Out of his comfort zone

THE main compound at Alan Jackson’s sprawling 140-acre estate amid rolling farmland here several miles outside Nashville consists of four structures: a two-story plantation-style mansion; an immaculate, white 12-car garage that houses his collection of vintage cars (and one Husky Taildragger two-seater airplane); smaller, but still impossible to miss at opposite edges of the gravel courtyard between the house and garage, are a wooden treehouse and swing set worthy of the Swiss Family Robinson, and a storybook playhouse, the latter two built for his daughters, Mattie, Ali and Dani.

On a recent late-summer morning, the swings hung motionless, the dollhouse vacant. “They’ve about outgrown those now,” the lanky, blond-haired and mustached country singer and songwriter said with his gentle Georgia drawl. Mattie’s 16 now, Ali is 13 and Dani is 9; for the most part, they’re not much interested in treehouses and swing sets anymore.

“The little one, every now and then she’ll go in that playhouse,” he says. “But the rest of ‘em, they’ve got golf carts they ride around. We’ve got basketball and tennis courts.” There’s also a large pond out back that’s stocked with fish, although his girls don’t do much fishing either. A delicate gazebo sits on an island in the middle.

“It’s like Disneyland out here,” he says with a chuckle.

Disneyland, perhaps; not Neverland.

The empty swings give Jackson a vivid daily reminder of the passage of time, a theme that looms prominently in his new album, “Like Red on a Rose.”

The song set is a marked departure for the man known as much in country circles for upbeat honky-tonk hits such as “Don’t Rock the Jukebox” and “Chattahoochee” as he is outside the country mainstream for his breakthrough 9/11 anthem, “Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning).”

The new album’s songs were brought to him by bluegrass singer and fiddler Alison Krauss, whom he sought out to produce it. Most deal honestly but gracefully with aging and the impact on life and love, particularly in a youth-obsessed culture, as Jackson does in “The Firefly’s Song,” which longtime Krauss associate Robert Lee Castleman wrote for the album:

I used to run in a young man’s boots

With a young man’s heart and a young man’s roots

But now I stand where a young man stood before

I don’t run like I used to

This old man don’t run no more

“I’m sure he’s at the same place I’m at in my life,” says Jackson, 47, dressed weekday casual in a pinstriped Oxford shirt rolled up midforearm, blue shorts, loafers and white socks. In place of the white Stetson that usually tops those blond locks when he appears in public, he’s wearing a weathered baseball cap with an embroidered marlin.

“I never try to hide the fact of how old I am or try to appear any younger than I am,” he says. “I never try to do songs I think are going to appeal to a younger audience. I do what I like, and if they like it, great. But I know that when I was a young man, when I was 20 years old, I loved George Jones. I knew girls that did too at that age. So it’s not about your age. It’s more the music. I’m very comfortable where I’m at, and that’s one reason I wanted to do an album like this.”

Another Castleman song, “Where Do I Go From Here (A Trucker’s Song),” unexpectedly alternates verses of Stephen Foster’s “Oh Susanna” with original stanzas in a folksy ballad posing grown-up questions about one’s direction and priorities in life.

Like all the material chosen for the album, the song was Krauss’ idea. “She played that one for me, and I thought she’d lost her mind,” Jackson says with a laugh. “It took me awhile listening to the lyrics to understand the parallels.”

When Jackson originally approached Krauss after last fall’s Country Music Assn. Awards show, he asked if she’d like to work together on a bluegrass album. He’d long thought about recording one, and who better to produce than the 20-time Grammy-winning darling of bluegrass music?

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Making a statement

THE man who’s racked up 22 No. 1 country singles -- more than Willie Nelson, Garth Brooks, Brooks & Dunn and all but 10 singers in country history -- had been feeling the urge to try something different.

He told his longtime producer Keith Stegall that the next time he went into the studio, “maybe we need to do something a little more, I don’t know, mature, more reflective of my age, more moody, instead of just ‘Here comes another Alan Jackson album.’

