Tim McGraw is on the mend. The father of three is opening up about his recovery, following multiple serious surgeries he had recently.
“Over the last two years, I’ve had four major surgeries,” McGraw reveals on Audacy. “So it’s been a rough go, but you know, I beat myself up over the years pretty badly.”
“I’m starting to come around,” he continues. “It’s just gonna take a little time, but I’ve done a lot of PT getting to where I can move a little better. There are setbacks. You go a couple of weeks, everything is really good, then you have a couple of weeks everything goes backwards.”
By his own admission, he hasn’t always helped his recovery.
“The worst part for me is I’m terrible at sitting still,” acknowledges the 58-year-old. “I had two back surgeries before the tour last year. And then during the tour, the back started going cattywampus on me. And in about three weeks in the tour, my knees went out, so I had to do the whole tour with my knee shot, my back shot. So right after I had double knee replacements. So both knees. And that was the worst, having to lay there for six, eight weeks and not do much.”
McGraw understandably struggled physically. But his biggest hardship was in his mind, when he wasn’t able to do anything but be still.
“That was the worst part was mentally,” McGraw acknowledges. “I mean, I was warned about it by my doctors that everybody that gets these things, there’s depression that happens. And for me, I was saying, ‘I’m not gonna get depressed. It’s football season. I’m gonna have my knees replaced and watch football.’ But three weeks into it, I was tired of it.”
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McGraw has a new single at radio. The father of three just dropped “Paper Umbrellas,” a collaboration with Parker McCollum.
“That song was on my Standing Room Only album, and we were getting ready to pick a new single,” McGraw explains. “I wanted to bring something off of that album, and there were a couple of choices we had, but I always loved that record, one of my favorite records on the album, and I wanted to freshen it up a little bit because it had been out for a while on the album.”
It was McGraw’s idea to reach out to McCollum to see if he would join him on the track.
“I was looking around at somebody new to put on the record,” McGraw says. “Parker was the first guy I thought of because I liked his music and the direction that he goes, and the way his voice sounds. And it seemed like his voice would fit perfectly on this type of song. He did a great job on it, and so we decided that, yeah, this is gonna be the single, and so it’s off and running.”
McGraw recently celebrated his 47th No. 1 hit, with “One Bad Habit.” The song is on McGraw’s Poet’s Resumé EP. Find all of McGraw’s music and upcoming shows at TimMcGraw.com.