Alan Jackson’s cover of Merle Haggard’s “The Way I Am” is really excellent. That’s a mood that only country can evoke, and when it does, hot damn, it really does.

Country at its best is not an exercise in nostalgia but rather about yearning for something that you cannot have, or once had and irrevocably lost — that is not only lost but still is so close that it caresses your face with a breath of wind in the middle of the darkest nights. It’s the only musical genre that deals in tragedy and regret and loss credibly and with depth.

In that song you can hear the person that Jackson’s character almost was, wishes he were but is not, feels that he could’ve been if he’d just had a little more of…something. But he didn’t and that’s his fate.

And that mandolin playing is really great. My favorite of any song with mandolin.