“Highway Robbery”
Tanya Tucker
Written by Michael Garvin, Bucky Jones, and Tom Shapiro
Radio & Records
#1 (1 week)
February 10, 1989
This record is ridiculous, and the only reason it is even listenable can be credited to the charisma of Tanya Tucker.
The storyline, put simply: Tucker gets the hots for a guy on the road and gets pulled over when she’s speeding after him. Her fruitless attempts to get the police officer to help her find this guy eventually devolve into her hitting on the cop himself.
Tucker was the only country singer on the planet who could’ve sold this thing. Try to picture even the greats like Emmylou Harris and Reba McEntire attempting this convoluted storyline. Tucker makes it plausible with an infectious and energetic approach that we’d hear again on some of her nineties hits, especially “Down to My Last Teardrop” and “It’s a Little Too Late.”
But I’m not sure she ever came closer to her actual personality on record than she did on “Highway Robbery.” The brassy, sassy pistol that Tucker was in her interviews and her personal life was rarely captured this well.
I just wish she’d found a better song to capture it with.
“Highway Robbery” gets a B.
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I’m occasionally up for some good cheeky fun and, stupid as this song is, she gets some clever lines in that at least make me want to see how the story turns out. Unfortunately, at least for me, that closing lyric short-circuits whatever modest rewards this song has delivered up to that point. I could sympathize with the narrator’s corny invocation of love at first sight leading her to break the speed limit in pursuit of the “bandit who stole her heart”, but when she abruptly pivots to the police officer as her new object of affection, she just comes across as mentally unbalanced. Her lack of impulse control takes on an entirely different connotation with that final lyric, and not one that helps sell everything that came before it.
Is Tanya Tucker the only one who could have pulled this off? I could see Pam Tillis or Patty Loveless pulling it off to the same degree, although I’m glad they didn’t attempt it because it’s too silly for their discographies. Interestingly though, there’s another 90s artist who did give a similarly themed record a whirl, albeit a male artist. Billy Dean’s “Innocent Bystander” was a kitschy late 90s trifle invoking legal-ese as love song metaphors in the same vein as Tanya’s traffic arrest quips in this song. Unlike “Highway Robbery”, Dean’s song fell far short of #1.
Grade: C
I don’t even know if I agree with what I am about to say, but a playful sense of fun is often undervalued in country music today.
I love that songs like this were intentionally written by songwriters, purposefully recorded by artists, and confidently promoted as singles by major Nashville labels.
I guess writers like Shel Silverstein, Tommy Collins, and Denis Linde suggest this kind of song has always had currency in Music City.
This ridiculous song also always sounded great on the radio, and Tucker sounded just as great singing it.
Sometimes that is enough.