Alan Jackson photo courtesy of SonyBMG.

"Sissy's Song," written for the funeral of a family friend, honors a young woman's memory with all the compassionate dignity that country often brings to lost-love ballads. "It was for a lady who worked here at our house; someone I saw everyday like family," he says. "She died suddenly of an accident this past spring, and it was really hard on me and all of us. This is the same track that we played at the funeral. It's a real pretty song, and a lot of people told me how much it made them feel better so I was very proud of it."

Other songs are also layered. "I Still Like Bologna" could have been just a belly laugh about an old sandwich, but in Alan's presentation it stands in for cherished traditions that predate cell phones. In the extraordinary "Nothing Left to Do," a couple passes the remote, has great sex, goes to great restaurants, drinks great rum, but cannot quite escape a hardy domestic boredom; the music, though, driven along slyly by the greatest country tension in the verses and the greatest country release in the honky-tonk choruses, builds a pure Nashville fire. "There's a lot of truth in it," chuckles Jackson. "It's comical."

When Alan talks about songwriting, the conversation turns as smart and relaxed as his songs. "Memories are some source of inspiration, but typically some of the better hooks come from when you are with a group of people and everybody is just talking a bunch of nonsense. Somebody will just phrase something differently. Something you have heard a hundred times, but the way they phrase it will sound like a song title. I have heard them in dialogue in movies or in a magazine ad or a billboard. And then some of them come clean out of thin air. Suddenly you are humming the melody and this hook just pops up. It's pretty strange.

"On 'Small Town Southern Man,' I didn't sit down to write a song about my family and my daddy and granddaddy, but I did pull from that stuff. But wherever you go, there are rural people—around outskirts of major cities and everywhere—that are working for a living and raising families. They all have the same qualities and same goals as a small town southern man."

"I guess I don't sit down and analyze it, or have a plan in advance. I knew we were getting ready to make an album, and I needed to come up with some songs. And then, there were a couple that came out on their own, like 'Sissy's Song.'"