 |  |
|
Locomotives aren’t much about bluster. They’re more about power, speed, efficiency,
rugged beauty, and drive. So is the career of Alan Jackson, which
recently passed the 20-year signpost without the slightest stall in sight. The country music superstar cites no
particular ulterior motive in naming his new album Freight Train, although he will allow that maybe there’s just the hint of a career metaphor in there. “This title just jumped out at me,” he
says. “When you really think about it,
man, we’ve been rolling along here for a lot of years, still going like a
train.”
Momentum: you can’t beat it, and Jackson’s still got
it. He’s sold more than 50 million
albums and had 34 No. 1 hits—three of those off his last album, 2008’s Good
Time. As superstars go, he’s one of only a handful of artists who’ve
been around for two decades who still regularly top the country chart. And unlike the other veteran smashmakers who
can make that claim, he’s the only one who is a true singer/songwriter, penning
most of his own material.
Of course, there’s nothing nearly so unusual about his
combination of celebrity charisma and artistic craftsmanship when you consider
him alongside his truest forebears. “I
wouldn’t want to compare myself to anybody,” Jackson says. “But if I was going to say somebody I wanted
to be like, of course, the two singer/songwriters in country music that stick
out to me are Hank Williams Sr. and Merle Haggard. I don’t know that there are two any better. I just don’t put myself in that category.”
Others might beg to differ, since Jackson’s considerable
catalog clearly positions him as a successor to these greats. He’s celebrated the common man in “Little
Bitty,” “Where I Come From,” “Little Man,” and “Small Town Southern Man.” He’s spoken to the passing of generations in
“Drive (For Daddy Gene).” He’s
addressed mortality in “Sissy’s Song.” He’s treated the dream that country music itself represents with respect
in “Chasin’ That Neon Rainbow” and satire in “Three Minute Positive Not Too
Country Up-tempo Love Song.” He can
have hits with songs as heartrendingly meaningful as “Remember When” and
hilariously meaningless as “I Still Like Bologna.” He’s spoken for a nation in “Where Were You (When the World
Stopped Turning),” and spoken for the nearest barroom in “Don’t Rock the
Jukebox.” He may be the only extant
country superstar whose honky-tonk poetry can lead you to answer the eternal
question, “Are you sure Hank done it this way?,” with an unblinking, “Yup.”
After penning every number on his previous album, Jackson
wrote or co-wrote eight of the 12 songs on Freight
Train, again showing the breadth of his emotional range. The opening “Hard Hat and a Hammer”
energetically extols the satisfactions of manual labor. The comforts of long-term love and marriage
get their due in the closing ballad “The Best Keeps Getting Better.” If you’re indulging a crush instead of a
30-year marriage, he’s got songs for you, too: a cynic finds unexpected love in
the frisky “I Could Get Used to This Lovin’ Thing,” which adds a steel guitar
to a Tennessee Two-style boom-chicka-boom rhythm (speaking of trains). But heartbreak finds its way into the set,
too, notably in a cover of the 1970s Vern Gosdin hit “Till the End,” which
unites Jackson with fellow traditionalist, Lee Ann Womack.
“If I had my way, the majority of it’d be sad,” Jackson
admits. “I love writing sad stuff
better, whether I’m happy or sad, and they make much better records, usually,
to me. The sad part about the sad songs
is it’s harder to get ‘em played out there! But also, I think about the people out there whose lives are already
hard enough, trying to make a living. Everybody
wants to hear something fun or that makes them feel good.”
If Jackson has a reputation for writing songs that skew more
toward contentment than sadness, that has less to do with satisfying audience
expectations than just adhering to the “write what you know” ethos.
“I’m a real visual person, and when I’m writing, especially
if it’s a story-type song, I visualize what I know,” he explains. “It’s much easier if you write about
something real. If I pick something
that didn’t sound like what I’d written or was part of what people think my
life is, it probably wouldn’t ring true, you know?”
Which doesn’t mean these are diary entries. “When I write something like ‘After 17,’ you
could say, ‘Yeah, he wrote that about his daughter.’ But I try not to write them so specific that it couldn’t be about
anybody’s child, so they can read that into their own lives as well. In ‘The Best Keeps Getting Better,’ I did
use a lot of images from me and Denise, and everybody can see it’s her in
there. But I don’t think it’s so direct
it couldn’t be about anybody that’s been married for quite a while.
