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Country music stalwart, Alan Jackson knows nothing different than to make a true blue album, one steeped in down home virtues and blue-collar themes and musicians true to their roots.
Angels And Alcohol is singer-songwriter Jackson’s 15th studio album, 22nd in all (counting live and Greatest Hits records). It maybe 25 years since the acclaimed Jackson’s ground-breaking, career making Here In the Real World, but he is still making essential country music, stetting a benchmark for others. Seven of the ten tracks come from Jackson, not co-writes but full-blown, 100% proof AJ originals. Some one way another inspired by his family as in “You Can Always Come Home” as he recalls the time he first moved up to Nashville and began thinking of how one of his three daughter who had recently moved out to California, and of how if things did not work out she could always come home. Quickly into gear you have title-track “Angels And Alcohol” and twangy, slide guitar (Robbie Flint) fashioned “Jim and Jack and Hank” coupled with heart-jerking, steel guitar doused “I Leave A Light On” set the pace for those that follow. As in fiddle warmed, swing inclined dittie “Flaws”, while on taking a trip south of his Alabama birth place down through Louisiana “Mexico, Tequila And Me” kicks up a great deal of dust.
Aided by a bunch of stellar Nashville pickers in Larry Franklin, Jim Vest, Brent Mason, Gary Prim, Andy Leftwich, Stuart Duncan, Bobby Terry, Jimmy Lee Sloas, JF Corebflos, Jim Hoke, Greenwood Hart, Michael Severs, Tommy Harden, Hoot Hester, Robbie Flint plus harmony vocalists John Wesley Ryles and Tania Hancheroff the sound is perfect.
There is some icing on the cake too, because in “Gone Before You Left Me (Michael While, Michael Heeney) and melancholy ballad “When God Paints” (Troy Jones, Greg Becker) you have two songs that he could just as easily have written and be proud of the fact!
Maurice Hope