Though he’s sold millions of albums, Rodney Atkins has endured some lag time between releases since signing to Curb Records back in the late ’90s. As a result, his image has become somewhat defined over time by his singles. This has been great for building a fan base, whose support has kept his batting average high for hit singles. But the flip side of this success is the tendency to get pigeonholed by the songs’ subject matter.

Atkins set out to change all that, with help initially from “Take a Back Road,” the first single and title cut from his fourth album, released Oct. 4. Written by Rhett Akins and Luke Laird, it’s a free-spirited tune about changing the scenery of your life. Though a bit of a departure from the subject matter addressed in some of his previous singles, it has struck a chord with fans, who made it the fastest-rising song of his career, averaging sales of around 40,000 copies a week after its August release.

“‘Take a Back Road’ is one of those songs that the first time I heard it, I thought, ‘Boy, that feels good,’” Atkins said. “It’s pretty catchy, something you want to just crank up. But then the more you hear it, you realize it’s not just a ditty. It’s about life. If you want it to be just summer ear candy, it can be that. But it’s also about getting right with your soul.”

The first single set the stage for the changes Atkins is pursuing in his music as well as his presentation. “I wanted this album to be different, and it is in that it’s got more edge on it,” he said. “It’s got a lot more dive-bombs. It’s a smaller band this time, which is why songs like ‘Back Road’ feel like they’re right in your face and not affected. And it’s a more soulful album. My last album, It’s America, didn’t talk enough about the real world. It lost some grit for me.”

For Atkins, a naturally shy, quiet, deep thinker who comes alive the moment he steps onstage, the challenge now is how to bring the grittier, real-world essence of his new songs to life. “The biggest thing in trying to do this is, first of all, to be authentic,” said his manager, Greg Hill, President, McGhee Entertainment Nashville. “That’s the most important thing for any artist. With that, nobody is one-dimensional. So how do you show other sides of an artist while still making people realize it’s authentic and real? For us, it’s also been about how do you let people see you evolving without totally disenfranchising your fan base. One of the most important things that come across any time you grow as an artist and evolve is maintaining a connection with your core, but also how do you grow that core? And part of how you grow that core is to let people see more sides of you.”

In Atkins’ case specifically, Hill acknowledged that “we live in a world where people think of Rodney as a Country guy. But he’s not just that. He grew up listening to Led Zeppelin and Lynyrd Skynyrd as much as Merle Haggard and Charlie Daniels. We’re trying to play off of what people see live. It’s the energy, the aggression. Rodney jokes that he lets his shadow come out and play onstage. How do we get that across in music? How do you do the unexpected that’s still Rodney, the Rodney I know, that his friends know? Sometimes that’s about approaching it differently.”

“Evolving as an artist, I think that’s just a part of life,” Atkins reflected. “I don’t know if it has as much to do with being an artist as your life just changes. The way I have always tried to approach pretty much anything I’ve ever done is, I love to read up on people and watch people and how they become successful in what they do. You never have a chance if you don’t take a chance. I’ve been told the reasons things won’t work way more than why they will work. That goes back to Little League. My team was in last place. We wound up switching coaches, and the new coach was this coal miner that would show up in his pickup covered in coal dust and pick us up in the back of his pickup. He spent the time focusing on teaching us not only baseball and the little nuances that matter on the field, but also to not be afraid. He always talked about the three D’s: drive, discipline, and determination. I learned a lot from him.”

Those lessons guided Atkins as he worked on Take a Back Road. He recorded several love songs for the album, including “Cabin in the Woods” (Jim Collins and David Lee Murphy), something he’d never done previously. And he took some chances on the marketing side, doing some unusual promotional photos and even appearing for the first time in a while without his signature baseball cap. Hill explains this all as being part of a campaign to present Atkins as a “broader person.”

“We want to let people keep seeing who he is, which is engaging, intelligent, funny and talented,” he continued. “We want to let people see how much time he takes in mixes. He’s very engaged in the creative process. There’s an artistic side to him that I don’t think people have seen yet. For Rodney, it’s not about being a star. He loves to make music. He’s an artist. He loves to have his music connect with people. And to get his perspective and his personality across is the point of all this.”

During one downtown shoot, for example, Atkins traded in his usual T-shirt, jeans and cap to show a different side, even crouching in a fountain with water spraying all over him. “If you’re a relatively normal human being, particularly a male, you don’t like having your picture taken,” Hill noted. “It’s going to make you feel uncomfortable, so we had to push Rodney outside of his comfort zone on that. It was important to get the sides that we know about him, that he’ll do for us when the camera isn’t around. If you only do photo shoots every two years on an album cycle, a change is going to be perceived as more shocking than if you are around it every day.”

“I almost didn’t want to do it because of the suit,” Atkins recalled. “They had me sitting in a fountain pond. It’s the most unnatural thing for a guy to be on the other side of the camera. If you see the Christmas pictures at our house, I’m probably in very few of them because I’m the one taking them. That’s normal. But Greg laid out pics one time of red carpets and then of me playing live. He said, ‘Did you see the look on your face at the red carpets? OK, now look at your face when you’re playing live.’ It was drastically different, so you’ve got to figure out how to deal with that stuff.”

It’s especially challenging to evolve the image of a particularly cerebral artist in a 10-second sound-bite world. “We’re not at the next level of where Rodney deserves to go,” Hill admitted. “We jokingly call Rodney a flyover artist, not unlike Tim (McGraw) or Kenny (Chesney), who Nashville for so long didn’t understand how they were connecting with Middle America. People in New York and L.A. understand the flashy cool, but they don’t realize that here’s a guy who’s connecting with people in the heartland and singing their anthems.

“We’re trying to focus on quality over quantity with media this time,” he continued. “In our format, you want to talk to everybody, so it’s ‘here I go with a 10-minute phoner.’ For us to get the message out, sometimes you need longer. That goes with the evolution of showing other sides of an artist. Everything we’re focusing on with this record, from the music to the images to the interviews, has been ‘let’s do the unexpected.’

For example, rather than have lyrics or little snippets from each song on this album, Rodney wrote a page on the process of making this record — what he thought, how he felt, not specifically to the songs but on the overall body of the work, to let people a little bit inside of his world and into his thought process. People want to relate to artists. It humanizes both the artist and the listener. And there’s a realness when people look at Rodney. They want to connect the song with the music with the image.”

But no matter how he adjusts his image or amps up his music, for Atkins it will always be about connecting with his fans. “I’m just low-key,” he said. “I get excited onstage, but if I walked in here being like that I’d feel like I was being fake. You just be yourself in the moment. I’m very much a thinker. Now you call it ADD, but I’m hyper-focused. I was that way even when I was little. I drive my wife crazy because she says I never talk. But I do, I just try to process things.

“If I didn’t have the outlet of playing live, I’d be frustrated a lot,” he added. “Music was definitely my savior. It’s a way of saying things that hopefully, because it’s in the form of music, it’ll stay around awhile. You have to take risks if you’re going to compete. Michael Jordan said, ‘I didn’t come here to be average.’ I love the challenge of being inside a song, writing a song, having a song that gets people excited about the music. It’s about finding those kinds of songs and fitting them into the landscape of Country Music. I’m very proud to sing Country Music, but the ultimate goal is finding what sets you apart.”

By Lorie Hollabaugh

Used by Permission, © 2011 CMA Close Up® News Service / Country Music Association®, Inc.