Songs About Me

1	Songs About Me 3:24
2	Arlington 4:07
3	Find Me a Preacher 3:43
4	My Way Back 3:51
5	I Wish It Was You 4:07
6	Bring It On 3:42
7	My Heaven 3:25
8	Baby I'm Home 3:58
9	Metropolis 3:20
10	I Learned How to Love from You 3:05
11	Honky Tonk Badonkadonk 4:01

Barnes & Noble

In the midst of the title track's aggressive southern rock, Trace Adkins describes his music as "country...mixed with a little rock and a little blues," a right-on summation of his sound on this disc. These songs may not be exactly, precisely, indisputably about Adkins, but their themes inspire uniformly thoughtful, deeply emotional performances, and his muscular baritone has never been so effectively employed over the course of an album. With a potent band behind him (its members include Aubrey Haynie on fiddle and Bryan Sutton on guitar), Adkins confidently steers his way through a couple of touching ballads and some raucous workouts centered on themes of love, family, friendship, sacrifice, and the old in-out. Haynie sets the stage with an evocative fiddle intro on the meditative "Arlington," as the singer delivers a measured, proud testimony told from the point of a view of a fallen soldier being laid to rest a "thousand stones away" from his granddad in the field of honor. "My Way Back Home" fuses country with a touch of R&B and adds a searing '80s-style rock guitar solo in buttressing a story about never forgetting "where I'm from." Offering himself up as a safe haven for a troubled, lonely soul in "Bring It On," Adkins matches the band's white heat with a gritty, bluesy vocal that more than holds its own against the pounding drums and wailing guitar lines driving the whole thing home. Toss in a couple of juicy, overtly salacious odes to the joys of the flesh (the country blues-based "Baby I'm Home" and the intentionally silly dancehall barnburner, "Honky Tonk Badonkadonk"), and Songs About Me sounds like it's about us too -- very human, in a phrase. David McGee

All Music Guide

It's not entirely a coincidence that Trace Adkins sounds like a streamlined Toby Keith on his sixth album, Songs About Me, since Keith was the biggest country star of the 2000s, or at least the biggest star who shares Adkins' low, deep voice and taste for traditional country. But it's not entirely fair to peg Adkins as a Keith wannabe, either, since Trace has been around as long as Toby, and has mined a similar neo-traditionalist vein for just as long. Still, Songs About Me has the self-conscious air of a Nashville studio product, one that's tailored to a specific sensibility and sound -- one that's not far removed from either Adkins' previous work or Keith's current music, but still feels like it was made with the rough, ready, red-state mentality of the mid-2000s in mind. This sober professionalism has its drawbacks -- everything from the production to the lyrics is a little too studied, and it can't help but pale in comparison to Keith's bawdy, robust redneck anthems -- but it also has its advantages, particularly because Adkins is an assured, professional singer who can sell this material even when it's at its most generic. That he can't quite make it transcend the generic is nothing to fault him for -- if he had better songs, a livelier setting, or a looser production, he might have been able to make this take off -- and even if Songs About Me isn't much more than a solid piece of craftsmanship, it's quite enjoyable at that level. Stephen Thomas Erlewine