Alan Jackson's 2008 CD, Good Time, photo courtesy of SonyBMG.
May 14, 2008 — Anyone who’s out for a good time with Alan Jackson needs to be aware: Anything they say may be used in the lines of a song.
Alan, who rather appropriately titled his latest album Good Time, has found that the time he spends with his friends provides some of the best creative sparks for his material.
"That’s usually when the best lines come," he told The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, "when you’re out with a bunch of friends and you have a couple of drinks and you’re just goofing off, and somebody will say something that’s a little different and it’ll jump out at you."
As a result, Alan makes notes on napkins and scraps of paper and then puts together lists of phrases and titles that he likes, and that process is what led to his recent hit "Small Town Southern Man." He had that title on his list, and when he needed to write songs for his album, that one jumped out at him.
"That song translates really well all over the country," he noted. "I’ve played everywhere you can imagine, and there’s that same atmosphere with small-town working people, even in the rural outskirts of major cities. Everywhere you go there are regular people just like where I grew up in Georgia."
You can bet there’ll be plenty of regular people in the audience when Alan plays the CMA Music Festival on Saturday, June 7. He’s part of the concert that night at Nashville’s NFL stadium, LP Field, along with Trace Adkins, Rodney Atkins, Kenny Rogers, Craig Morgan and Little Big Town.