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After 20 years of writing and recording hit after hit, country music has become synonymous with Alan Jackson. The superstar has sold over 50 million albums and has claimed nearly 100 industry awards - including three CMA Entertainer of the Year Awards. Freight Train, Jackson's 18th album was produced by longtime collaborator Keith Stegall and features 12 brand new songs, one of which is Jackson's hot new single, "It's Just That Way." Eight of the album's dozen tracks bear Jackson's songwriting credit, including one he penned with Roger Murrah, with whom he wrote one of his biggest hits, "Don't Rock the Jukebox." In a moving tribute to the legendary Vern Gosdin, who passed away last year and for whom Jackson has long expressed admiration, Jackson enlisted Lee Ann Womack to record "Till the End," Gosdin's 1977 classic duet with Janie Fricke.

Review: Alan Jackson in comfort zone on new CD

By MICHAEL McCALL, For The Associated Press
Monday, March 29, 2010
Alan Jackson, "Freight Train" (Arista Nashville)

On the twentieth anniversary of his debut album, Alan Jackson continues to prove consistency need not equal complacency. After a few years of challenging himself with side roads that explored traditional gospel, adult-contemporary love songs, and a wide-ranging collection of songs he wrote by himself, Jackson settles back into his comfort zone on "Freight Train."
The 12 songs mostly find him in a laid-back groove befitting the 51-year-old's laconic style. "Freight Train" delivers wise lyrics about love, family, loss and familiar comforts set to down-home melodies that lope along with natural ease. Everything seems so casually offhand that it's almost easy to miss the wisdom of the lyrics and the catchiness of the melodies.
Like influences Merle Haggard or Don Williams, Jackson so wholly embodies his musical persona that, when he's in the zone like this, there's no strain or filter between who he is and what he sings. As universal as the songs "After 17" and "The Best Keeps Getting Better" may be, it's also clear he's drawing on real-life observations about his daughters and his wife.
That way of presenting a lived-in talent without any artifice is why Jackson ranks with the best singer-songwriters of his generation — and why "Freight Train" proves he's still chugging, powerfully and gracefully, on down the line.
CHECK THIS TRACK OUT: The title song, written by Fred Eaglesmith, is a hard-rolling acoustic boogie tune that gives the singer and his expert studio band a chance to fire up some locomotive power.