“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.