Having proved they could deliver the commercial goods, the Mavericks began branching out with Music for All Occasions. The rest of the album is nearly as good, with strong singles in “O What a Thrill” and “There Goes My Heart.” The title track of What a Crying Shame, which could stand proudly alongside the best of Roy Orbison, became the band’s commercial breakthrough.
Bassist Robert Reynolds went one better, marrying (and divorcing) Yearwood herself. The album made only a minor splash at the time, but it was enough of one for a buzz to land the group an opening slot on the first headlining tour of rising country superstar Trisha Yearwood. Ironically, considering how popular the first song would become for other Nashville cats a few years later, covers of Hank Williams’ “Hey, Good Lookin'” and Buck Owens’ “Excuse Me” are essentially filler. The title track is a Malo original chronicling a journey from Cuba to Florida. Jones” and “End of the Line” (minus its Jim Bakker specific subtitle). The more polished sound of From Hell to Paradise benefits the reprises of first-album songs “Mr. The Maverick’s self-titled debut introduced all the elements which would bring them success: Raul Malo’s soaring tenor, the band’s throwback, classic country style and a set of smart songs, mostly penned by the band themselves. That’s a nice reward for a band that chose to play country music only as a compromise when they couldn’t agree amongst themselves on any other style.
Smart, stylish and completely unlike anyone else on the scene, the Mavericks powered across the charts and the airwaves in 1995 with a string of memorable singles whose intelligence, wit and personality truly stood out from their surroundings. Hard as it is to imagine in retrospect, for a brief time in the mid-’90s, America’s notoriously staid country music industry not only embraced but made stars of the Mavericks, a literate, retro-countrypolitan Florida band of R.E.M., Beatles and Cheap Trick fans fronted by a Cuban crooner of the Roy Orbison / Chris Isaak school.
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