INTERVIEW: Jason Aldean on Macon, Georgia

The Allman Brothers kind of formed there. That was sort of their home base. So people always say they were from there. They all weren’t from there, but that was where the band formed. But Otis Redding was from there, and Little Richard was from there. For country fans, back in the day Razzie Bailey came out of there. And then you had James Brown from Augusta, you had The Black Crowes out of Atlanta, and then you had REM and those bands coming out of Athens. And it was just, you know, Trisha Yearwood, Travis Tritt, Alan Jackson, all right there between Macon and Atlanta. And it was just this melting pot of all this different kind of music that was coming in there, and growing up, you’re exposed to all that stuff, and it’s just cool. It just gives you, I don’t know, an appreciation for all these different kinds of music.

I always have a hard time narrowing the songs down. I’ll always find a lot of songs. And I feel like I leave songs on the table a lot of times, because we’re trying to narrow it down to 15 or however many we’re putting on an album. And I always kind of, when we’re done with a record, I always look back and go, man, I kind of wish I’d have cut that one, you know? And I mean, “Fly Over States” was a song that we were going to cut for a record and left it off the album. We cut it on the next record and it ended up being a single and a big hit for us. And I feel like I’ve done that a lot over the years. And so honestly, with this being my tenth record, us dealing with the quarantine stuff, we had all this time on our hands. And it was just the tenth album being, that’s kind of a special record. And so we were like, man, let’s just do something different and let’s cut 20 new songs and then add in some live songs. We’ve never done a live album. We’ve never done a greatest hits record. So it’s almost like you get a double album and then a live greatest hits record on top of it, too. And that was the thought process.

Kelleigh Bannen: It’s a huge deal, honestly, 10 albums worth of hits. What have you not done? What do you still want?

Jason Aldean: A Grammy.

Kelleigh Bannen: Okay. All right.

Jason Aldean: A Grammy and an American Music Award. But no, the Grammy, I’m serious. But I don’t know. I mean, it’s been fun, and the thing I love is that I’ve always had a chance to go and make the records I wanted to make. I feel like for me, I landed at Broken Bow Records, which at the time was not a real player in town at all, but the one thing I’ll say about them is they always gave me creative control over everything that I wanted to do. And so I can go back and listen to those albums and be like, I made those records. That’s me. That’s not somebody telling me what to do, not somebody picking my songs for me or whatever. I did all that. And so that’s a good feeling.

My A&R process is pretty simple. It’s me and my producer, Michael Knox. And I give Knox a lot of credit too, because he weeds through a lot of the songs that he knows that I’m going to pass on. So he’ll get rid of those and then send me the best of the best. And then I kind of go… But he and I have been working together now for almost 25 years. So obviously we know each other really well.

So [my producer Michael] Knox was the one that was just like, “You really need to listen to this. You really need to listen.” I’m like, “Man, I’m listening.” But he’s like, “If you don’t ever do anything thing else for me, please cut this song.” And I was like, “We’ll cut it. I like it enough to cut it. I just don’t know if I want it to be a single.” And so sure enough, we cut it, put it out as a single, and to this day, it’s been my longest number one at four weeks. And then we’ve had other things that I had to talk him in. I’m like, I really want to cut thing, and this is why, and he was wanting me to cut something else. And we’d end up cutting the thing I wanted to cut, but that’s where he and I work really well together.