#TRACE ADKINS 2020 PROFESSIONAL#

On the surface, unlike many of the careers we’ve dug into, there was no label instability here: Adkins was a fixture on the Capitol roster until the label went “broke” in 2010. Phase One: The Conventional Country Singer (1996 – 2000)Ī lot had happened to Adkins by the time he signed with Capitol Records in the mid 1990s: A bulldozer accident, a severed finger, and most notably being shot through the heart by his second wife in 1994 during an argument over his drinking. In the end, maybe the question shouldn’t be “What happened to Trace Adkins?”, but “How the heck is Trace Adkins still here?”įrom a musical standpoint, Adkins’s career can be broken into three phases:

#TRACE ADKINS 2020 PROFESSIONAL#

If you claimed that the fall of Adkins’s career was self-inflicted, you wouldn’t get much of an argument either: Genre-benders like “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk” and bizarre novelty tunes like “Brown Chicken Brown Cow” stick out like sore thumbs in his discography, and his longstanding battle with alcoholism and the turbulence it caused in his personal and professional life can make his whole story read like a country song itself. I’ve personally always blamed Toby Keith for the destruction of Adkins’s career, but you could also make an equally-compelling case that Keith saved Adkins from a lifetime of irrelevance. When he was on, however, there were few better in the business (heck, he put a song on my 2017 best-of list over twenty years after his career started), and there’s no question he left an impression in the minds of country fans of the 90s and 2000s, which led Kory to ask what had become of the not-so-gentle giant: Over the course of his career, he has demonstrated great talent, questionable decision-making, a rough-luck streak that rivals Randy Travis, and oftentimes all three at the same time. The musical legacy of Trace Adkins is, in a word, complicated.

Trace adkins 2020