By comparison, the singles from I’m the Problem feel brittle, subdued, and sour. The lonesome guitar of the title track sounds pretty, but the story Wallen tells takes the “I know you are, but what am I?” conceit of last year’s Post Malone collab “I Had Some Help” to even saltier terrain. “I guess I’m the problem/And you’re Miss Never-Do-No-Wrong,” he sings wryly, revealing the title to be another of his smart aleck-y puns that feints at accountability like his last title track. (What first appeared to be a cliché about progress was a message to an ex who’d demanded he get sober: “I hate to tell you, girl, but I’m only quitting one thing at a time.”) On the other hand, there’s “Lies Lies Lies” and “Just in Case”: a whitewashed reboot of the concept of Willie Nelson’s “I Never Cared for You,” and a mid-tempo breakup ballad that borrows “Last Night”’s looping rhythms, minus the pop appeal. Together, they present an image of a man in a downward spiral, quieting his inner monologue by drinking himself to sleep. The courtroom sketch cover portrait does not seem incidental.
Listen to enough Wallen songs and you’ll start to tell the difference between the ones on which he’s listed among the writing credits and the ones handled by his trusted stable of co-writers (Charlie Handsome, Michael Hardy, Ernest Keith Smith, Ashley Gorley, Blake Pendergrass, and so on). The latter tend to cram their narratives chock-full with rustic detail: The drowsy “Revelation” aims for poetry, but feels like overload in its wordy depiction of a drunk motel sunrise. Wallen has a writing credit on its companion, “Genesis,” a bit of Dire Straits-esque heartland rock that meets the same themes of addiction and temptation head-on: “Swear it’s there in my blood/I was born to be lost,” he yowls, beating the original sin allegory to death, but winningly. Through this song, and the more compelling of the three dozen others, runs a streak of fatalism that defies the self-improvement gospel of our time and the moral imperatives of pop’s empowerment era. He is not listening and learning, setting boundaries, doing self-care; instead, he concludes, I am what I am. “When am I gonna learn?” he asks himself on “Genesis,” then shrugs: “I guess I prolly won’t.”
If there’s a through-line between Wallen and the second-biggest country singer in America, Zach Bryan, it’s the way alcoholism has always lingered at the margins—not the carefree drinking of Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” but something darker and more destined. Now Wallen’s crashing out in plain sight, crying to his ex that he’s made a huge mistake after another drunken, sleepless night on “Falling Apart.” He’s a co-writer on that one, as he is on “Kick Myself,” a cheesy rap-rock moment, though not without its pathos. He’s cleaned his act up, quit his vices, consulted medical and spiritual professionals, but remains miserable. “Kicked the shit that I used to use/But I just can’t kick myself,” he raps despondently, observing that since sobriety, life’s only gotten worse.