Pat Green

One Liner: One of the biggest Texas country names out there back in the 90's.

Wikipedia Genre: Country
Home: San Antonio/Lubbock/Austin

Saturday

Thoughts:  This will be fun.  I'm not sure I have ever really thought all that hard about Pat Green and what he means to me, before right now.

A million years ago, but I guess more recently than that since I am about to talk about the Internet, a college campus needed to have a computer lab (or 50 of them), so that the students could have access to computers.  They weren't in everyone's pockets or in every student's backpack like today.  When I started at college, they gave us our first e-mail address, which was a wild and new thing, and told us how we could communicate with students at like 20 other schools.  I still remember that my first e-mail was to a friend who had ended up at the Air Force Academy, because they were one of the few other available schools.

Anyway, we would spent evening time in the computer lab, working on papers, researching things (although the research power of the Internet back then was miniscule compared to now).  And socializing - the computer lab wasn't like the rest of the library where silence was the rule.  it was a large-ish room of sterile desks and chairs, all extremely functional and nothing built for show.  Kind of like the workspace in that Severance show.  But anyway, I have this strangely clear memory of a night in the computer lab in the mid-90's when Dee Buchanan first played me a Pat Green song.  

Dee was a fraternity brother, and was originally from Lubbock.  So, he proudly called me over to his desktop and handed me some humongous headphones, saying that he had heard this guy from Tech who was really good.  He played me "Dancehall Dreamer" from the 1995 album of the same name, and I was hooked in.  He sounds young, rough at the edges, but like he truly believes that things are someday going to go his way.  Good stuff.

But apart from my own experiences, my guy grew up in Waco and then moved to Lubbock to attend Texas Tech.  While he was there, he started playing bars and clubs around Lubbock and releasing independent albums like 1995's Dancehall Dreamer and 1997's George's Bar.  Around 1997, he decided to go for it with music, and had the good fortune of getting spotted by Willie, who took him on tour and then added him to the July 4 Picnic lineup.  He was soon selling out every show and got a Miller Lite sponsorship (still without any major label support).  One thing that I love about those old albums, are the covers of top-tier songs.  He covers Townes Van Zandt, Joe Ely, and John Prine, among his own great originals.  Which is sweet.  He later did an album of all covers, with Cory Morrow, called Songs We Wish We'd Written.

However popular those little indie releases were though, it wasn't until he signed with the big label and put out 2001's Three Days that he finally got his first legit hit - "Carry On."  8.8 million streams as of now.

Pat Green's voice is much better than I recalled.  I think a few days of listening to Wyatt Flores and Sam Barber has me thinking that these singer-songwriter guys don't have the chops. But he's got a solid range and warm tone that I enjoy.  "Three Days" also got some good radio play, as did "Texas On My Mind" and "Take Me Out to a Dancehall."  it is funny to go back through all of these albums - I owned all of the old ones on CD, but I haven't thought about them in forever!  "Rusty Old American Dream" (a David Wilcox cover) is freaking great!  So is "Down to the River" or "Galleywinter" or "West Texas Holiday"!  This rules!

But I'm burying the lede a little bit here, because all of those old independent releases and scrappy little tunes were blown away when he released 2003's Wave on Wave.  The title track to that one crushes anything else in his catalog with 45.6 million streams.

I'm sure it helps that he's a good looking, down-to-earth seeming guy.  But that tune walks a really good line between love song and potential Christian tune.  If you replace the "she" lines in there with he or Jesus, it would nail it.  Or at least I've always considered it to be that way.  I just listened to a Story Behind the Song for this, and his answer was unfulfilling - he just said "yes, this song is about whatever you think it is."  I also love the song because it reminds me of good times, for whatever reason, it has been the official song of a long-standing reunion of guys I went to school with, and so every year when we get together, that is the first song blasted from the bluetooth speaker and it makes several more appearances the longer the drinks flow.  Great singalong tune.

For a while he lived in Tarrytown, right by the house where one of my best friends grew up, and so it took on a mythical quality in my head, of the potential possibility to actually see Pat Green in the flesh.  Never did.  No clue if he still has that house.

Unbeknownst to me, Pat has continued to release albums.  2004's Lucky Ones, 2006's Cannonball, 2009's What I'm For were big label albums that apparently did mediocre and got Green branded as a sellout.  "CMT questioned the album as reaching for the "uninspired pop sound of today’s Nashville," with songs "starting to sound too much alike" and "crossing the line into Nashville pop" and perhaps not "honest and natural.""  Ouch.  When CMT is accusing you of turning pop, that has to sting.  So, he left his big label, moved back to Texas, and went back to releasing action on his own.  2015's Home has his biggest track since the olden days, with the Lyle Lovett duet called "Girls from Texas."  4.1 million streams.

Fine.  Nothing all that special, feels like a lazy song to just list states and a stereotype about each one.  I've gone through this 2015 album and the new 2022 album a few times, and they're fine.  Nothing in them really grabs me by the ears, just window dressing music.  I relistened to the Songs We Wish We'd Written though, and it is still great.

Definitely excited to try to catch this one.  Haven't seen him live in literal decades.