Two decades into his recording career, Jason Aldean has little to prove. The country superstar has notched No. 1 hits, won major awards, and toured the globe since debuting with his self-titled album in 2005, and he remains one of the genre’s biggest live acts. In the process, the Georgia-born singer-songwriter has crafted and honed a sound that would come to be imitated by younger artists, one steeped in Southern music of all genres but informed by a love for traditional rural living. On his 12th studio album, Aldean takes stock of how far he’s come. While there are still boozy anthems for “My Kinda Party” fans—“Country into Rock ’n’ Roll” is a standout of that bunch—Aldean often treads more serious territory, like on “Backroads of My Memory,” a kind of spiritual inverse to his 2011 smash “Dirt Road Anthem” that finds him in a reflective place. An emotional high point is “Help You Remember,” a painfully raw account of watching a loved one succumb to a memory disorder and a song that inspired Aldean to collaborate with the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America. Aldean brings a few friends on board for Songs About Us, too, tapping longtime pal and collaborator Luke Bryan for the title track and cult-favorite Nashville singer-songwriter David Lee Murphy on Murphy’s own 1994 cut “Dust on the Bottle.” Aldean’s final guest is also his most personal, as his wife Brittany Aldean joins him on the sultry breakup duet “Easier Gone.” Below, Aldean shares insight into these standout tracks. “Songs About Us” (feat. Luke Bryan) “It’s a little old-school-sounding. The first person I thought of was was Luke, you know, with us being from the same part of the world and coming up in this business together, making music and stuff. It wasn’t written as a collab, but it was one of those things that the more we talked about it, it’s like, ‘Man, this could be a really cool moment on the record.’ Also, Luke and I are always looking for a reason to do something together anyway.” “Backroads of My Memory” “It tells a story about me packing up my little truck and moving to Nashville and not knowing what the hell I was doing when I was going to get here. And just what that’s been like, looking back over the last 30 years, and how it’s gone since then. I think there’s songs like that on the album that touch on a lot of different phases of my life, my career, and things that have happened over the years.” “Dust on the Bottle” (feat. David Lee Murphy) “I met David Lee Murphy probably somewhere around ’96 or ’97. ‘Dust on the Bottle’ came out around then, and I was playing that in party crowds and all that stuff. I was playing in the bars back in the day. And then we entered this Battle of the Bands contest down in Georgia, and we won and we got to open for Diamond Rio, David Lee Murphy, and Johnny Paycheck the next day at this on-the-beach show down in Savannah. So, we get there and we’re in our van and trailer and we’re unloading our gear, and I turn around and this guy is standing there helping us move gear, and it was David Lee Murphy. He’s been one of those guys that’s just always been a part of my career over the years in some capacity. To this day, I think he’s one of the coolest guys in this town.” “Easier Gone” (feat. Brittany Aldean) “Britt, she’s a really good singer. She came off American Idol. She did that years ago. She sings all the time in the house, in the car, loves music. I always had it in the back of my mind, like, ‘Man, if the right thing comes along, it’d be cool to really get her in the studio and let her do that. She’s never really gone in the studio or had the chance to do anything like that.’ And she crushed it.” “Help You Remember” “There’s a lot of people that deal with that stuff, whether it be dementia or Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s or whatever the case may be. My big thing was like, ‘Hey, let’s use this to help raise awareness for it, too, and partner with the Alzheimer’s Foundation and make this thing a special kind of moment, not just for the record, but post-record, too. I think it was more of a therapeutic thing for us than anything, just to get that thought out and get it on paper and create something that was for them, for our family members.”