“Smile”
Lonestar
Written by Keith Follese and Chris Lindsey
Billboard
#1 (1 week)
March 11, 2000
Lonestar really brought the eighties soft rock experience to country music at the turn of the century.
They were like one of those B-list bands that delivered one megahit album that locked them into gold rotation on oldies stations for perpetuity. Lonely Grill was that album for them, powered by “Amazed,” the first song to top both the country and pop charts since “Islands in the Stream” in 1983.
Being in Nashville for college at the time, I was privy to the debate around the follow up single for “Amazed.” Despite an uptempo hit being right there and on its way next, the label was deciding between “Smile” and “Tell Her.” All of the audience testing favored the latter, but they still went with the former.
Made sense at the time, because at least it’s thematically different from “Amazed.” The arrangement is still to reminiscent of the bigger hit, though, which probably is a reflection of Lonestar’s limitations as a band, since they didn’t know “Amazed” was going to be a career record when they were recording the album.
“Smile” feels very much like the filler hit from Lonely Grill, and I do wonder if radio is still playing it. My best guess is it’s that upcoming uptempo hit and “Amazed” that are the only ones left in rotation, and if so, that feels right.
“Smile” gets a B.
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I liked Lonestar’s earlier stuff (Tequila Talkin’, No News) but, like Toby Keith with his forthcoming Number One, Amazed was definitely the demarcation line in their career where everything subsequent ranged from “perfectly fine” to “meh”. There are only a couple of Lonestar songs past this point that I’d go to bat for.
I’m on “Team Smile” here. I thought it was a better choice than “Tell Her” for the second single and enjoyed it vastly more than “Amazed”. I’ll have to listen closely for similarities but the arrangement of this one wins me over far more easily than its predecessor. I’m also not sure if recurrent radio play a generation later is the best metric for determining whether a song is filler or not. There’s plenty of country classics I haven’t heard on radio in more than 20 years.
Richie McDonald definitely seems to be polarizing around here but I thought his vocals nicely served a sad ballad like this one well, where he restrains his impulse for bombast. I always dig these kinds of heartbreak songs and probably would have really liked this one even if Kenny Chesney recorded it, but McDonald’s interpretation hit the sweet spot for me. The lyrics served as something of an aspirational approach for dealing with breakups that I don’t think I ever pulled off.
Grade: A
Fortunately for Lonestar, their “Smile” was not the worst song of the same name to reach the top 10 of the country charts in the 2000s. Remember country music’s Uncle Kracker phase, anyone? I don’t hate this song, but don’t love it though. Pretty forgettable to me. I will admit that I do like Mr. Mom, which we will see later on in the series. Definitely a guilty pleasure of mine.
Mr. Mom is also a guilty pleasure of mine. And while I’m not a huge fan of their identikit ballads, Not A Day Goes By was one that I latched on to quite a bit during it’s chart peak.
If President Trump hadn’t already dubbed former President Biden “Sleepy Joe” he could have used the descriptor to define the low-energy melodrama of Lonestar.
There should be a tariff on the tedium of this performance. If nothing else, this song allows me the opportunity to grind my axe about this band.
I know post “Amazed” Lonestar tends to get a lot of hate and many prefer their earlier music before Lonely Grill. I used to be in that camp myself (I never actually “hated” their newer music though, just paled in comparison to their 90s stuff at the time). However, for the last few years or so, I’ve also grown to also enjoy much of their singles from the 2000s as well, yes even Mr. Mom. I guess it’s just now very refreshing to me compared to what we’ve been subjected to in the last decade or so, and I now find their version of pop country a lot more appealing compared to the obnoxiousness of bro-country and the country/small town living pandering of much of modern mainstream country. I’d rather hear songs that mention family and kids like “My Front Porch Looking In” and “Mr. Mom” or sensitive ballads like “Smile,” “Not A Day Goes By,” and “Tell Her” than to hear one more modern country song that talks or brags about beer, small towns, trucks, partying, and hooking up.
I admit that “Smile” didn’t really do much for me when it came out. I didn’t love it or hate it. It was a nice enough song that was just kind of “there.” However in the late 2000s, I found myself loving it after revisiting it and realizing how much I really enjoyed it, especially when comparing it to what was currently on the radio. What I now heard was a classy, “I’ll let you go if it makes you happy, even though I don’t want to” ballad that I should’ve appreciated more at the time, since I always had a liking for those kind of songs. I also fell in love with the song’s melody and Richie McDonald’s delivery that mixes sadness along with trying to sound happy for the woman leaving to find a better life. I also love the smooth contemporary, easy listening style production typical of Dann Huff’s style with ballads in the late 90s and early 2000s. I especially love the sound of the steel guitar in the intro, which kind of has a cool, futuristic style to me. I’m also with another commenter above in that I actually like this one more than “Amazed,” in that I prefer this song’s softer approach compared to the power ballad style of “Amazed.” It also helps that this one wasn’t as overplayed back then, either.
And yes, nostalgia also plays a part in making me appreciate this song more now than when it was a new single. Like other late 1999/early 2000 singles, it’s another one that takes me back to my parents and I spending time in Lancaster and York, Pennsylvania during the cold months of those times. It especially brings to mind of us staying at the Hampton Inn at Greenfield in Lancaster and hearing it one cold night as we arrived at the hotel.
For whatever reason, I barely remember this song. It took a long time for radio stations here in Central Florida to quit playing “Amazed” and this song received relatively little airplay for a #1 single and was dropped from rotation fairly quickly. I think the problem for local programmers is that this ballad came off as basically an easy listening endeavor and even in 2000, local listeners expected something more country than this recording. For me this record is a “C”, not terrible, not terribly interesting
Nice performance but ultimately not as memorable. I stopped listening to country radio much later than other posters as I believe it was 2012 when I was completely done with it. Our radio station from what i remember had “No News”, “Amazed”, “What About Now”, “I’m Already There”, “My Front Porch Looking In”, “Mr.Mom” and “Walking in Memphis” were played regularly. I remember really enjoying the lyrics but haven’t listened to it in years.