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Jason Aldean
Album: Wide Open
Label: Broken Bow Records
Release Date: April 7, 2009
Website: www.jasonaldean.com

They say that the third try is the charm, and this is certainly true for country singer-songwriter Jason Aldean, whose third album, Wide Open treads on Saving Abel's rugged southern rock turf with shavings of Rascal Flatts-vibed country-pop and Taylor Swift's soft picturesque ballads. Produced by Michael Knox, Wide Open features several tracks that Aldean co-wrote with a group of songwriters that gained his trust and friendship like Neil Thrasher, Wendell Mobley, David Lee Murphy, and Jim Collins. The tracks share a recurring theme about small town folks chasing after their big city dreams. It's a theme that has been a driving force in Aldean's own life having been born and raised in the rural town of Macon, Georgia and breaking into country music's own equivalent to Las Vegas, the big city lights of Nashville, Tennessee.

Aldean's lyrical themes balance the menial tasks of everyday life with dreams that hang in the window, desiring to be more than a cog on a spinning wheel but the mechanism that motors the wheel to go forward. His tunes are musket by smooth country acoustics barreled by the fiddle and pedal steel guitar and heated by the rawness of rampant pounding in the rhythm section. Aldean cradles the words with his tongue like they are his to hold, and the heartland country flange in the guitar riffs bulk up the melodies with a rustic flavoring in tracks like This I Gotta See and the hearty rays of the pedal steel in She's Country. The intonations can be rugged like in She's Country or buttery smooth like in Don't Give Up On Me, or right in the middle like in Keep The Girl. The power rock riffs that sediment Crazy Town are ribbed in country-flexed fiddles, and move into wispy tendrils and light flouncing beats gartering On My Highway. The picturesque vibe of the track is calming and vibrate with a gentle canter along Big Green Tractor, which Aldean calls a country boy's chariot for his lady.

Jason Aldean is a modern day Glen Campbell, the forerunner of country-pop through the '70s, and Wide Open strengthens Aldean's hold on this position. Once a child of rural America, now a pivotal figure in the global marketplace of country-pop, Jason Aldean is a part of that mechanism that is motoring the wheel of country music to go forward, and showing that dreams can become a reality.

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