ALAN JACKSON: Life’s Work on the Neon Rainbow

Where some genres seem to demand that artists periodically reinvent or at least stretch themselves, country music has always placed more of a premium on consistency.  So it’s often the case that the most decisive years in an artist’s career are the earliest of their success, which establish a musical identity that can remain essentially unchanged for decades. For Jackson, the first few albums (and the hits they contained) perfected a model that, in many respects, remained unchanged into the early years of this decade-and has now been reintroduced on Good Time.

Certainly their sound has been remarkably consistent, and not by chance; the musicians who play on Good Time are, save one man, the same ones who played on his debut almost 20 years ago, from fiddler Stuart Duncan to guitarist Brent Mason to piano legend Hargus “Pig” Robbins. “Pig missed a year or two when he was sick, but they’ve remained pretty true all these years,” Jackson says with a chuckle, while Stegall adds simply that, “These guys know what an Alan Jackson record is supposed to sound like.”

Still, there seems to be a new life in the playing and in the arrangements, something Jackson attributes to a sort of reinvention-in-reverse after several years of doing other things. “To be honest,” he says, “I think that we were maybe getting a little stale in there, and I could just feel that. Then that gospel album [Precious Memories, originally intended as a private gift to his mother] kind of accidentally got released, and then the Alison thing [Like Red on a Rose] came along. So that gave us a couple or three years to breathe, and Keith got rid of some of his other responsibilities…so when we went in this time, everyone seemed fresh.”

“They don’t get to play much country music any more,” he adds with characteristically sly humor. “But the first song we cut was ‘Good Time,’ and I could see them kind of light up, and that just stayed on through the session.”

The recording has been equally consistent, and equally unforced.  “Keith and I will get on the bus, play things on guitar and figure out what we’re going to do,” Jackson says.  “Then Brent will come on the bus, I’ll play it for him, he’ll chart it, and we’ll work up an arrangement while I sing along.

“I’ll hear an arrangement in my head-not as detailed as it ends up, but I know what kind of production a song’s going to have. Keith and I have always worked together, and he’ll have an idea and I’ll have an idea, and we just try to do some different things. I guess that’s a culmination of everything I’ve done; back when I was playing in the bars, people wanted to hear a lot of different kinds of things.

“Then when we go into the studio…most of the time we just do one or two takes live. It’s pretty much a live cut musically; I don’t sing a song more than two or three times, four at the most, and then we’ll move on to the next. We don’t patch it all up or tune it to death. We just try to get a natural vocal.”

“I don’t know of any other artist I work with who does it that way,” Stegall says.  “There’s not a lot of preparation. He just shows up with his songs, and the tracks evolve out of our relationship. It’s a very natural, organic way of doing things, and it’s what we’ve done with every album.”

Yet as important (and as consistent) as the sound of an Alan Jackson album is, it’s ultimately in the songwriting that Good Time-with no one’s name in the songwriting credits but Jackson’s-can stand almost as a summation of a career that probably still has many years to go. To hear Jackson and Stegall tell it, though, the shedding of both co-writers and outside songs was simply providential.

“I think part of that was driven by the fact that once he got out on the road, he didn’t have time to co-write,” Stegall says. “He discovered he could write and deliver what he needed himself, and it just worked.”