When you look at the country artists with more than 20 #1 songs on the Country Airplay charts this century, it’s a who’s who list of all of the biggest mainstream stars of the modern era. Millennial mainstays like Kenny Chesney, Luke Bryan, and Tim McGraw top the list, along with regular hitmakers like Jason Aldean and Blake Shelton. If you asked most folks over the age of 30, these are the names that likely come to mind when they think of country music.
Amidst this list of perennial A-listers, one name is a bit of a black sheep. Country radio stalwart Thomas Rhett has hung around the top of the airplay charts for over a decade now, and has amassed a striking 22 number-one singles. As a product of the 2010s Nashville scene, he doesn’t lean as heavily into the blue-collar aesthetic, like some of his more seasoned peers. But however inexplicably, TR’s name will likely go down in history amongst the biggest hitmakers of his time.
Even with his impressive stats, he doesn’t have a lot of signature songs or much of a signature sound to hang his hat on, but also usually doesn’t ride trends in pursuit of fleeting relevance. In a more calculated way, Thomas Rhett has built a compelling personal brand around his down-home, Georgian affability and People Magazine-perfect relationship with his wife, Lauren. In this way, it sometimes feels like Thomas Rhett, the musician, exists in service of Thomas Rhett, the public figure. Such a phenomenon happens a lot with older artists who have said all they can say in their music, and passively release albums to keep their name in the press, and give them something to tour. However, TR hasn’t been doing this nearly as long as Jason Aldean, and the lack of bite in his music early in his career has always held him back from the “legend status” that his raw stats would suggest. Even so, as Nashville stars go, he’s easy to tolerate and has remained widely accessible to many different age demographics.
That was, until his latest LP, About a Woman, and its deluxe counterpart, About a Woman (From a Small Town), threw a wrench in that previously smooth-rolling wheel. With this record, he’s created a body of work so sleepily simp-tastic and obnoxiously-produced that it drowns the relaxed southern charm that usually makes his albums passable. The silly moments aren’t fun, the sexy moments aren’t sexy, and above all else, About a Woman (From a Small Town) is fresh out of the hooks or instrumental moments that could redeem its dullness as a concept album.
In short, there’s a lot wrong with this album. Thomas Rhett’s commercial appeal has always hinged on his ability to produce fluffy pop-country that works on the radio and the Today Show. Still, like Kane Brown, he’ll occasionally remind listeners that he has the chops for something a little twangier (see the woefully neglected “Country Again: Side A). In direct contrast to his usual pragmatism, About a Woman (From a Small Town) takes a ruinous shift into the most synth-heavy, noisy production he’s attempted to date. Producer Julian Bunetta (One Direction) has crafted some pretty solid sounds for TR in the past, but from top to bottom, this record’s skittering beats and quirky EDM noises reek of Billy Currington’s little-known flop album Intuition.
Between the lack of personal anecdotes (a big change for the ever-earnest artist) and an annoying surplus of empty-calorie ditties about infatuation and youthful desire, this record and its bloated 19-song tracklist feel like it was written for him, not by him. It’s a frightening stage of an artist’s career when it feels like they’re being steered, and the creative juices that inspired their seminal work have run mostly dry. This is not to say that Thomas Rhett has ever produced anything truly eyebrow-raising. Still, you could usually credit him for his ability to effectively put his life to paper. After an artist has left their early 20s behind, the extent to which they write about that period of their lives is a decent indicator of how much they have left to say in general (see Keith Urban post-Fuse). We get a lot of songs about falling in love in the bar and getting lost in the country on About a Woman, and it never feels true to the life of 35-year-old husband and father Thomas Rhett.
The last big indictment of this album is how stubbornly tone-deaf it is to the current moment in country music. In a time where young up-and-comers thrive by baring their souls on their own stories instead of feeding the monolithic radio machine a new batch of sugary slop, TR gave that machine its fill for the remainder of the year at a minimum. Sorry guys, but you’re about eight years behind to the Dan + Shay hot-AC sound. As I write this, “I Never Lie” by Zach Top is the #1 song at country radio, and the format is dominated by an epic triumvirate best identified by their “authenticity” and “realness” (we’re speaking of Zach Bryan, Morgan Wallen, and Luke Combs, of course). Flat pop ditties don’t cut it like they used to, and even though Thomas Rhett has the chops to do more, his last two LPs are fiercely committed to doing the bare minimum. There’s not a single cut on this record that screams “SMASH HIT,” but that seems to be okay by the standards of its creators.
To bring this thing full circle, there was a time when you could’ve squinted and seen Thomas Rhett on the Blake Shelton/Jason Aldean trajectory, skating by on his public persona with a string of easily digestible singles that practically top the airplay charts by the end of their first week. Regrettably, About a Woman (From a Small Town) utterly nerfs the laid-back charisma that made that even remotely possible, and replaces it with simpering laudations and flat pickup lines that never translate as sweetly as he probably intended. Coming on the heels of the wilted Where We Started, our Georgia troubadour will need a truly outstanding seventh full-length effort to dig himself out of this hole. As far as this album is concerned, younger folks generally view this kind of music as hokey and insincere, whereas older folks are more likely to recoil in disgust at the sound of a snap track. It’s a kind of stylistic no-man’s-land that only make sense over the speakers of a department store.
It does make you wonder what’s next for Thomas Rhett, but a front-to-back listen through About a Woman (From a Small Town) makes it difficult to care.
