George Strait - The Breath You Take

Fairly important: the formatting on this post goes to hell in most feeds, and it will be best read at ericonthecharts.blogspot.com

I heard they put the dog to sleep in the extended version for added weepiness.

George Strait
The Breath You Take
Hallmark
#66 (LoMid)
Dec 16, 2010
Dean Dillon
Jessie Jo Dillon
Casey Beathard
Tony Brown
George Strait

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O cruel fate, is this my punishment for disparaging the trivial but unoffending “Aston Martin Music?” To feel the terrible sting of George Strait sappiness? Lo, the heartfelt drama, presaged as it was by the naming of Hallmark as a genre, the tumultuous forces use my own designs to wreak terrible revenge!

Seriously, though, “The Breath You Take” is even more overwrought and dramatic than any corny prologue I could type. It's picking some low hanging fruit, too: like Carrie Underwood bet song sales against mother/daughter wedding dances, Strait's going even wider... everyone's got a dad, right? (go ahead, be a jerk; start listing exceptions) Point is: this kind of thing has a massive, built-in market, especially in family values-friendly country music.

This song deserves some ire for its stunningly uninventive sappiness. Prefect Dad (a new superhero, it seems) comes to your baseball game even though he had a plane to catch and came to your daughter's birth even though he didn't have to. His theory: “Life's not the breath you take, the breathing in and out... but the moments that take your breath away.” That's all fine (though I could mention the importance of breathing in and out), but it seems baseball and a trip to the ER waiting room are the width and breath of Strait's image of Perfect Dad.

The implications of both events are “it was inconvenient for me to be here, but I came anyway,” but they're sung in such a way to evoke a kindly, country gentleman. Both are things a father simply ought to do (if you put your kid in an activity, attend the activity. Oh, and don't skip out on the birth of your grandkids), but they're given maximum schmaltz by making sure Perfect Dad has sacrificed something to do them... and if this isn't bald fiction composed by professional songwriters, I'll be shocked. These scenarios were invented for maximum Hallmark effect: you have to love Perfect Dad, because when Strait kills him in the third act, he wants you to feel it.

Sort of. George Strait didn't write this-- we can blame him for singing it, but he didn't add a single word to the Mortality of Perfect Dad tearjerker.  There's a team of three writers, raised on a steady diet of "Cat's in the Cradle" and loved-one-dies-of-cancer movies, to blame for that.

Musically, it's pretty rote... It's got the exact same structure as any Backstreet Boys song you'll find. Who would have guessed there's be a modulation into the bridge? Or that the following chorus would be stripped down when it returned? On one hand, these conventions have served plenty of good songs, and we should all be thankful Strait (producer and Pure Country icon) didn't squeeze in a drum machine for a dance pop bastardization.  On the other... who composed those strings?  Aaron Zigman?  It sounds like we're watching a Nicholas Sparks adaptation in here, these are the violins that score Mandy Moore's lukemia.

I guess I agree with one aspect of this song: we really should treasure the moments that make life worth living, but none of those moments involve listening to this phony and overwrought treacle.

RUN!

Stay with the song, walk away, or run like hell: