Digital Rodeo

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Why has Jason Aldean been able to connect with so many people so fast? His fans would probably say relatable songs, a powerful, dynamic voice, and total dedication to giving himself up for an audience. He’s done it for years at a stretch across the Southeast, in bars and taverns and some places you’d best not even go. He’s thrown down for 15 people in halls that could have held hundreds. And he’s spent the last year proving he can connect from the biggest stages, the ones that they haul around in multiple semi-trailers.

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.”