“I Hope You Dance”
Lee Ann Womack featuring Sons of the Desert
Written by Mark D. Sanders and Tia Sillers
Radio & Records
#1 (6 weeks)
June 30 – August 4, 2000
Billboard
#1 (5 weeks)
July 8 – August 5, 2000
“I Hope You Dance” was one of those records that became an instant standard. We knew this one would be playing at weddings, graduations, and baby showers for the rest of the century. The sentiment was Hallmark ready and a slew of merchandise and tie-ins followed.
Womack even became a crossover star for a hot minute, as the maternal sentiment hooked the AC audience and helped power her album to multiplatinum sales. It was a big enough release that when her next album had a similar pop flavor, she was exiled from the radio with the Faith and SheDaisies of the day. Womack even got her “back to her roots” redemption arc mid-decade and eventually became an Americana superstar.
But you know what gets lost in this often told narrative? Just how sad “I Hope You Dance” is. The lyrics may be optimistic, but the record is anything but. It’s moody and dreary, with foreboding strings that suggest things that go bump in the night, not sunny days of happily ever after.
Womack doesn’t help brighten things up, sounding like a doomsdaying mother imagining horrible fates for her children as soon as they’re out of her watchful sight. She sounds like a woman who’s had her own hope stripped away by life, but knows it’s her duty not to pass that hopelessness on to her daughters.
I’ve always loved that I can hear such a melancholy in this record that is so often used in joyous celebrations. Maybe it’s all in my head, but it’s that duality that makes this one a solid A for me.
“I Hope You Dance” gets an A.
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I’ve never heard the melancholy and sad aspects of this song. But now that you’ve mentioned it. It’s hard to not hear it, as Womack almost sounds like she’s desperately pleading for her kids to dance because she never got too.
I agree. I never really got the sad aspects either but now it definitely feels sad. lol.
I, too, never thought of it as a melancholy song, but now that you say that, I completely hear it. I always liked I Hope You Dance, though I was a bit disappointed that many people had no idea how traditional Lee Ann’s material was because this was her signature hit. But listening to it again with the melancholy in mind elevates it even more. It really does sound like a “don’t make the same mistakes I did” song, more so than a generic Hallmark inspiration theme.
As for the album, I really love The Healing Kind and her cover of Lord, I Hope this Day is Good.
I agree with Kevin’s take and it’s one of the reasons I always loved this song. The arrangement and vocal tone hints so strongly at a life unfulfilled by the narrator. It makes the song so much more powerful and moving than it would have been if it was a Collin Raye ballad filled with twinkle-voiced sunshine.
The album was incredible–one of the best in my collection–and I also loved the two bookend songs you describe. I think she should have released her cover of “Lord, I Hope This Day is Good” as a single. I strongly suspect it would have been a big hit.
I love her version of “Lord, I Hope This Day Is Good” too!
What a great observation! I never overtly thought of the sadness tinged in her performance, but it’s definitely there now that you point it out. I don’t think she can help but sound sad though. Her voice is always tinged with teardrops, which I agree does elivate this song. I think if somebody else had sung it, it would seem much fluffier than this does.
It probably had something to do with the fact that I graduated college the spring this song came out. And it was likely because this song was recorded by one of the best female vocalists of my lifetime. And it was almost certainly because I was as introverted as a 22-year-old man could possibly be when I first heard this. But whatever combination of influences came together, I fell in love with this song the first time I heard it in a way that’s only been true of a few other songs I’ve ever listened to. It was March 2000 and “I Hope You Dance” was competing against Lee Ann’s ex-husband Jason Sellers in the “Country Challenge” on some canned syndicated radio broadcast I was listening to one evening. “I Hope You Dance” was a Category 5 emotional tornado for me….and Sellers’ “Can’t Help Calling Your Name” did nothing for me. The “challenge” would be settled by audience feedback over the course of the hour and the winner would be played again at the top of the next hour. I couldn’t wait to hear “I Hope You Dance” a second time….but Sellers won and they played him again instead! I was crushed, but I knew I wasn’t crazy and that “I Hope You Dance” would live to see a brighter day on country radio. Thank God I was right.
