As the father of three girls, Tim McGraw is very protective.

So, when his eldest daughter Gracie McGraw began dating, he wanted to ensure her boyfriend was a gentlemen. “I was on the road working,” he recalled on NBC’s The Tonight Show Thursday. “They gave me a call and they said, ‘You know, Gracie’s going out on a date. Do you mind if she goes before you meet the guy?’ I said, ‘I’ve met him. He’s a really nice guy. We’ve done all our research—everybody. He’s a really nice guy. We put our Secret Service guys on it. They checked him out. Everything’s good. They can go out tonight, but I’ll be home tomorrow.'”

Tim ended the call with one caveat: “Around noon, I want him to come by the house so I can say hi to him—look him in the eye.” The singer got home in the wee hours of the morning, so Gracie’s boyfriend wasn’t on his mind the next morning. “We’re doing a barbecue, so I’m in the kitchen and I forget that he’s coming. I have a white apron on and a knife and I’m trimming meat up, so I’ve got chunks of meat all over this white apron, blood everywhere,” he recalled. “The doorbell rings and I go and answer the door, and here’s this kid who’s dating Gracie standing there. I’ve got a knife in my hand and a bloody apron on…It worked out really well!”

The singer joined his wife, Faith Hill, on the show to promote their new album, The Rest of Our Life. “We’ve wanted to do a record for a long time together. We’ve been married 21 years. We’ve done a handful, but not quite as many songs as people think we’ve done together…So, this time around, when we decided we were going to do a tour together, we thought, ‘We have to do an album together. It may be the only album we ever get to do together,'” he said. Best of all, he admitted to Jimmy Fallon, “We both turned 50 this year, which was a cool year for it.”

In April, the couple kicked off their Soul2Soul: The World Tour. The second North American leg will begin in the spring of 2018. “It was frightening at first, because I had the pleasure of performing with one of the greatest performers in the business of music—period. Honest to God, he is,” Faith said of singing onstage with her husband. “I was nervous at first. It’d been a while—10 years—but once I got out there, after a few shows, I’m like, ‘Bam! I love it! I love it!'”

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