One Thing at a Time

"One Thing at a Time" is the title track and thesis of Wallen's sprawling 36-song album, and it plays like a shrug set to music. The production is mid-tempo modern country: acoustic guitar foundation, programmed and live drums layered together, an electric lead that stays in the background, everything polished but deliberately unhurried. Wallen sings it in a lazy, half-conversational drawl, letting phrases trail and consonants blur the way someone actually talks a few drinks in. The lyric is a catalog of vices — whiskey, cigarettes, a woman he can't quit — and the joke is structural: he's been told to quit them all, so he'll handle them one at a time, which means never. It's self-aware without being repentant, a man narrating his own stalling. In context it functions as the album's mission statement, an artist who had just weathered public disgrace declining to promise reform. Best played on a slow Sunday when you're avoiding something, windows open, nobody expecting anything of you, the kind of listening where you recognize yourself in the excuse and let it go.