Tim McGraw and Faith Hill launched Soul2Soul II on April 21, 2006, and the tour quickly turned into a record-setting run that, by the end of its first leg, had become the highest-grossing country music concert of all time. The 2006 slate covered 74 shows, sold more than a million tickets and grossed roughly $89 million.
That number mattered because it broke the mark previously held by Garth Brooks, putting McGraw and Hill at the top of a part of the industry where arena tours are often measured as much by scale as by songs. The couple had already proved the formula once before: their first Soul2Soul tour in 2000 covered 65 stops and drew nearly one million fans, setting up the demand for a second run when they announced it in January 2006.
The format stayed the same on the road. Hill opened the show, McGraw followed, and the two closed together with duets that included “It’s Your Love” and Fleetwood Mac’s “Go Your Own Way.” The full Soul2Soul II trek lasted until September 2007 and stretched to 118 stops, making it one of the most ambitious country tours of its era.
When the couple announced a second run of shows in February 2007, they rebranded it Soul2Soul 2007 and took it to cities they had missed on the first pass. Lori McKenna, Lance Miller, Halfway to Hazard and Taylor Swift opened on various dates during that outing, and Swift appeared on several stops before her own rise changed the scale of country touring.
McGraw said in a 2023 interview that he and Hill had looked at Swift on those dates and told each other, “This girl, she’s going to be the biggest star in the world.” He also said Swift was one of their opening acts and that they had no doubt she was headed to do big things.
The prediction proved right. In 2014, Swift’s Red Tour broke McGraw and Hill’s record and became the highest-grossing country music concert in history, closing the circle on a tour that had already reset the standard for what a country act could do. For Faith Hill and McGraw, the answer was never whether Soul2Soul II mattered; it was that the record they set was always going to be chased.