James Otto photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Nashville.

James Otto may be 100 percent country, but he’s also got a heart full of soul. On his third album, Shake What God Gave Ya, Nashville’s breakout star puts his God-given lung power to work on a set of songs that make even more determined use of the old-school R&B grit in his powerhouse voice. "I look at my sound as somewhere between Nashville and Memphis," says James, setting the new record’s compass point firmly on the map.

Although Shake What God Gave Ya marks the first time he’s explored the country-soul sound so devotedly on record, it won’t come as any shock to anyone who heard his earlier smash, "Just Got Started Loving You." Which is a category that should cover just about every country fan, since that tune was declared the No. 1 country single of 2008 by Billboard. When it came time to craft a full-length follow-up, James took that ringing vote of confidence as license to lean more heavily on those influences this time around. In other words, he just got started being soulful.

"With ‘Just Got Started Loving You,’ the beat and groove of that song could easily have been ‘I got sunshine on a cloudy day?’—that kind of thing," he says, jubilantly launching into a verse of the Temptations’ classic oldie "My Girl." "And the fact that that went over at radio was an eye-opener for me, because it really opened the door for me to be able to do a lot more of that on this album. I never would have expected that it would have gone over the way it did. But I’m really thankful that it did. And hopefully the same people that loved that song will get a lot out of this record."

James doesn’t just have to have faith that the new material will go over with audiences. A good deal of it has been road-tested, particularly on the 2010 triple-header tour he’s undertaken with Toby Keith and Trace Adkins. "I approached writing a lot of these songs with what I really wanted for my live show," he says. That arena-ready thinking bred barnburners like the opening track, "Are Ya With Me," which emphasizes his Southern rock side, and the divine mandate of the title song, "Shake What God Gave Ya," which James says "has turned out to be the best live song we have—better than any of the hits—because it gets people off their asses and out of their seats."