Tim McGraw told the audience what we were all thinking.
“The only thing that can beat this night,” McGraw said onstage while being inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame on Oct. 18 in Nashville, “is when you’re standing here and I’m sitting there.”
McGraw was referring to his wife, Faith Hill, who was seated in the audience, looking adoringly at her husband alongside two of their daughters, Maggie and Audrey. While McGraw might have been thinking about how worthy Hill is for a slot in the Hall of Fame herself, it’s hard not to wonder that maybe he was hoping for something bigger: a return to the stage and studio for the Mississippi-born Grammy winner.
And, honestly, we’re with you, Tim. We miss Faith Hill too.
It’s been two long decades since Hill released a non-holiday solo album: 2005’s Fireflies. Her last recorded project was her collaboration with McGraw, their 2017 duets record The Rest of Our Life, and her last public performance was a Covid-19 livestream fundraiser produced by CMT in 2020. Since then, she’s mostly kept private, reportedly wanting to focus on her daughters and acting. She landed a role in the Paramount Yellowstone spinoff series 1883. But she also has worked on numerous charity projects and causes — among those, speaking out in support of changing her home state’s flag, which contained a Confederate symbol, in 2020. “We have to realize that this flag is a direct symbol of terror for our Black brothers and sisters,” she wrote on Twitter at the time.
So it’s not that Hill has disappeared from public life altogether — she’s often seen supporting her daughters and husband at various events — but her presence has been minimal at best. In 2024, she deleted her social media accounts (to which we say, truthfully, we are jealous of her peace). And her website, FaithHill.com, just leads to a blank screen. For as influential as Hill has been on an entire generation of country artists, especially female singers who are fearless about blending pop and soul into their take on the genre, it’s a presence surely missed. Without her, Nashville’s musical landscape feels incomplete.
Perhaps most incomplete? The story we often tell without her. Though Hill and her smash hits like “Breathe” are often referred to in passing, especially to illustrate the female-led heyday of the 1990s, her vast influence and massive success is often underscored and undervalued. It’s jarring to see conversations around Ella Langley’s breakthroughs without mentioning Hill, who shattered numerous records and helped make a certain breed of country/pop hybrid marketable on a mainstream scale (it was Hill and Shania Twain, after all, who inspired Taylor Swift to move to Nashville). Her debut single “Wild One” saw Hill become the first female country artist in three decades to top the charts, and led to huge crossover success with numerous Number One singles.
As a vocalist, Hill was, and is, one of the genre’s greatest. Few could so effortlessly glide over the syllables of “centrifugal motion” as Hill does on “This Kiss,” or consistently execute a flawless live performance. Hill is not just a technically great singer — the emotion she is able to capture in each note elevated every appearance onstage into moving, unforgettable territory (or, on songs like her last country radio solo hit, “Mississippi Girl,” twangy fun).
Country radio and Music Row, however, didn’t always appreciate the creative, openly explorative nature that Hill brought to her recordings, especially on 2002’s Cry. In a post-9/11 climate that gravitated toward jingoistic hits, Hill’s title track was considered a disappointment on the airwaves, never reaching Number One status (it did eventually win her a Grammy). Reviews of the album were predominately unkind, often chastising Hill for not staying in her lane — despite a career that almost always played with genre boundaries.
“Everything is a risk for me,” Hill told the Globe and Mail in 2002. “Making this album is a risk. It’s progressive and sounds so different. That’s what they said about Breathe. But in order to grab the fruit, you have to go out on a limb. I don’t walk a straight line.” That riskiness was inspirational: It’s easy to see a lasting influence on artists like Swift, Kelsea Ballerini, Carrie Underwood, and Megan Moroney, even if the country music community wasn’t so kind at the time.
Will Hill ever return to center stage? We hope so. Her take on country music, not to mention her convictions, would be welcome in a genre that praises, but often sidelines, the stories of women as they age past the ripe year of 30 (Brandi Carlile would do an excellent job producing a Faith Hill comeback album). But even if she prefers to stay out of the spotlight and focus on her family and charitable work — artists, after all, don’t owe us anything — that shouldn’t change how we place her in the canon of country music history. Or, shall we say, its centrifugal motion.
