Review: Aaron Allen, Highway Mile

There’s a sweetness that runs through Aaron Allen’s Highway Mile – a near boy-band level of tenderness and wide-eyed devotion. Allen’s storytelling is in service of life’s simple pleasures – faith, home, family, a loving partner and a sense of stability. 

His tenth release, Highway Mile can lean toward the saccharine; it’s hard not to crave some grit or humour, something beyond the heart-on-sleeve odes to domestic bliss, and the work it takes to get there, that Allen makes his name on. Allen’s vision of country is about the calm after the storm, the arrival after a long voyage – his songs are brief missives of thankfulness and overcoming. 

Highway Mile is an EP of comfort food, a gentle and big-hearted collection of songs that makes do with country-radio’s preferred palette of tradition meets new-fangled sheen. It’s a pleasant, if rather faceless, listen – with so few narrative details of what exactly Allen’s overcome, it’s hard to feel any significant emotional connection to his journey. 

The stakes feel low, or non-existent – songs by a happy man about becoming and remaining happy. Still, Allen’s appeal is understandable – in a time defined by upheaval and uncertainty, there’s a strange comfort in hearing someone figure it out. 

Highway Mile was released April 3, 2020.
Listen to it here