Real Friends

Chris Janson likes to party as much as the next young male country star, but his idea of a good time is a little different. Instead of footloose flirtation made for spring break bashes, he caters to working folks impatient to kick back. His third album, Real Friends (the first that he's coproduced in addition to cowriting), makes clear that he’s learned as much about getting rowdy from the swaggering, swinging hard country of late 1970s and '80s Hank Williams Jr. as he has from his contemporaries. In the boisterous, bragging number “Say About Me,” Janson even does some Hank Jr.-style mythologizing. Elsewhere, he makes jocular toasts to humble pleasures (“Normal People”), blue-collar camaraderie (the Blake Shelton-assisted title track), and clocking out (“Waitin’ on 5”), and even spins his future passing into a reason for a tropical getaway (“Hawaii on Me”).