Thirteen studio albums into his career, Jason Aldean shows no indication of ever fully fading away. The country megastar continues to deliver regular #1s at radio, tour arenas, and release music that, more or less, sounds like a repackaged version of what he did one album ago.
Songs About Us, Aldean’s latest release, is his best album in years. Not for any exceptional, groundbreaking reason. Rather, he makes an unexpected return to experimenting with production and chord progressions, covering deeper topics than just drowning your sorrows in whiskey, and managing to stick to his country rock-and-roll brand the entire time.
How far can that carry someone like Aldean? As far as Michael Knox’s signature, overbearing, electric guitar-driven production can. The album arrives in a bombastic fashion with high-energy tracks to set the tone. Then, over time, the 20-track LP begins to slug along because, hey you need slow, boring album filler once in a while.
This direction with the tracking on Songs About Us isn’t foreign to Aldean. Many of his albums suffer a similar fate. Still, compared to projects like Highway Desperado and MACON, GEORGIA, where those faults cast a dark shadow over everything good, it manages to give each track solid footing, with a more mature and intentional approach to the lyrics and the album’s pacing.
Look at songs like “Anytime Soon,” “Little Hometown Left,” and “Backroads of My Memory.” They all still carry the nostalgic spirit of an Aldean song you’ve heard somewhere at some point in time, but with different instrumental progressions and occasionally clever wordplay. The radio smash-hit “How Far Does a Goodbye Go” is another example of this; simply changing up the format of the song with a quieter verse and first chorus, then leading to a bombastic second half, is enough to make it feel far less stale than most of his other #1’s.
There are also moments where Aldean shares more vulnerability and maturity in his storytelling than he has in years. “Help You Remember” stands out as the most meaningful track on the album, where he reflects on the difficulties of seeing a loved one have Alzheimer’s. It’s one of the most tender, personal tracks in Aldean’s entire discography, and stands out as a true highlight on Songs About Us.
“She’s Why” and “Don’t Tell On Me,” are also worth acknowledging; these are two very different songs that add more emotional depth to the album than you might expect. These are some of the most passionate takes on dedication and painful memories that Aldean has shared in his recent releases, giving the album moments of relatability that resonate much more strongly than the surface-level tropes of albums past. Between clever wordplay, raving vocals, and those same production-level adjustments, Aldean seems to have paid attention to the music he was making for a change, which pays off quite well.
But of course, it’s still a Jason Aldean album, and you’re bound to run into the inescapable washed-up rock-and-roll side of him at some point or another.
It’s perfectly evident in songs like “Country Into Rock ‘n’ Roll,” “What’s a Little Heartache,” and “Drinking About You” that feel like the Aldean that needs to finally retire. While none of them are particularly terrible, it does feel like whiplash to some of the worst moments in his career. They almost sound like B-sides to e his 2019 album 9, a project that tried for its hour runtime to revive bro-country, but wound up hungover in a dive bar parking lot at 6 a.m.
The same redundant, party-animal spirit can be found on track nine as well. “Dust on the Bottle,” a cover of the 1994 hit that sees Aldean collaborate with David Lee Murphy, feels borderline pointless. Other than Aldean gratuitously wanting to sing “Dust on the Bottle” on one of his albums, the cover doesn’t add much of anything to the tracklist of Songs About Us. Beyond capitalizing on nostalgia for the hell of it, Aldean keeps the record so similar to the original that the only thing different is that he’s singing a majority of the track. At the same time, Murphy sounds noticeably worse than he did on his solo version.
The song that perhaps explains why this album suffers a similar fate to the rest of Aldean’s discography is the title track. A collaboration with Luke Bryan, “Songs About Us” tiresomely regurgitates trite country music talking points, as its singers let us know how much they love each one. “We won’t ever turn down those songs about us” is recited in the outro of the track, which probably has to do with the volume of their truck’s sound systems, but sounds an awful lot like an admission that they won’t say no to cutting any cliche country song that they come across.
Aldean seems to want more personable, vulnerable tracks on his albums. Now in a more mature phase of his career, Songs About Us arrives to deliver on some of that. But as much as Aldean strives to go deeper with the stories he tells, the “Rock ‘n’ Roll Cowboy” persona calls to him like the goblin mask. He must make bro-country slop whether he likes it or not, and this album certainly has a decent amount of that. But we can all be thankful the record isn’t entirely soaked in it, and that’s all you can ask for.
