You get the sense that Aldean gets pumped up to sing live the way college quarterbacks fire up for games. The Tennessean called his music “amped-up contemporary country, with Southern rock and honky-tonk influences.” Aldean calls it “aggressive country.” So it’s no surprise that behind his radio success is a desire to commune with his crowd, to make a party happen wherever he and his band go. He played some 200 dates last year, a hard pace, but one he’s trained for. “I was playing clubs when I was in high school,” says Aldean. “But it was one of those things where I don’t know if people knew how serious I was. I don’t even know if I knew how serious I was about it at the time.” After high school, he put a band together and went out on the road. “I actually had a chance to go to college and play baseball or go after a music career,” he says. “But I was in bars every night, having fun, playing music. At that point I threw everything I had into it.” Those high school days were spent in Macon, Georgia, hometown of music legends like Otis Redding and Little Richard. “I didn’t think about it much at the time, but looking back I don’t think you can grow up somewhere that has that kind of musical history and not be influenced by it in some way. I definitely think I was influenced by it, especially the Southern Rock thing. It just taught me to be who I am.” For a while there, it looked like Jason might sidestep some of the hardships typically waiting for a newcomer in Nashville. He landed a major label record deal and a publishing contract. But the record deal fizzled after a year, and his publisher started to get antsy. When the Broken Bow deal came through at the last possible minute, it was great news but certainly not a guarantee of anything. Independent labels had struggled for years to be taken seriously at radio. But label founder Benny Brown had been building his brand and a promotions team for several years by the time Aldean came along. “I had grown up watching those shows on TV from the time I was a kid and seeing all the guys that I looked up to on the show and winning these awards,” says Jason about his Top New Male Vocalist nod. “At the time it seemed like such a reach to get to that point, so to first of all be sitting in the audience, second of all to be nominated for an award, and then to actually win it. . . .I think anybody who goes back to see the tape of that night would probably see how nervous I was. I almost knocked the microphone over.” It’s no nervousness and all nerve on Aldean’s new album Relentless. You can feel the attitude he brings to his live shows in its opening lines. The lead song and lead single, “Johnny Cash” is about freedom and abandon, a fantasy about blowing off the grind and the naysayers and hitting life’s highway with the top down and “Folsom Prison Blues” or “Big River” pumping on the stereo. Later, Aldean sings “I Use What I Got” about the pride and steel it took to get through the hard times in a breaking career. The album closes out in a similar vein – a song with a “Honky Tonk Woman” backbeat about a serial heartbreaker called “I Break Everything I Touch.” Relentless also has a darker side, with a handful of songs about the wake of busted love and sonic textures that are grittier than one normally hears on country radio. He and long-time producer Michael Knox took advantage of success not by trying to repeat themselves, but by looking for new angles. “It was cool to go in and experiment a little bit with this record and not have to worry about everything being so mainstream,” Aldean says. After all, he knows his fans. He sees them most every night on a stage somewhere, and more often now on the street or in a restaurant, where he’s being recognized more and more regularly. “It’s cool. I like meeting people and hearing what they have to say,” he says. “One thing I learned about fans is that they’re brutally honest. They’ll tell you if they like something and they’ll tell you if they don’t. But that’s good. That’s the way I am too.”