Country star George Strait recorded his last two award-winning albums at Jimmy Buffett's Shrimp Boat Sound Studio in Key West, Florida. He returned there again to work on his new collection, Twang.
2009 has been an exciting year for Texan George Strait. In addition to recording his 26th studio album, Twang, he won his first Grammy Award, received the Academy of Country Music's Artist of the Decade honor, and performed a tour that included the first concert at the new Dallas Cowboys' Stadium in Texas.
George recorded his debut album in 1982, and since then has sold more than 67 million records in the United States. Now 57 years old, Strait says he has no desire to stop making music.
"I still really enjoy singing, and that's really who I am. I mean, I love to fish and I love to do all these other things, but my love has been and still is Country music and singing," he said. "So, you know, for as long as I can keep doing it, that's what I'm going to do."
George included two covers on Twang, Delbert McClinton's "Same Kind of Crazy" and the mariachi standard composed by the late Mexican songwriter Jose Alfredo Jimenez, "El Rey."
George hasn't recorded a self-penned song since 1982, when he wrote "I Can't See Texas From Here" for his debut album Strait Country. Twang includes three tunes that he wrote or co-wrote. For the first time in his career, George collaborated with his son, Bubba Strait. He credits Bubba with motivating him to write again.
"Bubba started writing probably, oh, I guess, a little over a year ago," George says. "He just started toying with the idea of writing a few songs. I kind of had it in the back of my mind, too, that I wanted to start writing again. So, we just kind of inspired each other. He inspired me, I think, more than me him, but we just decided to see if we could write together. So we wrote a couple of songs. We've written actually a few more that I didn't cut on the album that possibly I will on the next one."
George and Bubba co-wrote the album's first single with legendary Nashville songwriter Dean Dillon. The song took only three weeks to reach the Top 20 on Billboard's Country chart, making it one of the fastest-rising hits of Strait's career. Its success led MCA Records to release Twang earlier than originally planned.
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