By the end of the decade, the singer was unhappy with the sloppy production quality of his records and had signed with Epic in the hopes that producer Billy Sherrill could re-establish his music.

However, after three albums with Sherrill, Jones still had not scored a solo number one (he had gone to the top of the charts in 1973 with "We're Gonna Hold On", a duet with his then-wife Tammy Wynette).

In his liner notes for Classic Country Music: A Smithsonian Collection, the genre historian Bill Malone calls it a "perfect matching of lyrics and performance" and "one of the great modern songs of divorce".

The Grand Tour also includes "Our Private Life", a song Jones wrote with Wynette which takes a swipe at the gossip-mongers in the tabloid press who were hounding them and speculating (quite accurately, as it turned out) that their marriage was crumbling.

In July 2013, Andrew Meuller of Uncut compared the album to Frank Sinatra's In the Wee Small Hours, calling it "An exultant wallow in heartbreak" with Jones inhabiting songs "like an inmate on suicide watch."