Alan Jackson Too many hits, too little time

August 17, 2012 at 12:00a.m.

By Randy Lewis

Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES

Alan Jackson has his own version of the 1 percent vs. 99 percent problem, and he has to contend with it every night he’s on tour.

“The problem with me is I’ve had 60-something singles,” said the lanky country singer and songwriter in a recent phone interview from his home outside Nashville. Jackson, 53, was gearing up for a West Coast swing. “It’s gotten to be that there are so many songs and there’s always something some of the people really want to hear and we can’t always play everything. It always ends up I leave something out that somebody wanted to hear, and I feel bad.”

It’s a problem that maybe 1 percent of working musicians face — perhaps more like one-tenth of 1 percent — and a problem most would give their eye teeth to have. In fact, Jackson has charted closer to 70 singles over more than two decades, about 50 of those having reached the Top 10. He easily could string together a generous concert set of two dozen songs if he only included his No. 1 hits, dating back to his first, “I’d Love You All Over Again” in 1991, through his latest, “As She’s Walking Away” in 2010, on which he duetted with the Zac Brown Band.

And then there’s songs off his latest album, “Thirty Miles West.”

“I do a couple,” he said. “I do [the recent single] ’So You Don’t Have to Love Me Anymore,’ and sometimes we do ‘Dixie Highway,’” a collaboration with Zac Brown that’s on the album. “But if I replace one of the hits with something they haven’t heard, sometimes that doesn’t work as well. I hardly have time to mix it up much. I make my set list up every night right before the show, and it depends on where I’m playing, what I feel like, and I do like to change it up somewhat.”