Album Review: Trace Adkins – Cowboy’s Back In Town

It is the #1 selling country CD right now-50,000 sold in its first week. That is the way you start at a new label. Congratulations, Trace Adkins!

Luckyoldsun:

Like Brady pointed out, I was careful not to speak of Keith’s career nosedive because that’s obviously not true. But I’m not alone in feeling like the quality of his work, and especially the quality of his single choices, has suffered quite a bit ever since he took the reins of his own career and began fashioning himself a music magnate rather than just a singer-songwriter.

It might just be on the deluxe version, but there’s a hell of a version of “Between the Rainbows and the Rain” on this CD.

I know it’ll never happen, but I would love for Adkins to put an album of great, deep songs like that. He just kills those kind of songs.

But Toby tends to neglect the other artists on his label to the point where they just fade away. There’s big no attempt at promotion. Rushlow Harris and Scotty Emerick were a few good ones that amounted to nothing after a few singles.

The song-titles alone are a total cringe-fest. A bright neon sign outside a smorgasbord of Dumb Country. It’s like he’s decided “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk” (I felt stupid just typing that song title) was the template for future endeavors. He could do better than this crap.

As for TOby Keith, 9/11 was the best thing to ever happen to him. Before that, he seemed to jump on every trend to come along, in the hopes that one would stick.

You guys are all pretty comical. Yep I do agree Toby is not one of the best singers out there except on his ballads. His writing skills over the last couple years are not even note worthy. What a shame. But as far as Trace: He is a wonderful performer who puts his all into his songs on stage; more than Toby does. He sings his ballads better than Toby by far; but I do agree some of his choices for his new album were questionble but all in all I enjoy it. I have enjoyed all of Trace’s music; but I would love to see him get away from some of the corny stuff he does & focus on what he does best…sing real music…I am glad I bought the new album.

… proving that if you play it on the radio enough times, and appear on enough TV shows, people will buy CD’s of you farting into the mic.

I find it telling that Trace in a recent interview talked about how Blake Shelton putting out 6-packs every few months and Trace said something to the effect of “when i finish an album, i don’t want to have to do another one for 12-18 months” It just kind of shows that Trace isn’t really a musician, he’s a guy with a great voice who realized he could make money. I don’t recall Trace writing too many songs and it seems like he’s just recording albums because someone at the label tells him it’s time. I enjoy some of Trace’s songs, but you can tell that there’s nothing on any of his albums that goes together, he’s recording songs and when he gets to 10, calls it an album.

“Very revealing?” All it reveals is that when Adkins finishes an album, he doesn’t want to have to do another one for 12-18 months. Which ain’t much, and certainly says nothing about whether he’s a musician (which – hello! – he obviously is, being a country music star and all) or whether music’s just a job to him or anything else along those lines. Sheesh.

The only song that I like off this album is on the Deluxe Edition it is called: “Happy Man”. He needs to do more songs like that. Instead of songs like: “Hell, I Can Do That”, or Brown, Chicken Brown Cow”, or Hold my Beer. Stuff like that, to me, in my opinion, isn’t real country music. Stuff like: “Happy Man” and “This Ain’t No Thinking Thing”, and “Untamed” is REAL country music. I think Trace is a great artist, but just needs to release great songs like: “Happy Man”, “This Ain’t No Thinking Thing” and he would be alright.