“If I Had You”
Alabama
Written by Kerry Chater and Danny Mayo
Radio & Records
#1 (1 week)
April 28, 1989
Billboard
#1 (1 week)
May 20, 1989
Alabama’s Southern Star album ushered in a creative resurgence that didn’t spill over to this treacly ballad.
“If I Had You” is too slow and plodding to build up any emotional tension. It traffics in overly familiar lines – “we’d be lovers, we’d be friends” – that leave an impression of generic country balladeering. Even the harmonies on the chorus are listless.
I do appreciate some of the acoustic instrumentation, which helps steer it away from pure late eighties Adult Contemporary territory. But I’m mostly just excited to move on from this dull record and get back to the album’s uptempo treats.
“If I Had You” gets a C-.
Every No. 1 Single of the Eighties
Previous: Randy Travis, “Is it Still Over?” |
Next: Rodney Crowell, “After All This Time”
That was a short comeback! Somehow, I have zero memory of this at all yet I still managed to see almost every single lyric coming before Owen sang it. It was just that paint-by-numbers. It’s astonishing how much of Alabama’s catalog I’ve memory-holed. Radio has done an unusually good job of sorting through Alabama records and determining which ones are and are not worthy of recurrent play, leaving duds like this to drift into outer space for eternity. The downside is that Alabama’s legacy is inflated above and beyond its actual merit, with most listeners including myself convinced their batting average for quality was considerably higher than it was. I’d have been quite surprised going into these reviews starting with 1987 as I did, if I was told that three of the weakest entries of the three-year stretch that ended the decade would be from Alabama. “Song of the South” still makes up for the three clunkers on both sides of it, but just barely!
Grade: D