Thirty years ago, Rick Trevino first topped the Country charts with “She Can’t Say I Didn’t Cry". The single established him as a balladeer country artist and an unusually sensitive country singer — one with a reflective streak as wide as the Texas plains. He’d already made history as the first mainstream Nashville star to release a mainstream country album in English and Spanish simultaneously; now, according to Billboard, he’s made the Song of the Summer.

Twenty six years after “Running Out of Reasons to Run,” his subsequent #1 smash, he’s still scoring the summer, and he’s still thinking and feeling deeply. “The Ride,” his newest single, is both a heartfelt autobiographical account and a word of advice to a younger listener. The highs of the journey through life, Trevino tells listeners, will be dizzying. The lows will be challenging. But the rewards of serenity, peace, and wisdom are attainable to those who can handle the curves and hang on.

All of the hallmarks of Trevino’s country music are here: the muscular beats, the tight arrangement, the gorgeous melody, the weeping pedal steel, his daughter, Presley’s harmony, the beauty, the ache, and the smoldering passion. Yet lived experience gives Trevino’s words a rare kind of resonance. As a young hitmaker, he had a premonition that life was more complicated than the radio made it sound like it was. As an accomplished veteran performer looking back at the road he’s traveled, it’s clear to him and his fans that he was right all along.

Though he’s connected with a mass audience, Rick Trevino has always had an independent streak. The fusion of Latin music and mainstream country on albums like In My Dreams was audacious, groundbreaking, and not a little bit risky. Video director Gilbert “Gibby” Villasenor captures Trevino’s willfulness and drive in his beautiful clip for “The Ride.” The filmmaker shoots the star in a South Texas setting; he’s forging ahead in a great in-between, confident about where he’s going, but vulnerable to the elements and his self-doubt. During the first part of the clip, he’s on his own. But then, during the back half, he’s joined on the trip by his soulmate. We’re shown reflections of Trevino’s life: his marriage, his music, his children’s firsts, and his wife’s battle with breast cancer. It hasn’t been easy, and it’s never been a straightforward run. But Trevino has been honest about it all — and listeners have been lucky to have been riding shotgun with him.

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