There have been a number of songs that have employed the “dance as a metaphor for life” analogy over the years, and most of them have been excellent, but this one was in a category of its own in the way that it spoke to me. My parents are staid and laconic Norwegians who weren’t known for displays of emotional vulnerability. I needed to hear this song’s message articulated by them at this point in my life, but that wasn’t gonna happen. Instead, I heard it from Lee Ann Womack and the Sons of the Desert. And when I did hear it, it wasn’t like a light switch went off and I quit being a mere spectator of life immediately, but I internalized the message and never forgot it. A couple of months later, when my mid-40s uncle was glowing about “I Hope You Dance” and expressed regret for “looking back on his years and wondering where those years had gone”, it reinforced that I didn’t want to become my uncle. I’m older now than my uncle was then and can say that I didn’t become him. Is Lee Ann Womack’s song responsible for that? Probably at least some!
I’m aware of the some of the common criticisms of this song. That it isn’t country. That it’s like a series of fortune cookie messages strung together with no through line. I don’t agree with these conclusions but I can vaguely understand them. Even if I was to indulge the premise, I would say that the salesmanship of the vocal performance and the arrangement delivers in spades even if you’re disconnected from the message. Lee Ann Womack’s gentle accessibility makes the listener feel like they’re hearing these words from the most important female role model in their life, and the Sons of the Desert’s background vocal feels like the internal monologue haunting you in real time as you process Lee Ann’s words. I’m not prepared to say this is my favorite country song of all time, but it’s in the top three.
I was elated when Lee Ann had a career record and a multi-week #1 with this. And I figured it was the kind of song that put her on the well-deserved top tier of country females like Shania, Faith, and Martina. That didn’t happen. It should have, but it didn’t. The fact that the other singles from the album were a little dark for radio (even though I loved them!) probably blunted the momentum, and her follow-up CD missed the mark entirely. It was one of my many disappointments that would come amidst the trajectory of popular country in the 2000s, but I gotta give the new millennium credit where credit is due for being a few months old and producing a song that shook me to my core.
Grade: A+
As far as country-pop crossover hits go, it’s hard to beat this one. I’ve loved Lee Ann’s voice from the moment I first heard Never Again, Again and she’s made very few missteps in a rather stellar, if not always properly recognized, career (even her follow-up album, despite been smothered in glossy production, had a batch of clutch songs). Definitely an A record.
I know I said it on Facebook, but it bears repeating. For 25 years, I thought this song was bland sellout garbage, made for no other reason than to squeeze every penny from the Chicken Soup for the Soul crowd. Even from what I knew about Lee Ann Womack when I was 13, this felt as out-of-character as Alan Jackson doing death metal. On top of that, I felt like I was genuinely the ONLY person alive who didn’t like this song.
But that realization of the song’s melancholy, and the interpretation of it as “I hope you dance, because I never got a chance to?” That RESONATED with me. It made me see in a totally new light a song I’d long dismissed.
Thanks to Kevin for finding just the right words to get me out of my own head and into someone else’s.
I…I don’t know. I think I may have dropped my opinions on this song in comments here before, but this song just didn’t do it for me. I didn’t think it was ”sellout trash” or whatever epithet one wishes to throw at it, just that it didn’t fit LAW as an artist. The album as a whole was much, much better. My favorites from it were ”The Healing Kind,” ”Stronger Than I Am,” ”Lonely Too,” and ”Does My Ring Burn Your Finger” (which absolutely freaking smokes, IMO), with honorable mention to ”Lord i Hope This Day Is Good.”
I really did not care much of this song, although her performance has its compelling moments. I’d give the song a ‘B’ but I really did like the album from which it came.
Chalk me up as another one who just didn’t care too much for this song when it was new. In fact, at times I hated it when it seemed like there was no getting away from it thanks to radio overplaying it throughout much of the 2000s, which pains me to say as a big Lee Ann Womack fan. The melody and production/arrangement just never grabbed me, and I found it to be one of the more bland sounding pop country songs at the time (The backup vocals from Sons Of The Desert helped it stand out some). Lyrically, I saw it as one of those preachy “Go spread your wings and fly” type of songs that just never resonated with me as someone with autism and social anxiety and never had the desire to leave home or my parents behind. Even when I started becoming a much bigger fan of Lee Ann after picking up her self-titled debut album in the summer of 2001, this was easily my least favorite song I had heard from her at that point.
