27, Adkins’ 13th studio album, The Way I Wanna Go, is a creative tour de force that serves up the lyrical and stylistic diversity that would make his hero Milsap proud. ![]() There’s just not a whole lot he can do with the dull ones.Releasing Aug. As the country-convert hero of “Songs About Me” can attest, this guy knows how to make his songs speak truth, whether they’re silly or high-minded. Adkins sings it with the same rueful machismo he uses to joke around, only for chills instead of laughs. In Adkins’s case, that number is “You’re Gonna Miss This”, his biggest pop hit and a contemplation of lost time worthy of Proust, or at least Prine. With the right voice and the right song, even country-by-numbers can whup you upside the head. (Pies, smart aleck: this isn’t a Willie Nelson album.) Depending on your mood, generic country songs can be as satisfying or as boring as generic John Wayne movies, but they’re shorter and they create a good ambiance for getting your bake on. (Adkins co-wrote only two of these 28 songs.) His non-novelties range from forgettable (“Big Time”) to maudlin (“All I Ask For Anymore”) to actually pretty good (“Every Light In the House”). He’s a master because most of his stuff sticks and he sings it with ease, even when he picks the most boilerplate ditties offered him. Ultimately, Adkins is a master of the Throw-It-At-the-Charts-and-See-What-Sticks school of country singing. Another serious novelty is the baptism tune “Muddy Water”, where Adkins gets dunked by the same gospel choir that lures his wife toward the bedroom in “Hot Mama”. Sort of a “serious novelty” in its country context, it’d fit in well on the latest Josh Groban album. “Last Shot” starts off as a simple prayer for peace, and then balloons into a time-traveling war fantasia, complete with a well-enunciated contribution from the West Point Cadet Choir. Rather, they’re plainspoken soldier songs, sung with stoic restraint and accompanied with a refreshing lack of bombast. His two military odes, “Arlington” and “Til the Last Shot’s Fired”, are moving precisely because they’re not jingoistic screeds of the type favored by Darryl Worley (“Have You Forgotten?”). (Hint: it’s not an appliance.)Īdkins is a good enough singer that he can convincingly deliver dramatic showstoppers, too. Also infectious are the braggadocio of “Ladies Love Country Boys” and “I Got My Game On” (two other Johnson co-writes), and the giddy horndoggerel of his early hit “I Left Something Turned On at Home”. When Adkins croaks out the rapped verses of “Chrome” (the “favorite color” of a lady he admires), or wraps his tongue around the various pick-up lines and baseball metaphors of “Swing”, you can savor the pure physical pleasure of his voice right along with him. ![]() ![]() He knows how to exploit the low end of his range for comic effect Trace Adkins’s funny songs are all about the delirious joy of being Trace Adkins Ģ. ![]() Where a nitwit like Rodney Atkins (“Farmer’s Daughter”) cloys for our good will, Adkins’s funny songs barely deign to wink at us, and sometimes they make him sound a little intimidating. “Badonkadonk” kicks everything off with a strutting chunk-rock beat, a smack-your-grandma-simple guitar riff, and the eternal question, “How’d she even get them britches on?” It’s some kind of art.Īdkins is one of country radio’s most reliable purveyors of novelties and just-plain-funny songs because he delivers them all straight. Adkins’s new two-disc compilation, The Definitive Greatest Hits: Til the Last Shot’s Fired, sums up his time on Capitol Records (he’s now on Toby Keith’s Show Dog label), and roughly a third of its songs are played for laughs. One of Adkins’s best-known hits, “Badonkadonk” shows off his goofy side. As if mandated by federal law, nearly every article about Jamey Johnson’s The Guitar Song has mentioned that Johnson co-wrote “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk” for Trace Adkins.
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