Doin' My Thing

Luke Bryan is a hearty, affable Georgia boy and his sophomore album, Doin’ My Thing, is the ideal encapsulation of his personality. This is straight-ahead, feel-good country music, as built for long drives and Saturday night dances as it is for the radio. Bryan has an easy time with relationship songs like “Do I,” “Apologize” and “I Did It Again,” but his real specialty is reinforcing visions of the small-town life he grew up with in Leesburg, Georgia. His passions and routines are recounted in “Doin’ My Thing,” “Welcome to the Farm” and “Drinkin’ Beer and Wastin’ Bullets,” but the song that best sums him up is “What Country Is”: “It ain't a John Deere cap that's never fell in the cotton / It's a Jimmy Rodgers song that was long forgotten / It's homemade peach ice cream on sunburnt lips / That's what country is.”