When listening to a track like “Strawberry Wine,” it’s tempting to lodge a well-recognized grievance: “You just don’t hear anything like this on country radio anymore.” Strains like “The hot July moon saw everything,” penned by Nashville Songwriters Corridor of Famer Matraca Berg and Gary Harrison, do really feel like remnants of a bygone period, proof of the sort of musical poetry we all the time consider to be unique to the previous. However the single, Deana Carter’s debut, was an anomaly even when it was launched in 1996. A sluggish, melancholy, metaphor-laden waltz, the track was removed from a surefire hit then — and would have been a tricky promote in nearly any section of nation historical past.
“When I told Matraca it was going to be the first single, she was like, ‘Oh no way, that’s the worst idea – it’s a five minute waltz!’” Carter says. “It did sound very different, for the time.”
However “Strawberry Wine” resonated with Carter and what would quickly be hundreds of thousands of her followers, and proved to be remarkably radio-friendly regardless of its unorthodox aesthetic. If there was delicate controversy concerning the track’s tawdry implications, it was irrelevant by comparability to all of the individuals who heard its reality. “She was
just singing my life story,” Carter remembers of listening to Berg carry out the track. “I remember being gobsmacked that it was so spot on.”
“Strawberry Wine” turned her signature, and one of many greatest nation hits of the last decade — the gas that pushed Did I Shave My Legs For This?, her first album, to go platinum 5 occasions over. The track, and the album, hit a ‘90s sweet spot: Carter’s earned, trustworthy songwriting and basic nation sensibility (which many attributed to her father, acclaimed session guitarist Fred Carter, Jr.) have been hued by a touch of the grit and newness of less-country friends like Sheryl Crow.
The album was the product of years of labor. Carter was despatched again to the drafting board numerous occasions by legendary producer Jimmy Bowen as he culled the album’s 11 songs – six co-written by Carter, 5 by others. Carter was accountable for the timeless title monitor, a punchy, too-real description of a partnership gone lopsided that occurs to be one of many album’s greatest vocal showcases. Nowhere else in music has the arduousness (and selflessness) of leg-shaving been so successfully documented.
”I positively wished it to be the title [of the album], as a result of I knew that I’d solely get one shot,” Carter says. “I felt like the record was so heavy in certain spots, so I wanted [the listener] to be pulled in in a light-hearted, curious way.”
When Did I Shave My Legs For This? was launched, a lot of the media’s consideration was consumed by the truth that Carter, at 31, was being stored from unfettered nation dominance by the emergence of a younger prodigy named LeAnn Rimes. Looking back, although, the success of the album is partially a tribute to how a lot better tolerance nation radio had for not only a range of sounds, however of genders. When Carter reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Scorching Nation Songs chart for the primary time in November 1996 with “Strawberry Wine,” Patty Loveless, Reba McEntire, and Terri Clark have been within the high ten together with her.
“Back then, it was wonderful because radio played everybody,” says Carter. “They played duos and bands and a ton of different girls, but the key was that all the records all sounded so different. You knew who you were listening to.”
What made Did I Shave My Legs For This? completely different was the songs – romantic in a well-recognized means with simply sufficient aptitude and depth to face out, even within the crowded area Carter describes. “My mentors – my parents and Jimmy Bowen – always taught me to make the songs the most important thing,” she concludes. “You might have a better song tomorrow or the next day. Never quit pursuing it.”
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