Rodney Atkins - Topic

“Some of these songs were like carving a statue,” says Rodney Atkins. “You put a whole lot of stuff on there and then keep chipping away, so you only have left what you need—you figure out what’s just noise, what’s taking away, how do you make the lyrics really be heard. Sometimes you have to go way out there so you can come back.”

Atkins’ fifth studio album, Caught Up in the Country, reveals an artist who is confident enough to know that making your best music can require patience and experimentation. While his storied career has reached such heights as being named the Top New Male Vocalist at the 2006 ACM awards and seeing his single "Watching You" become the Number One Song of the Decade according to Country Aircheck, it’s been more than seven years since Take a Back Road, his last record of new material. But Atkins knew that this time, he wanted to bring his songs further than he had ever gone before.

“I’ve never taken it lightly,” he says, “but with some of the other albums, I got to take my time for part of the album. But then when you get that first single finished, you gotta go, and you start working at a faster pace for the second half of the album. This time, I got to take that time with every song.”

The results, he believes, are the most daring collection of his career, touching on emotions and sounds which continue to expand his range—from the twangy celebration of the album’s title track (featuring the roof-raising vocals of The Fisk Jubilee Singers) to the slow-burn cover of Jason Isbell’s “Cover Me Up.” And with six Number One singles, eight Top Five singles, and over 13 million units sold, Atkins sees that his track record validates his approach.

“As I was working on this album, we put out the Greatest Hits,” he says of his 2015 compilation album. “Country Aircheck amassed the most played artists of the decade, and I was the second-most-played male solo artist—but I hadn’t even released a single in five of those years. So that was really the justification for taking time to work on this record.

“To see that all those songs were still relevant,” he continues, “still fit in with what was happening musically, even if they were a decade old—that was a foundation to build up from and keep going.”

The songs on Caught Up in the Country date as far back as 2013, when Atkins started with “All My Friends Are Drunk” (an “anti-party party song,” he calls it). “As I worked on that, I started writing, and you sort of get an idea of what you’re look