Many, many moons ago, I got a promo of Marty Stuart’s newest album at the time, This One’s Gonna Hurt You. With titles like “Me & Hank & Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” I could tell that for a country guy, Stuart probably liked to rock.

So I put the album on and for approximately one album, I became a huge Marty Stuart fan. I kind of lost track of Stuart after that, although I always kept an eye and ear trained to see what he was up to. A few years ago, he was back in Cleveland for a fascinating evening of conversation at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame that included stories of his time spent as a member of Johnny Cash’s band as Johnny was preparing for his final “victory lap” that would come around in the ’90s.

One thing that has always impressed me about Stuart is that he puts his cards right out there on the table. You never really have to guess who Marty Stuart is trying to be from album to album. He just sounds an awful lot like Marty Stuart, with a clearly defined definition laying out what that is.

On his new album Tear The Woodpile Down, Stuart defines that by saying that “today, the most outlaw thing you can do in Nashville, Tennessee is play country music.”

But it wasn’t always that way, because as he notes, “when I first came to Nashville . . . the most outlaw thing you could possibly do around here was to take country music and blow it up into rock & roll. Mission accomplished!”

So Marty Stuart has made a great country album, 10 tracks deep and to take his outlaw ways even further, he wrote most of the songs himself. Recorded with his band, the Fabulous Superlatives, Stuart is joined by some special guests (including Hank III and Lorrie Carter Bennett), but he doesn’t need any of them – Tear The Woodpile Down stands as the same kind of great Marty Stuart album that I heard back in 1992, no enhancements needed and it’s highly recommended.

Hear four tracks from the album here and if you dig it, you can grab a free download of the title track via the widget below. [And if you reaaaaalllly like it, Marty won’t mind it a bit if you should decide to buy the whole dang thing, which is in stores tomorrow (Tuesday, April 24th).]