Alan Jackson – Press Image

At a time when country music is as much hip-hop and pop as anything, it makes sense that Alan Jackson would emerge with an album that has the same cleansing quality as “Here In The Real World” all those years ago. Having weathered every trend, seen “superstars” come and go, the soft-spoken legend returns with Where Have You Gone, a twin-fiddle’n’steel survey of real country. Classic songwriting that exhumes sorrow, love, life, loss, cheating, drinking, the South, wanting, children growing up and parents dying, these 21 songs are a witness to what country music was born from and will always be.

“It’s a little harder country than even I’ve done in the past,” Jackson concedes. “And it’s funny, I was driving out here where I live and was listening to the final mixes, just listening to what Keith (Stegall, his longtime producer) sent me, and I started to tear up. I was surprised to get so overly emotional, but I just love this kind of music. It’s what I’d always wanted to do.”

When Alan Jackson broke the country charts wide open with “Here In The Real World,” his unadorned classic country was a stark reminder of how gut-wrenching a simple song can be. With the chorus closing revelation, “The one thing I’ve learned from you/ is how the boy don’t always get the girl/ here in the real world,” the future Country Music Hall of Famer deployed the kind of vulnerability only a strong man of deep dignity can. Tall, thin, quiet, Jackson hadn’t come to save country music in 1990. But, somehow, that’s what happened. In the world of jacked up, arena-ready Nashville, Alan Jackson stood as a voice where bruised hearts, small pleasures, words written in red and easy good times were strung like laundry on lines of steel guitar, fiddle and a Telecaster that evoked Merle Haggard, George Jones, and Buck Owens.

Entertainer of the Year. Grammy winner. Headliner. Thirty-five #1s. Enduring hits, including “Don’t Rock the Jukebox,” “Chattahoochee,” “Gone Country,” “Remember When,” “Drive (for Daddy Gene),” “Chasin’ That Neon Rainbow,” “Where I Come From,” “Wanted,” “Little Man,” “Who’s Cheatin’ Who,” “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere” with Jimmy Buffett and “Murder on Music Row” with George Strait. And when America was stunned in the aftermath of 9/11 and the World Trade Center falling, it was Jackson who took the stage at “The CMA Awards” and in his quiet way expressed the confusion and grief of the entire nation with, “Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning).” Once again, he delivered for a country that couldn’t find the words: simple, straightforward and hollow without buckling as only the greatest country songs can be.