What Makes You Country [LP]

On his sixth album, Bryan wants to bring us together. “Let me hit you with some hometown truth,” he sings in the album’s title track, before sketching a series of country cliches—cowboys, ploughboys, kids running through Georgia pines—linked by their Southern roots. “We’re all a little different, but we’re all the same/Everybody doin’ their own thing.” Through philosophical musings on faith and fatherhood (“Most People Are Good,” “Pick It Up”) he bids listeners—and, notably, his sons—to be open-minded: “I believe you love who you love/Ain’t nothin’ you should ever be ashamed of.”