Tim McGraw makes the most of his melancholy on 'Southern Voice’

Most of Tim McGraw’s 10th studio album, Southern Voice, was recorded three years ago.

That’s noteworthy because it means he probably hadn’t heard Jamey Johnson’s recent album, That Lonesome Song, before he recorded this album’s excellent, quietly mordant I Didn’t Know It at the Time.

The past, McGraw acknowledges, is not always prologue. "Back when I had those fights with my old man," he sings with plain sadness, "I never thought that he’d be an old man." For listeners of the monomaniacally gloomy Johnson, it’s familiar turf, but McGraw comes by it honestly. Few country singers are self-assessors as harsh as McGraw, and his willingness to excavate the tougher bits of his past is one of his least-appreciated qualities.

But above all, and to his great detriment, McGraw is a pleaser. That explains why I Didn’t Know It at the Time is followed directly by It’s a Business Doing Pleasure With You, a lifeless bit of false class posturing in which McGraw complains about the wages of dating a woman with expensive taste. (Let’s assume his wife, country star Faith Hill, finds this funny.) Montgomery Gentry and Toby Keith pull off this sort of song well; McGraw, burdened by earnestness, never really cracks a smile.

Southern Voice is filled with such jarring juxtapositions, never settling into a mood. Mr. Whoever You Are is unerringly dark, a tale of a small-town girl looking for escape. But that’s followed by the album’s title track, an anthemic trifle that imagines a Southern identity that spans, improbably, Dale Earnhardt, Rosa Parks and Billy Graham.

Still, distractions aside, McGraw returns again and again to the melancholy of passing time, and it sounds as if, rightly, he might wish to reframe his entire career around songs about crumbling beauty. The stark Good Girls recounts the souring of a friendship between two women chasing the same man, and Forever Seventeen opens with a gentle kick: "Let’s be honest/You’re not flawless/But you’re as close as anything I’ve seen."

Flawless is boring — the wrinkles are what matter.

— Jon Caramanica, The New York Times

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