“It’s weird how Alison had kind of the same idea. I guess hers were just a little more extreme than mine.”

Krauss, in an interview for a DVD that will accompany the CD, said she wanted “to make a record about a man who is reflecting on his life from a very peaceful place, a man who’s pleased with what’s gone on so far.”

Some of the songs she brought to Jackson she commissioned for the album -- including “The Firefly’s Song” and Sidney Cox’s exquisitely to-the-point love song “Had It Not Been You” -- when she felt a particular sentiment or viewpoint hadn’t been squarely addressed.

The album maintains a consistently introspective lyrical perspective, mirrored in soulful musical settings more attuned to electric piano and moody organ lines than twanging electric guitars and snapping two-step rhythms. “No party songs,” is how Jackson puts it. It’s a musical space miles removed from the splashing good times on Georgia’s Chattahoochee River that he celebrated in one of his biggest and sunniest hits.

“This has allowed him to recharge his batteries and do something different creatively,” says Joe Galante, chairman of the RCA Label Group/Nashville. “And Alison did a great job to bring him to different places musically, especially with the sexiness and intimacy in his vocals.”

Krauss too came away impressed. “I’ve compared working on this to what I felt as a teenager, when music was all that you thought about. It was a magical time for me.”

But making a stylistic change is not without risks for Jackson, Galante says. “It’s not the kind of thing you can map out by the numbers and predict the results. But I think people who have an image of Alan as a certain kind of singer and songwriter will be surprised at this record and the texture of it. I love the record, it’s so romantic, and it’s such an intimate record.... But it’s kind of a shot in the dark.”

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Country comforts

PRESSING his rangy frame into the cushions of one of the stuffed leather chairs in front of a desk made from the chopped grille of a 1966 Ford pickup, Jackson is surrounded in his garage-office by automotive, music and sportsman memorabilia that gives the place the air of a low-key museum -- a ‘60s Stingray bike with a stick gearshift, a statue of Jack Daniel, a working neon rainbow beaming those two words celebrated in his 1990 hit “Chasin’ That Neon Rainbow.”

Next to that hangs an enlarged, framed photo that shows him and his wife, Denise, in 1979, while they were still dating, in his 1955 T-Bird convertible. That was the first car he ever owned -- he saved up $3,200 and bought it in 1973, when he was 15, then worked for years with the help of his father fixing it up. It’s still the prize of a collection that also includes a 1964 Aston Martin DB5 just like the one James Bond drove in “Goldfinger” and a 1928 Stutz Blackhawk Boattail Speedster. “All those others are just cars,” he says, except for the T-Bird, which he says “was my life for a long time.” That explains the loving tenacity his wife exhibited when she tracked it down and bought it back more than a dozen years after Jackson had sold it. Behind him on two walls are mounted a half-dozen marlin he reeled in himself on fishing trips.

Here he’s in his comfort zone, something he steps out of on “Like Red on a Rose.” Besides the consistently pensive tone, it’s his first album with a producer other than Stegall, with whom he’s created a 16-year string of hits and sold more than 33 million albums in the U.S. since 1991, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

Although he’s charted many ballads, most have been love songs, until 2001, when he found himself, like so many Americans, haunted by the events of Sept. 11, awake in the middle of the night and not knowing how to process his feelings.

That led him to write “Where Were You,” one of the most widely played songs dealing with the terrorist attacks and their impact on the world. The song was the first time Jackson had dealt directly in song with a topical issue, and it brought a deeper level of emotion to his songwriting.

He expected it to remain in the public’s consciousness for a few months, maybe a year, then recede into the background. Yet five years later, he says he still gets requests for it at his concerts.

“I can see people out there and I can tell they’re waiting for that one,” he says. “They’re not our normal show-goers and record-buyers. And the crowd just loves that song. ... I think it is, yes, a song about 9/11, but I also think it’s a song about what it says -- about faith, hope and love -- and that’s part of life no matter what kind of tragedy the song was written about.”

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randy.lewis@latimes.com