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“Good Time” is a honky-tonk jam that kicks off Alan Jackson’s latest Arista
Nashville album for a tremendously easygoing yet edgy five minutes-plus. It’s a Friday
night country tune sung by a dog-tired guy who has worked straight through the week yet
doesn’t want to sleep—not now; not when “all the conditions are right,” as Jackson sings,
for something sweeter. The guy has cashed his check, cleaned his truck, picked up his girl
across town, and as the sun goes down, he’s heading out for some fun—some beer, some
Bocephus, some relief.
Jackson’s newest collection—for which he wrote all seventeen songs—is named
“Good Time,” as well, and it’s generated a trio of back-to-back-to-back chart-topping
singles with the title track and the songs, “Country Boy” and “Small Town Southern
Man.” Loose, inventive, traditional, high-spirited, sad, intense, laid-back, clear as a bell,
the album is a great Alan Jackson hang. “I guess I felt like I needed something that
wasn’t entirely a big, heavy album,” says Jackson, whose last release, 2006’s profoundly
acclaimed Like Red on a Rose, was an adventurous exploration of country-soul with
producer Alison Krauss.
“You know,” Jackson continues, “I felt like I wanted something that had some fun
on it, because when I play in concert, people still want to hear songs like ‘Chattahoochee’
and ‘Don’t Rock the Jukebox’—all those are a big part of our success too, as well as the
big ballads. That’s why I wanted to call it ‘Good Time,’ even though the whole album’s
not a bunch of party songs.”
The collection reunites Jackson with his excellent long-time Nashville producer
Keith Stegall, who encouraged him to stick with his own songs for this record. “We just
went into the studio and started fooling with them,” Jackson says of the 22 songs he
brought to the studio. “And every one I played, Keith would say, ‘Yeah, we ought to cut
that one.’
“I don’t push my own songs; I always look for guidance from Keith. I’ve always
gone in and said, ‘We just want to make a good record.’ I don’t care if I write any of
them or all of them. But this time I said, ‘Are you sure you think we should do all these
of mine?’ We had some good outside songs he had found.
“The songs that ended up on the record all have different qualities that make up
the record. It’s a mixture of styles and subjects so somebody can hopefully find
something on there to like.”
As a songwriter, Jackson always has been a little tricky to classify. His work is a
hybrid of Nashville professionalism and personal expressiveness: His songs offer the
hummable polish of the most expert Music Row copyrights at the same time that they
expose the personal interiors that listeners associate with the work of self-contained
singer-songwriters.
With its seventeen straight-up original tunes related but not limited to what
Jackson calls “fun,” Good Time is his most ambitious demonstration of how—whether
working with the great ‘60s-based country-soul of “When the Love Factor’s High,” the
strummed memories of “1976,” the deceptive dittiness of “I Still Like Bologna,” the
harmonica-flecked “Never Loved Before,” a duet with Martina McBride, or the Nashville
elegance of “I Wish I Could Back Up”—the country song, in Alan Jackson’s hands, is
capable of all things.
“Sissy’s Song,” which became the album’s beautiful fourth single, was written for
the funeral of a family friend, and it honors a young woman’s memory with all the
compassionate dignity that country often brings to lost-love ballads. “It was for a lady
who worked here at our house; someone I saw every day like family,” he says. “She died
suddenly of an accident this past spring, and it was really hard on me and all of us. This is
the same track that we played at the funeral. It’s a real pretty song, and a lot of people
told me how much it made them feel better so I was very proud of it.”
Other songs are also layered. “I Still Like Bologna,” Good Time’s new single,
could have been just a belly laugh about an old sandwich, but in Jackson’s presentation it
stands in for cherished traditions that pre-date cell phones. In the extraordinary “Nothing
Left to Do,” a couple passes the remote, has great sex, goes to great restaurants, drinks
great rum, but cannot quite escape a hardy domestic boredom; the music, though, driven
along slyly by the greatest country tension in the verses and the greatest country release
in the honky-tonk choruses, builds a pure Nashville fire. “There’s a lot of truth in it,”
chuckles Jackson. “It’s comical.”
When Jackson talks about songwriting, the conversation turns as smart and
relaxed as his songs. “Memories are some source of inspiration, but typically some of the
better hooks come from when you are with a group of people and everybody is just
talking a bunch of nonsense. Somebody will just phrase something differently.
Something you have heard a hundred times, but the way they phrase it will sound like a
song title. I have heard them in dialogue in movies or in a magazine ad or a billboard.
And then some of them come clean out of thin air. Suddenly you are humming the
melody and this hook just pops up. It’s pretty strange.
“On ‘Small Town Southern Man,’ I didn’t sit down to write a song about my
family and my daddy and granddaddy, but I did pull from that stuff. But wherever you
go, there are rural people—around outskirts of major cities and everywhere—that are
working for a living and raising families. They all have the same qualities and same goals
as a small town southern man.”
“I guess I don’t sit down and analyze it, or have a plan in advance. I knew we
were getting ready to make an album, and I needed to come up with some songs. And
then, there were a couple that came out on their own, like ‘Sissy’s Song.’”
As for going with what he calls a frequently lighter country touch, Jackson is
equally common sense and matter-of-fact. “I’ve just always written things that are lighter,
or simpler, just things that I like and things that my fans still like. I came along singing in
little bars, singing everybody else’s stuff. Then I came to Nashville to make country
music, and this is still pretty much the kind of music I’ve made my whole career, from
light, up-tempo things to serious, lost-love things. When people start classifying you in
the industry as a writer, then it’s real easy to start trying to write for writers and not for
the fans. I think when you start writing for writers too much it gets too poetic, it gets too
over-the-top, and regular people out there who’ve made me successful, the fans, they
don’t appreciate that kind of thing. They’d just rather have something that makes their
day easier, you know.”
He says he’s not sure why refining and breathing new life into different stripes of
classic country keeps compelling him. “I just write what I like,” Jackson says, “and I
guess that’s what I like. Take ‘When the Love Factor’s High’: I love that song, and when
I played that for my wife, she said, ‘Man, I just love that—it’s a country song. It’s a great
song.’ When we came along, we loved Conway Twitty and Gene Watson and all those
people. That’s one of the reasons I came to Nashville, was to do that kind of music. A
song like that might be hard to get that played on radio today. But that’s just the way it
is.”
In the end, what you keep coming back to with Alan Jackson and his work is
something that artists in any musical field might envy: balance. He is a dedicated,
informed country classicist unafraid of the new. He is a first-rate songwriter who doesn’t
insist on singing only his own songs. He writes “heavy” songs about love and the world
but also writes “light” songs that refuse to go light-headed. He wants to do what he wants
to do but he also considers how his fans feel about things. He’s won every award in the
book but doesn’t let that be the end of his creative stories. The effortless range of Good
Time recalls the work of Hank Williams—who, as Jackson says, knew a thing or two
about balance and keeping things creatively together. “He’d write uptempo ‘Jambalaya,’
‘Mind Your Own Business.’ But then he’d write ballads and do religious songs and
gospel things. He did all that stuff, and it all worked.”
With Good Time, Jackson says, “Keith and I just wanted to go in there and have
fun making a record. We wanted to make a country record with the songs we wanted. My
life is very wonderful, and I’m happy, and I think a lot of that reflects on my songwriting
now. It’s a good place. I don’t feel like I need to prove or earn anything. I just want to
make good music that I like and that I feel like people who buy my records might like.
That’s the bottom line, right there.”
As country bottom lines go, Jackson’s is among the very richest.
