25 in '26: Pat Green & Cory Morrow - Songs We Wish We'd Written

There was a time when Pat Green and Cory Morrow were the center of our musical universe.

Not Americana. Not Red Dirt. Not whatever name we eventually decided to put on all of this. "The scene". "Texas Music".

And in 2001, when both guys were in the middle of runs that helped build this whole thing, they made a record of other people’s songs.

Songs We Wish We’d Written.

Even the title was perfect.

Because this wasn’t really a covers album. It was two guys showing you the records they had worn out before we started wearing out theirs. Waylon Jennings. Merle Haggard. John Prine. Townes Van Zandt. Billy Joe Shaver. Steven Fromholz. Willie Nelson. Blind Faith. Stealers Wheel.

And then, sitting among all those names, Django Walker. That feels even cooler 25 years later.

These were the guys at the front of this new wave of Texas Music, but they knew exactly where they came from. There was no pretending they had invented something. They were just the next guys lucky enough to get handed the guitar.

And for many of us, Songs We Wish We’d Written became part of our education.

Maybe you already knew of Prine. Maybe you knew Townes. Maybe your dad had played Waylon and the Hag around the house your whole life.

Or maybe you were 20 years old, had a Pat Green CD in your truck and suddenly needed to figure out who exactly Steven Fromholz was. That happened a lot back then.

There wasn’t an algorithm waiting to serve you the next artist. Somebody mentioned a name from the stage. Somebody covered a song. You read the songwriting credit in the liner notes. Then you went looking. This record sent a lot of us looking.

And then there was the other conversation.

Cory "won".

At least that was the verdict from a pretty healthy portion of the Texas Music peanut gallery at the time. Not that there was an actual competition of any sort. Pat was the bigger star and getting bigger by the minute. Three Days was coming. Nashville was coming. “Wave on Wave” wasn't far behind. You could already feel that Pat was about to go somewhere none of these guys had gone yet.

But put on Songs We Wish We’d Written and plenty of us walked away thinking Cory had the better songs and maybe even the better performances. That was a fun argument to have in 2001. It's definitely an unnecessary one to settle in 2026. But it is part of the story.

Cory sounded completely at home inside these songs. There was an energy and urgency to his performance. There was something about his voice and his choices that fit the project. At a moment when Pat was beginning to separate from the pack commercially, this record was a pretty good reminder that Cory Morrow, at the height of his powers, could stand right there with anybody.

Mostly, though, the beauty of the record was that neither guy seemed particularly interested in making the songs theirs.

“Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way?” kept the Waylon beat and arrangement.

“Paradise” was still John Prine.

“Live Forever” was still Billy Joe Shaver.

“Red Bandana” still pointed you toward Haggard with a hangover.

Pat and Cory just brought those songs into our world for a little while.

That's always been a part of Texas Music. The line between generations was never very thick. Robert Earl Keen could lead you to Guy Clark. Pat could lead you to Jerry Jeff. Cory could lead you to Townes. Somebody could play an old song at 11:45 on a Thursday night in a bar and by Friday afternoon you were at Hastings looking for the record it came from.

We were learning the family tree without realizing anybody was teaching it to us.

Songs We Wish We’d Written might be one of the purest examples of that.

25 years later, you can hear it as a snapshot of two artists at an important moment in their careers. But, that's not all I hear.

I hear a CD case sliding around the floorboard. I hear songs getting passed between friends. I hear names we were just beginning to learn that would eventually become foundational to everything we loved about this music. And I hear two guys who were helping build the future stopping for a minute to tell us about the past.

Turns out, that was a pretty important part of building the whole thing.