Jason Aldean Vows to Keep Making Full-Length Albums: ‘I Know Things Are Changing’

As Jason Aldean prepares to release his ninth studio album, appropriately called 9, he has seen plenty of changes in the music industry over the past 14 years, ever since his self-titled debut came out in 2005. One of those changes is artists choosing to release EPs, or sometimes even just singles, instead of full projects – a trend Aldean says he will never get behind.

“I like making full-length albums,” Aldean shared with PopCulture.com and other media. “I know things are changing as far as that goes and album sales are not what they used to be for anybody. It’s all kind of going to streaming now and more singles driven, I guess, a little bit. It’s just not the way I like to make records. I’m still a fan of full-length albums, and I feel like it’s hard to get a vibe from an artist if you’re only hearing five, six songs from them. It’s hard for me to narrow it down to 16 songs, much less 5 or 6, whatever it is these days.

“I want to make records for as long as I can make them,” he continued. “If it just gets to a point where it’s just not the way things are going anymore, then we’ll reassess it, but I still enjoy that process and creating music. If people are going to go buy an album, I want it to be worth their while. It’s going to have a lot of songs on it. I’m going to do that until I get told I can’t.”

Not only will Aldean keep making records, but he will continue to cram as many songs on each one as he can, with 9 boasting 16 tracks.

“If you go back and look at the last couple of albums, we put 15 songs on each record,” said the singer. “On this one there’s 16 because I didn’t want to cut it to 15. We had 16 songs that I wanted to cut, so we ended up adding the extra one on there.”

Aldean chose not to write any songs on 9, but he, along with his longtime producer, Michael Knox, combed through hundreds of songs to find the ones he wanted on 9.

“The process of finding them is the same as it’s always been,” Aldean said. “He and I try to find them. We get together, go through them and try to pick out what we think is the best 16 songs and try to make a complete record. You want to have some tempos and some ballads, some mids and not heavy it be too heavy one way or the other so that plays into it a little bit, too. “

Order 9 at JasonAldean.com.

Photo Credit: Getty / Mat Hayward