By Richard Harrington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 6, 2007
These are the figures that make Tim McGraw and Faith Hill country music's reigning power couple: combined sales of more 60 million albums, a barnful of awards, a dozen No. 1 albums and three dozen No. 1 singles. Last year's "Soul2Soul" tour did okay, too: With 74 concerts in 56 cities, it grossed nearly $89 million on sales of 1.1 million tickets, making it the top-grossing tour in the history of country music.
This summer's "Soul2Soul" trek is a bit shorter (43 shows, including Saturday's at Verizon Center), but it's just as big, and we mean big: It's using the same stage, shaped like a cross with a circle in the middle and four long catwalks that allow McGraw and Hill to be close to pretty much everyone on the floor or in the lower stands (better for those cellphone photo opportunities).
There's a mini-village beneath the stage, with his-and-her dressing rooms, band rooms, bathrooms, caterers and wardrobe rooms, though you wonder how much room McGraw needs for his trademark black hats, T-shirts and black jeans. There's also plenty of play space for the stars' three daughters, ages 5 to 10 and each with her own dressing room.
The armada bringing "Soul2Soul" to Verizon consists of 14 buses, 22 trucks and a staff of 120.
"It takes that amount of personnel to put together the staging and everything," Hill says. "You have to create a well-oiled machine in order to move such a massive set from city to city."
The song list is pretty massive as well: About three dozen songs follow their opening duet cover of Snow Patrol's "Chasing Cars." Hill does a hit-laden set, McGraw does a hit-laden set and the segues and bookends are hit-laden duets, closing with their most recent collaboration, "I Need You." It's a nonstop, generous three hours of "your hits or mine?" that's not just a rerun of last year's record-setting tour.
"We change the set list, but there are certain songs we can't get away with not doing," McGraw says. "There's no way to fit them all in for either one of us. We try to pick the ones that we like performing and the ones people like to hear."
All this is a long way from the early days when McGraw and his longtime band, the Dancehall Doctors, all traveled in the same van with a trailer attached.
"I have the same band, and we still have that van -- my guitar player has it at his house -- so those days are very fresh in our minds. We talk about them all the time," he says. "Darran [Smith] and I have been together the longest, almost 18 years. We look at each other sometimes, look around at the audience and we'll raise our shoulders -- 'I don't know!' 'Cause we'll be thinking about the times when there were only 50 people in the club for days on end."
Hill, a native of tiny Star, Miss., got to Nashville first, in 1987, and worked various jobs, including as a receptionist at a publishing company; she famously failed an audition as a backup singer for Reba McEntire before beginning to make a name for herself on demos and recording sessions, breaking through in 1993 with her first No. 1, "Wild One." McGraw, from Start, La., arrived a few years later and did the familiar Nashville two-step: starting with a publishing deal, looking for a record deal. He finally broke through in 1994 with "Indian Outlaw" and "Don't Take the Girl," the latter the first of his 27 No. 1 country hits.
As it happens, McGraw did take the girl -- for a drive, that is. Jeep is sponsoring this year's tour, partly because it doesn't hurt to be part of such a hugely successful run and partly because it was in a red 1978 CJ6 Jeep that McGraw and Hill had serious discussions about their future in March 1996 during their first tour together. McGraw was the headliner, Hill the opening act as the prophetically titled "Spontaneous Combustion" tour arrived in State College, Pa.
They'd both been new faces at a Nashville radio seminar the year before, and, Hill says, "we only just met quickly, and no sparks were flying. I thought he was very attractive and a real gentleman, but that's as far at it went. [When we toured together], that's when it became obvious that, oh, my gosh, there was a serious connection, a serious spark."
When the tour got to Pennsylvania, McGraw borrowed a Jeep from a local crew member and took Hill for a romantic drive, eventually pulling over and talking about whether their relationship was going to be The Relationship. McGraw didn't propose right then, Hill says, "but it was the moment of truth: Are we going to be adults and handle this in an adult way, or are we having fun for a while? Realizing that we both do the same thing for a living, and that in this business, unfortunately, marriage is not always a priority.
"I knew this about him, and he knew this about me: that we were going to take it seriously, that marriage and family was the most important thing in both of our lives -- that family would always be first in our life. We just had to make sure we were on the same path.
"We knew it was going to be challenging down the road, the scheduling, that we were going to have to probably let some things go that normally we would have done had we been single," Hill says with a laugh. "But we were okay with that. As long as we kept the same goals in play, we would make it through and it wouldn't be as difficult as sometimes people make it out to be."
Seven months after their Jeep excursion, McGraw and Hill were married in Rayville, La., at his aunt's home, with Hill in a designer wedding dress -- and bare feet. Three years ago, Hill gave that very same Jeep to McGraw as a birthday present.
"I thought it was amazing that she tracked it down and bought it," McGraw says. "That day just meant so much to us -- that's the day that changed our relationship. We take a ride every anniversary in it."
"Isn't that cool?" Hill asks. "It's not very often you get a true story about something like that."
For both, hits just kept coming, and so did little McGraw-Hills: Gracie in 1997, Maggie in 1998, Audrey in late 2001. Surely the girls had some fascinating "what I did on my summer vacation" stories after last year's massive tour?
"We must rank pretty high on their list, though our oldest daughter, Gracie, just turned 10 and informed us that this could be it for her," Hill says with a laugh. " 'I'm done after this summer of touring!' and that's probably going to be the case. They're getting old enough now that they're starting to form strong bonds with their friends, and they really want to be around them during the summer to spend time with them and do regular things."
Hill says: "The last time I'd gone on the road was the original 'Soul2Soul' [in 2000]. I had missed it, and I was thankful for the break, but I was working. It wasn't literally six years off not working!"
She kept recording, of course, and had some other projects, including a role in the Nicole Kidman-starring remake of "The Stepford Wives," but Hill and McGraw's priorities have always been clear: Family is first, second and third. Their tours are arranged around school schedules: The tours are mostly summer affairs, when their daughters are on vacation. During the school year, Mom and Dad, who long ago made a pact not to be apart for more than three days, take turns driving the girls to school and picking them up.
"With three kids, and school, and Girl Scouts, gymnastics and softball and basketball [McGraw coaches these last two] -- that's why we only tour in summer," McGraw explains. "The rest of the year we're just taxi drivers with a credit card."
According to McGraw, it's not a question of balance, but of family priorities. "We have a list of everything that our family has to do -- children-wise, individual-wise, husband-and-wife-wise -- and we update it every month, and that's the first thing on the list. We hand it in to both our management offices and say, 'This is what we're having to do this month, anything that we do work-wise has to negotiate around these things.' "
"We love doing what we do," Hill adds. "We love more being a family and being normal and being Mom and Dad -- that's our pleasure in life, doing the things we do every day."
Tim McGraw and Faith Hill
Appearing Saturday at Verizon Center
Together again: They've made movies separately (his include "Friday Night Lights" and "Flicka") and recordings together, but they have yet to make a film together. "We've talked about it," says Hill, adding, "we really don't want to do a movie together where we're lovers; we'd like to be brother and sister or something crazy." ("Or arch enemies," McGraw suggests.) "There's been a lot of opportunities but it's just not been right," Hill says. "You have to be very careful because it could be the worst decision we would ever make, and we'd never want it to change our relationship. The great thing about doing a movie together would be that we'd both get to work and still be together."
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