Long gone are the days where we can realistically hope for Blake Shelton to come out with an “Austin” or “Ol’ Red”, or heck even a “Some Beach”, and his latest single “Texas” is no exception to the rule of mediocrity and adherence to industry standard he now strictly follows.
I’m under no impression that Blake was ever a Tyler Childers or Sturgill Simpson type figure. He dominated the early 2000’s with some truly great music (“The Baby” remains one of the most underrated songs out there) and has been able to maintain star status ever since, cashing in his country music success for a judge spot on The Voice and a creator role on USA’s Barmageddon. He was never a traditionalist figure hell-bent on maintaining the style and substance the genre was built on and, though he’s proudly from Oklahoma, Blake is Nashville through and through, having embraced the current trend of maximizing the run time of individual singles and having little to no interest in releasing an entire project. His “albums” at this point are really just a disparate collection of songs whose only uniting point is that they happened to be released in a similar timeframe.
This is not to put Blake down, he made his choice and profited greatly from it. He seems great as a guy and I’d love to crush some brews with him, but it would be dishonest of me to frame this critique of his latest single with improper background.
“Texas”
Today, Blake Shelton released his first solo single since 2022. Titled “Texas,” it’s a pretty standard song about losing a girl and when people at the bar ask what happened to her, the guy says he doesn’t really know but he guesses she’s in Texas. Admittedly, it’s super catchy and I can see this becoming a guilty pleasure song of mine but the thing that immediately jumped out to me was how similar it sounded to a Shaboozey or Dasha song. I get neither of them were the first to use a boot-stomping beat and jumpy, driving melody but given Blake’s history of hopping on whatever the current trend is, it’s pretty easy to see what the discussions were in the lead up to recording and releasing this song.
Apart from the hick-hop type instrumentation and melody, the lyrics leave a lot to be desired. The hook (“She’s probably in Texas”) is repeated 11 times during the sub-3 minute run time and the chorus is sung three times. While format alone doesn’t make a song bad, even a quick scan of the lyrics shows a severe lack of substance.
Before you read through these lyrics, you should know that it took four fully grown adults, employed as professional songwriters, to come up with them. And no, Blake wasn’t one of those people; he hasn’t released a song co-written by him since “We Can Reach the Stars” on his 2021 album Body Language (Deluxe).
“Texas” was written by Johnny Clawson, Josh Door, Kyle Sturrock, and Lalo Guzman, all of whom have deep catalogues of songs written for a slew of Nashville artists. This is not to talk down on these guys as individuals, they were hired to put together songs designed for radio play (though that medium is quickly dying out) and are just doing what their employers are paying them to do. Plus, Blake Shelton radio hits still probably pay pretty well, eh?
But can we also step back and admit that it’s really insane that this is what passed the bar for a quality tune coming from the minds of well-established and popular industry songwriters? I guarantee if you sat down at a bar with those guys they would admit that it’s not all that great and that it was only pieced together in hopes of mass commercial success, which is the only thing labels and managers care about. The system’s incentives are all screwed up, even after years of improvements throughout the mainstream, and “Texas” exemplifies the problems as well as anything.
She cut me loose and caught herself a somewhere wind
I haven’t heard a word and haven’t seen her since
She disappeared quicker than this double shot of Jim
‘Cause everybody at the bar started askin’
“How’s your girl?”
She ain’t my girl
“Where she been?”
I ain’t quite sure
Good question, no tellin’, but I’m bettin’
She’s probably in Texas
Amarillo, all I know
George Strait said it
Yeah, that’s where all them exes go
If she ain’t with me out here in Tennessee
Then I don’t know where she’s headed
If I’m guessin’, I reckon
She’s probably in Texas
She’s probably in Texas
The lyrics speak for themselves…
Again, I don’t hate Blake Shelton or the four dudes that wrote it. It’s catchy and will probably accomplish everything the team hopes it would, falling nicely into the boot-stomp lead trend of western themed pop country songs.
Country Music’s Copycat Problem
“Texas” is a public example of the copycat industry that mainstream country music has morphed into. Country has long suffered a sort of inferiority complex when it comes to other genres, hence why the powers that be so gleefully promoted pop and hip-hop sounds for the past decade plus, but below that surface we see the machine sitting on status quo until an artist takes a chance and does something different despite being told, or incentivized, not too.
Whether that artist is Sam Hunt, Chris Stapleton, or Tyler Childers, we all know what happens right after one pops up; an avalanche of knockoffs and wannabes appear and are given nearly unlimited resources to mimic what the first person did in hopes the public buys it. Remember when Chris broke out in 2015 and an onslaught of big burley bearded guys popped up? Sure, it was dramatic (and positive) shift from the bro country thing that was popular at the time, but it was still the same game. Authenticity be damned, let the few real artists remaining do their thing and if one happens to make something that gets popular, the industry just steals it, very slightly alters or repackages it, then sends it off to radio, which eats it up and plays it to no end.
Blake Shelton’s “Texas” is not a problem, it’s a symptom of a plague that’s been improving throughout country music no doubt, but hasn’t been fully eradicated yet.
