When he sings 'Put your lovin' on me/Take this weight off me/Put your lovin' on me,' he's way beyond the ledge of asking, 'There's nothing here to catch me now/I'm gonna fall anyway.' He has nothing to lose and expresses that. A Hammond B-3, spiky guitars, and booming snares and cymbals play at the distortion point in this tune by Hillary Lindsey and Luke Laird, but no matter how loud and proud the music is, McGraw's insistence on delivering an unfettered, albeit desperately sincere, melody is what makes him stand apart. There is an amazing spirituality at work in the songs that McGraw chooses here.

'Put Your Lovin' on Me' is another one, but this one is an anthem, albeit one that pleads for relief and sustenance. He's singing to convince himself as much as he is the listener. In the grain of his voice, you can hear the determination to talk and walk from the place of redemption rather than the terrain of suffering. There are multi-layered pedal steels, baroquely jangled electric guitars, and McGraw's singular vocals riding above the wall of multivalent yet melodic noise to offer a message of threadbare hope in the face of adversity. But the real shock is the psychedelic country-rock of the title cut, written by William C. The honky tonk songs are more so ('Shotgun Rider,' 'Whiskey and You'), the pop tunes are more on the rock & roll side of pop ('Last Dollar '), and the romantic and story-songs ('I'm Workin') are so utterly, unabashedly plainspoken, they hit the listener straight in the gut. It still comes down to songs, though, and the 13 here are all winners. (Think, if you will, Mitch Easter as a country music producer with a big road band to rein in.) In fact, the sound of the record, its varied richness, and its pluralities illustrate that this is an era in countrymusic when creatively almost anything is possible. McGraw - who, with help from Byron Gallimore and Darran Smith, produced Let It Go - is once more willing to push the sonic formulaic envelope with a wonderfully textural array of sounds and the moods they help to underscore. His backing band, the Dance Hall Doctors, is the E Street Band of country music in the 21st century. The pair had a child and McGraw comes back to a style of country music he helped form in the early '90s. McGraw is a road dog and a husband to Faith Hill.

Tim McGraw stayed out of recording studios for nearly three years after his smash single and album Live Like You Were Dying.

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