“Ain’t Nothing ‘Bout You”
Brooks & Dunn
Written by Rivers Rutherford and Tom Shapiro
Radio & Records
#1 (5weeks)
April 27 – May 25, 2001
Billboard
#1 (6 weeks)
April 28 – June 2, 2001
A big thing in the 2000s was the back to basics comeback.
We’d see it in pop with Madonna, Green Day, and Mariah Carey, who made late career classic albums by revamping their classic formula for modern audiences. And we saw it in country later in the decade with resets from George Strait and Alan Jackson.
Brooks & Dunn were an early example of this superstar revival approach. Everything about “Ain’t Nothing About You” is explicitly designed to revamp the B&D sound for 2001 radio while reminding fans why they fell in love with them in the first place. So we get an aggressive, in your face take on “Brand New Man” that replaces that song’s wide-eyed rediscovery of innocence with a hardened and gritty determination to love a woman, obstacles be damned.
It achieves its intended purpose, delivering an urgency on record that we hadn’t heard from Brooks & Dunn since their early days. They’ve got something to prove again, and they pull it off with a solid record that sets up better singles to come from their comeback set.
“Ain’t Nothing ‘Bout You” gets a B+.
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It’s just ok to me. Maybe a “B-“. I am astonished that it spent 6 weeks at #1.
I always loved this one. It just explodes from the speakers and sounds like none of their other songs. It still has the usual B&D issue of Kix being nearly inaudible, but it’s such an exhilarating record to me because of its energy, distinctiveness, and overall declaration that B&D’s slump was over. They were back bigger and better than ever.
Of all of the early 2000s career resets, Brooks and Dunn’s was the most rewarding and comprehensive. They had hit a grand slam on their first at-bat with their 1991 debut but I thought they’d mostly been coasting on it for the rest of the 90s. Sure, there were a number of standouts in their middle-to-late 90s output but no pattern of continued excellence comparable to their debut. But in the aftermath of their lethargic “Tight Rope” effort, they got their swagger back in a way I didn’t see coming with “Steers and Stripes”. I didn’t know yet in early 2001 how consistent the album’s output would prove to be, but there was no question that the lead single was the highest-energy record they’d put out in quite a few years.
Kix and Ronnie were consistently candid about their behind-the-scenes squabbles on record choices. Ronnie said years earlier that he was a hard no at first about “My Maria” and would put up just as big of a fight in opposition to recording “Ain’t Nothing ‘Bout You”, thinking it was too pop. I always found that characterization a bit odd since I thought the song fit right into their wheelhouse, but he conceded at year’s end that his instinct was wrong when “Ain’t Nothing ‘Bout You” ranked as the #1 song of 2001 on Radio and Records. As you said, there were even better songs to come from “Steers and Stripes” and it sure was nice having the Brooks and Dunn I fell in love with back for the first time in nearly a decade.
Grade: B+
I loved Brooks & Dunn. They were one of my favorite country acts of the 90s and 00s.
However, when I look back on their catalog, this wasn’t a stand-out song for me. I don’t hate it, but compared to the high quality they normally put out, this was pretty mediocre.
I’d give it a B- or C+.