However, not only has Kevin’s interpretation of it helped me see the song in a different and more interesting light, but after listening to it again after not having heard it in a long time, there are other messages/themes within the song that I notice and can now appreciate more today such as remaining humble (“I hope you still feel small when you stand beside the ocean”), staying true to one’s self (“If you come close to selling out, reconsider”), never giving up on your hopes and dreams, and to keep appreciating life, in general. I like the “I hope you never lose your sense of wonder” line, as well, which hopefully I never will!. Also knowing that Lee Ann likely had her kids in mind when deciding to record it helps soften my stance on it today. Btw, I did always think the music video featuring her daughters was beautiful, even when I still didn’t care much for the song itself. So while it’s still not exactly one of my top favorite Lee Ann songs, I now at least have a better appreciation and understanding of it today.
I personally preferred her second attempt at a crossover hit, 2002’s “Something Worth Leaving Behind” which has a message that I always found to be more agreeable and a more catchy melody to me. From that album of the same name, I also adore “Forever Everyday” which has a sentiment that I really love. It always gets me teary eyed whenever I hear it due to the combination of its theme about the beauty of childhood innocence and the very pretty melody. I still really wish that one had done much better for her when it was a single.
It’s just so hard to believe this is the first and only time Lee Ann will show up in this feature. Despite her not having another number one after “I Hope You Dance,” she always seemed like a pretty big name until sometime after the Call Me Crazy era. It’s especially a shame that none of the other singles off the I Hope You Dance album went to number one, especially “Why They Call It Falling,” which is another one of my all time favorites. Also love her version of Rodney Crowell’s “Ashes By Now” and “Does My Ring Burn Your Finger,” plus the album cuts: “Stronger Than I Am,” “The Healing Kind,” “After I Fall,” “Lonely Too,” “Lord I Hope This Day Is Good,” (great cover, btw!) and “Thinkin’ With My Heart Again” (which I love as much as Ty Herndon’s version).
Oh, and I can not leave a 2000s Lee Ann Womack related feature without mentioning how much I love the There’s More Where That Came From album, as well. Of all the “back to their roots” albums that came out around the mid-late 2000s, I always thought Lee Ann was the one who pulled it off the best. The fact that only one single off of it (“I May Hate Myself In The Morning”) managed to crack the top 10 was just another reason for my growing frustration with country radio around the mid 2000s. I’m especially still sore about the excellent “He Oughta Know That By Now” not becoming the hit it should’ve been.
Oh, and back to “I Hope You Dance.” Am I the only one who thought that the Sons of The Desert sounded like they were singing “ears have grown” at the end of the choruses for the longest time? Or sometimes it would sound like “ears have flown”, lol!
I’m astonished that Kevin’s take about this song coming from a place of sadness from the narrator was such a revelation for so many people. Between the narrator’s beaten-down delivery and lyrics like “loving might be a mistake, but it’s worth making”, “don’t let some hellbent heart leave you bitter”, and “if you come close to selling out, reconsider”, I don’t get how any other interpretation was possible.
I do get your point, but I think the lyrics a bit “Hallmark” like and that is why some of us didn’t really get the sadness at a glance.
Do you think the song, as written, was intended to be from the perspective of a narrator lamenting a life unfulfilled? Or was it this particular musical arrangement and Womack’s distinctive, melancholy-tinged voice that somehow made it so? Or does the song’s original intent even matter? I ask because I certainly don’t see this perspective in the song’s lyrics (or the accompanying official video). If we are to believe the narrator may have been left hopeless and bitter by some “hellbent heart,” as interpreted in some of the comments, I don’t get why she’d be saying in the same breath that “loving might be a mistake, but it’s worth making.”
I tend to interpret the song rather simply as a parent encouraging their child, through platitudes and quite possibly their own experiences, to fully embrace life. It’s far from a favorite of mine (truth be told, I can’t stand it), though I very much like Womack’s overall output as a country music artist.