trace adkins i left something turned on at home

#TRACE ADKINS I LEFT SOMETHING TURNED ON AT HOME PROFESSIONAL#

(Actually, you can see a similar deep in Keith’s output around the same time before he switched from Mercury to Dreamworks.) However, Keith would soon find success as a swaggering, confrontational macho man, and Adkins and Capitol took notice. ‘I appreciate that.'” ⁠- Edward Morris, CMT, July 2001 ‘Thank you for having that perception that I’ve had all this success,’ he said with a grimace. “When a reporter referred to Adkins’ ‘success’ as a recording artist, he quickly dismissed the characterization. Regardless of the whys, Adkins was keenly aware that what he was doing wasn’t working: Looking back, it could be argued that Adkins did not do enough to distinguish himself from the pack: He did not, for example, make much use of his voice’s incredible range, and his releases were heavily skewed towards ballads and stuck to the standard lovin’ and leavin’ themes of the era. Although Adkins’s debut album Dreamin’ Out Loud was relatively successful (it produced three top five hits, including the #1 “(This Ain’t) No Thinkin’ Thing,” and his debut single “There’s A Girl In Texas” remains one of his most recognizable songs despite only reaching #20), he crashed back down to earth soon after takeoff, producing only a single top-ten hit (“The Rest Of Mine”) in the remainder of the decade. However, as we’ve discussed before, the late 1990s were a transitional period from the late 80s/early 90s neotraditional sound a poppier sound headlined by acts like Shania Twain and Faith Hill.

Despite this, however, Adkins’s singles over this period had a relatively consistent sound that fell neatly in line with the neotraditional movement. Within the label, however, change was a constant companion: The label went through three presidents from 1996 to 2001, and Adkins worked with three different producers (Scott Hendricks, Trey Bruce, Dan Huff) over his first four albums. On the surface, unlike many of the careers we’ve dug into, there was no label instability here: Adkins was a fixture on the Capitol roster until the label went “broke” in 2010. Phase One: The Conventional Country Singer (1996 – 2000)Ī lot had happened to Adkins by the time he signed with Capitol Records in the mid 1990s: A bulldozer accident, a severed finger, and most notably being shot through the heart by his second wife in 1994 during an argument over his drinking. In the end, maybe the question shouldn’t be “What happened to Trace Adkins?”, but “How the heck is Trace Adkins still here?”įrom a musical standpoint, Adkins’s career can be broken into three phases:

#TRACE ADKINS I LEFT SOMETHING TURNED ON AT HOME PROFESSIONAL#

If you claimed that the fall of Adkins’s career was self-inflicted, you wouldn’t get much of an argument either: Genre-benders like “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk” and bizarre novelty tunes like “Brown Chicken Brown Cow” stick out like sore thumbs in his discography, and his longstanding battle with alcoholism and the turbulence it caused in his personal and professional life can make his whole story read like a country song itself.

I’ve personally always blamed Toby Keith for the destruction of Adkins’s career, but you could also make an equally-compelling case that Keith saved Adkins from a lifetime of irrelevance. When he was on, however, there were few better in the business (heck, he put a song on my 2017 best-of list over twenty years after his career started), and there’s no question he left an impression in the minds of country fans of the 90s and 2000s, which led Kory to ask what had become of the not-so-gentle giant: Over the course of his career, he has demonstrated great talent, questionable decision-making, a rough-luck streak that rivals Randy Travis, and oftentimes all three at the same time. The musical legacy of Trace Adkins is, in a word, complicated.

Trace adkins i left something turned on at home