Some characters in Jason Aldean songs used to hate their small towns. In 2010’s “Church Pew or Bar Stool,” the narrator — alienated by both Saturday-night drunks and Sunday-morning Bible clutchers — feels alone in his one-stoplight hometown. The protagonist in 2017’s “Any Ol’ Barstool” found the part of town that suits him, but he’s resigned to a life of slugging Jack and Cokes. The character in 2012’s “Water Tower” is grateful to return to his hometown, but needed to leave in order to view it with fresh perspective.
In 2023, Aldean rode the culture war to the top of the all-genre charts with “Try That in a Small Town.” The song — a fairly generic “resentful of the big bad city” anthem with a violent, dog-whistle-laden video — pushed all the buttons it intended to, becoming the biggest mainstream hit of his career, even if it was somewhat unremarkable within his loyal country audience (unlike nearly 30 some odd songs in Aldean’s career, “Try That” never reached Number One at country radio).
What happens after going from reliable hitmaker to cultural flashpoint? It’s hard not to consider Aldean’s latest album, Songs About Us, at least partially through the prism of that question, especially given that the co-writers of “Try That in a Small Town” are all over this record. But the singer has returned with a resolute refutation of the idea that his music will be a platform for his conservative worldview or grievance politics. The record contains mostly standard-fare country imagery (like the blue eyes in “Songs About Us,” a song, and album title, that begs the question: Who is us?). Indeed, there’s nothing explicitly political about Aldean’s latest: The closest the Georgia native gets to blue-state resentment are the high heels and black dress meant to represent the love interest in the city-girl-meets-country-boy album closer “Lovin’ Me Too Long.”
What’s happened instead, post-“Try That,” is that Aldean has dug his boots in so hard into singing about rural pride and small-town virtue that it can feel like he’s about to slip. Twenty-plus years into his career, Aldean has backed himself into a corner, a hamster-wheel trap where being “Jason Aldean” means perpetually churning out lines about all the mud and dirt and dust, where every sunset in every little town burns red (as they do in four separate songs here), where men on the eve of their fifties sing about seeing girls “hotter than the South gets” (“Country Into Rock n’ Roll”).
There’s plenty you’d expect from an Aldean record: John Deere erotics, lots of barstools, “boots” rhyming with “roots,” crunchy hair-metal guitars, ample drum loops, a smattering of solid heartbreak songs (see “The High Road”), and at least a half-dozen songs that sound like future country-radio staples. There’s even a random yet welcome karaoke-forward duet of “Dust on the Bottle” with David Lee Murphy.
Sometimes Aldean acknowledges the nostalgia of middle age or takes a moment to reflect, like on the charming mid-tempo ballad “Backroads of My Memory.” But spending time with Songs About Us can often cast light on how little Aldean has evolved, or at least suggest that he’s uncertain of how to move forward. It’s as if Bruce Springsteen spent his middle age still singing about sleeping on abandoned New Jersey boardwalks.
There’s a near desperation to the degree it feels like Aldean needs to prove he’s still included in the “us” of the album’s title. “That’s a big part of the reason people can relate to me,” Aldean told Rolling Stone a decade ago. “Because I do feel I’m like them.”
The key word is feel. Many of these 20 songs seem weighed down by their need to prove something about Aldean’s backroad beginnings, but the most interesting moments actually come when those anxieties switch from subtext to subject matter. One wonders whether the “you” in “Help You Remember” might represent an inner monologue Aldean is having with the part of himself at risk of forgetting from whence he came. In the album’s last few tracks, Aldean doth protests too much, and the results are fascinating: “It’s under my nails/It’s who I am,” he sings on one of the album’s best songs, “Her Favorite Color.” (Spoiler: It’s dirt.)
Then there’s “Little Hometown Left,” the tune on Songs About Us that makes its central tension most plain. It’s hard to think of a recent country song whose chorus more succinctly summarizes the singer’s central concern: “I know I’m gonna end up right where I’m supposed to be,” Aldean sings, “long as I got a little hometown left in me.” On his latest, Aldean is so hellbent on proving this point that it’s hard not to be curious about what’s underneath all of the shouting.
