Jason Aldean on Changing Industry: ‘I Like Making Full-Length Albums’
Jason Aldean is on the horizon of his newest 16-track album, 9 (to be released Nov. 22). Call it old school, but the country singer says he's going to keep making full-length albums “until I get told I can’t."
Aldean, 42, shared the news with Taste of Country at a recent media roundtable in Nashville.
"I like making full-length albums," he says. "I know things are changing as far as that goes and album sales are not what they used to be for anybody. It's all kind of going to streaming now and more singles driven, I guess, a little bit."
"It's just not the way I like to make records," he furthers. "I'm still a fan of full-length albums, and I feel like it's hard to get a vibe from an artist if you're only hearing five, six songs from them. ...If it just gets to a point where it's just not the way things are going anymore, then we'll reassess it, but I still enjoy that process and creating music.”
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The "We Back" hitmaker and his producer Michael Knox treat their LPs like an experiment, with both of them choosing what tunes to cut and then sequencing them to create an overall feel for an album.
“I always feel like the album needs to start off with a bang, then leave you there for a second, then take you down and play something a little softer and change it up a little bit,” the superstar says. “I think it has to do with feel. … For me, a lot of the time, it’s just keys. Making sure that songs aren’t stacked together that may have a little bit of a similar feel to where it just kind of feels like one big, long run-on song.”
Aldean notes he usually goes for a mix of mid-tempo and uptempo songs, as well as country ballads to round out the record, stressing his overall sound as heavy, but “not too heavy.”
"If you go back and look at the last couple of albums, we put 15 songs on each record,” he says. "On this one there's 16 because I didn't want to cut it to 15. We had 16 songs that I wanted to cut, so we ended up adding the extra one on there … If people are going to go buy an album, I want it to be worth their while.”
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