“Once you start sharing your life in your music, then it’s
hard to get away from that. After
‘Drive,’ people started looking at me like every song’s about my family or
faith, and I keep telling people, man, you’ve got to go back and listen to all
my albums. They’ve always been
collections of songs about my life, or my family—and then there’ll also be
songs on there that are drinking songs or heartbreak songs. I’ve always wanted each album to be a
collection of all the things that to me are country music.”
In a way, Freight
Train feels like a Jackson greatest hits set. “Somebody who listened to it who’s close to me said they thought
it felt like a mixture of all the things I’ve done for 20 years on one album. Right at the start, ‘Hard Hat and a Hammer’
takes you way back to two or three other working-man songs I’ve had over the
years. And then there’s some bluesy stuff, and there’s some family stuff. There’s a couple that even take me farther
left, like Like Red on a Rose did. ‘It’s Just That Way,’ the first single, and ‘Big Green Eyes’ are not
typical country melodies, and they’re maybe a little more edgy for me.”
When Jackson breaks into an oldie in concert, unlike most
other current country stars’ cover choices, you can be sure he won’t be picking
a classic-rock standard. His respect
for the traditions of his own genre continues on Freight Train with “Till the End,” which “was definitely a tribute
to Vern Gosdin after he died. That
song’s always been one of those that pops up in my head every now and then that
I’ve wanted to cover as a duet with somebody. A lot of people won’t know it because it was a long time ago and
probably not as big a hit. It gave me
the opportunity to finally sing with Lee Ann Womack. It was terrible for me, because I thought I sounded pretty good
till she came in! And then she just
blew me away.”
Jackson is characteristically humble about where his legacy
will go down among those of the greats.
“There’ll never be another Hank Williams,” he says. “As time goes on, there was a Merle Haggard
and a George Jones, and then in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, it got like all music
and probably other arts in the world: more homogenized, with not as much of an
edge anymore. Probably a lot of artists
from my generation grow up in a subdivision and go to college, and they just
don’t have much to write about. There
are very few personalities left that
end up being famous that have lived the kinds of lives that those guys did and
continue to as adults. Today, we’re all
healthy, and half the artists don’t drink, and everything’s nice and sweet and
vanilla, and it reflects in the music. Not that everybody needs to be a drunk or dope addict and crazy. But some of that dark stuff and heartache
creates some of the best music. It gets
softer every generation. You know, I’m
not as hard as Merle Haggard, and he wasn’t as hard as some of them before
him,” Jackson laughs. “And the ones who
come along after me might be softer. That’s what I see happening.”
But therein lies the combination that would make Jackson a
singular talent even yesterday, let alone an altogether unique standout today:
he sings “hard country” that’s deeply in touch with its softer side. It’s not subdivision-soft, mind you, just
firmly rooted in the farthest recesses of the heart. And for Jackson, home is where the heart is, but so is the
honky-tonk.
“I think most of my initial hunger came because I grew up
with nothing,” he says. “My family were
good, hard-working people, and had decent jobs, but they didn’t have any
money. It was either just be a working
man and get by, or take a chance on the music business. That was what drove me. As far as the relaxed part, that side of my
personality comes from being a little shy, and just growing up in the
South. My daddy was that way. But I’m not so laid back that I don’t have a
lot of energy. I’m very motivated, and
my mind’s always going and full of projects.”
Maybe the Freight
Train title is an acknowledgement of his more aggressive side. But, as with the rest of his art, Jackson
won’t be the one encouraging you to read too much into it.
“I’d been kicking around several songs to title the album
after, like ‘It’s Just That Way’ and ‘Every Now and Then.’ But they sounded too much like album titles
I’d already had, like Who I Am, and What I Do, and Where I Been,” he says (just joking about that last one, which
doesn’t really exist). In typical
Jackson fashion, it may have come down to a very simple motive, in the
end. “I’ve had about every other
vehicle—boats, cars, motorcycles— but I’d never had a train on the album
cover.” Maybe a 747, next time? Until then, here’s to contemporary country
music’s most reliable engineer.
|
 |
 |
     |
 |