“Tell Her”
Lonestar
Written by Kwesi B and Craig Wiseman
Radio & Records
#1 (1 week)
February 2, 2001
Billboard
#1 (2 weeks)
February 3 -10, 2001
“Tell Her” is so refreshing lyrically.
It’s a frank and honest conversation between friends, with one refusing to indulge the other’s anger and making sure he thinks through the consequences of his decisions.
Which is totally Richie McDonald’s wheelhouse as a vocalist. He sounds like a sympathetic friend who is trying to stop his friend from making a mistake that he just might have made himself back in the day.
There are some nice country instrumentation flourishes too, with the subtle steel guitar work doing some sneaky heavy lifting in the background. It’s so close to being a perfect record.
But they forgot the melody! This song screams out for a power pop chorus that never arrives, which makes it all feel a little incomplete. This one was better in my memory, honestly, because I would’ve sworn that there was more of a payoff here than there actually is.
I’m disappointed.
“Tell Her” gets a B.
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I think there might be a reason you expected better of this one. The only available cut I can find is the one you have attached….the album cut. Radio must have agreed with you that this sounded dreary and dull because they played a different version with a fiddle-laced arrangement (at least I think it was fiddle….I haven’t heard it in more than a decade). I’ll write my review later tonight but I’ll have two different scores for the radio version versus the album cut which is the only version I can find. If anybody has a link to the radio version of “Tell Her”, I’d be thrilled if you could point me in its direction.
Here ya go!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGY3V8Cx8mY
Thanks much. Not sure why my previous searches for this version have gone unfulfilled. Doesn’t seem like it should have been that complicated for me. Beats the album version by a mile.
I agree, the radio mix of this song was infinitely better and, in my opinion, fixes almost all of the issues you had with the seeming lack of payoff. The album version sounds like a bad Dan + Shay song to my ears, but the radio mix has a lot more muscle — it’s so vastly different I went out of my way to acknowledge this when I reviewed the song. I think it’s interesting that you brought up the melody, as I found the melody of “What About Now” far weaker than this song’s.
My sister had their Greatest Hits on constant loop, and it bugged me that even there, they just put the album version on and not the radio version (despite doing the radio version of “No News” and a remix of “I’m Already There”). For a long time, I couldn’t find any proof the radio mix even existed, as this song got literally no recurrent play in my area (much like I said previously about most of the early 2001 chart toppers). For a long time I was convinced I was undergoing a Mandela effect until the radio version finally got posted online.
I also find this song fascinating because I can’t find any info on the “Kwesi B.” who is one of the co-writers here. He has two other credits (and his real name) on ASCAP, one of which is a soundtrack cut by Tony! Toni! Toné!, and the other of which does not appear to have been recorded by anyone. I wonder how he ended up with his name on a #1 country song?
I have the Greatest Hits CD as well and always skip this one out of frustration that they put the lifeless album version on it rather than the radio cut. It’s not often I get to say this, but thank goodness that the sage founts of wisdom that are country radio programmers prevailed on this one.