Soon his music was streaming again, and “Dangerous” became one of the best-selling albums of 2021, certified for four million sales in the United States. Late in 2021, Wallen was featured on a hip-hop single by the rapper Lil Durk, “Broadway Girls,” singing about the temptresses of Nashville’s Lower Broadway honky-tonks.
In 2022, Wallen toured arenas, and the Academy of Country Music gave “Dangerous” its award as album of the year. His combination of proud rural roots and well-calibrated arena country was unstoppable.
So why change what worked? On “One Thing at a Time,” a modern Nashville product with many contributors, Wallen largely collaborates with and draws on songwriters who have supplied him before. He also retains the producer, Joey Moi, who has been with him since his debut album. The songwriting teams with and behind Wallen return to familiar motifs: barroom neon (“Neon Star”), the red letters of the Bible (“I Wrote the Book”), the 865 area code of eastern Tennessee (“Tennessee Numbers”) and specifying just what qualifies as “country” (“Ain’t That Some”).
There’s ample skill on display on the new album. Old-school country-music wordplay is at the core of songs like “Days That End in Why” and “You Proof,” both about trying to drink away regrets, and “Wine Into Water,” a ballad that has its narrator proffering some Napa cabernet after a fight, hoping to turn “this wine into water under the bridge.” In “Keith Whitley,” song titles from the country singer who died in 1989 are woven into a whiskey-soaked plaint about lost love. And in “Everything I Love,” set to a clip-clop beat that harks back to Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings, Wallen shrewdly presents all of his country bona fides while denouncing the ex he showed them to; she was from a “high-rise town” and now “I can’t take my Silverado down them roads we used to ride.”
Moi, who previously produced Nickelback, makes every track gleam, using overarching pedal steel guitar and Wallen’s proud Tennessee drawl to mark the music as country while cannily drawing on Eagles, Tom Petty, the arena marches of U2 and even hip-hop. The ticking, twitchy drum-machine sounds of trap and R&B and the cadences of melodic rap show up in songs like “Sunrise” and “180 (Lifestyle),” which credits its hook to the 2014 hip-hop hit “Lifestyle” by Rich Gang featuring Young Thug and Rich Homie Quan, while its lyrics refer back to “Broadway Girls.”
Jon Pareles
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