If some music fans have a problem with country music’s version of success, its take on teenage rebellion can be even more vexing. The 20-year-old country singer-songwriter Blaine Larsen has been successful: he writes many of his own songs, records for a major label and has staked out a distinctive bit of pop territory—that of the young man coming into his own. Still, whether or not he’s a rebel in the conventional sense remains an open question; one could reasonably ask if rebellion means anything in the context of modern country music. If some music fans have a problem with country music’s version of success, its take on teenage rebellion can be even more vexing. The 20-year-old country singer-songwriter Blaine Larsen has been successful: he writes many of his own songs, records for a major label and has staked out a distinctive bit of pop territory—that of the young man coming into his own. Still, whether or not he’s a rebel in the conventional sense remains an open question; one could reasonably ask if rebellion means anything in the context of modern country music. On his new Rockin’ You Tonight, Larsen makes a few jokes and looks back at his high school days with the kind of regret that can only come to those who’ve made it far beyond their home town (in Larsen’s case, Tacoma, Wash.), halfway re-energizing some of Nashville’s ideas about sex and marriage. Rockin’ You is more professional than his 2005 debut, Off to Join the World, but where the debut carried with it an air of discovery and freshness, his new record sounds as if some of the life has been sucked out of it. Off to Join the World was recorded as a set of demos by Larsen and his producers and songwriters Rory Lee Feek and Tim Johnson, and was initially released as In My High School in 2004. Once signed to BNA, Larsen added one song to In My High School and released the demos just as they were. It was a remarkable debut, its insights into the class divisions that mark American high schools expressed in closely observed lyrics, and its music put across in a series of spare, humorous asides. On “The Best Man,” Off to Join’s opening track (co-written by Feek, Johnson and Larsen), there’s a formal compression that amplifies the meaning of what seems to be a rather conventional lyric. “He was the best man my mama ever loved / Not the kind that walks away / But the kind that doesn’t give up,” Larsen sings. It’s a beautifully judged performance, and a canny song; when he sings, “He taught me how to drive a nail / And drive a go-kart / And how to love a woman / With all of my heart,” he deftly makes the connection between past and present: what his life could have been and what it takes to be a successful man. What’s disarming about Larsen is the way he builds a kind of ease into his narratives of obstacles overcome and success attained. This is partly a function of his big, open baritone—he’s as precocious a singer as, say, the young Stevie Winwood. But it’s also a function of experience. On “In My High School,” one of the other signature songs on Off to Join, he sings, “They had assemblies for the football team / But never for the kids with different dreams.” This is just the sort of insight that puts the lie to the notion that country music yearns for a past that never was—one could say that country yearns for a future that never was, since the kind of success that Larsen ultimately achieved by singing country music is as much a red-state pipe dream as becoming a top NASCAR driver. Since, like any number of great country performers, he’s honest about his past, Larsen is impossible to dislike. He seems competent, steadfast, ambitious and more than happy to enjoy a well-earned good time. So, on “I Don’t Know What She Said,” from Rockin’ You Tonight, and on Off to Join’s “I’ve Been in Mexico,” Larsen enjoys the perks of success. “I Don’t Know,” the first single from Rockin’, is willfully insubstantial fare, and carries with it no conceptual kick. “That old pocket guide to Mexico / Wasn’t much help to this out-of-place gringo,” Larsen sings, but the point of this inane song is that love conquers language barriers. “Blah-blah-blah-blah,” Larsen sings at one point, as if tired of the whole enterprise. Whereas “I’ve Been in Mexico” is not only more relaxed and genuinely funny, it contains one of that record’s most telling lines: “I’ve discovered how to take it slow.” Here we have a man who’s attempting to become a complete human being; he takes a vacation, and it helps him do his job better, in contrast to his boss, who is “stressed out, so many deadlines to meet.” If this is teenage rebellion, it’s the healthiest kind. The charming “Yessireebob” on Off to Join comes across as an inspired bit of Nashville pastiche; it’s a Western-swing blues that finds Larsen plopped in front of the TV, watching a “swimsuit model in the Cozumel sand / And some lucky guy with a towel in his hand,” and wondering how to join that particular profession. Rockin’s “I Don’t Wanna Work That Hard” is similarly structured, and gets at another of Larsen’s themes—class—when he sings, “Ain’t gonna kiss her butt to win her heart,” after his girlfriend’s mother dismisses him because of his cheap clothes. Rockin’ You Tonight is a well-sequenced record, even if it sounds glossier and somewhat more simple-minded than Larsen’s debut. “They Don’t Grow Enough Roses,” about a man who thinks gifts will impress a woman he has pushed to her limit, and “Spoken Like a Man,” which shows how a man can function both in a marriage and on a night out with the boys, work as a pairing, and continue the exploration of maturity that Larsen began with “The Best Man.” Musically, “They Don’t Grow Enough Roses” works as an updated ’80s production, and Larsen sounds assured, soulful and sympathetic. “Well, those long-stemmed apologies won’t work no more / She can’t see the beauty, just a handful of thorns,” he sings. Meanwhile, “Spoken Like a Man” works as a vision of what class actually means—it’s all right to have a beer, shoot a little pool and even appreciate the good-looking woman at the bar, but a real man is faithful to his wife without being demonstrative about it. Larsen might not share the rebellion of a pure rock-’n’-roller, but like any rocker, he’s concerned about personal style, the correct and economical way to handle a situation. Sometimes Rockin’s pairings don’t work. “I’m in Love With a Married Woman” is a joke you’ll get in the first 10 seconds of the song, while “Someone Is Me” places Larsen in a landscape that includes “aluminum cans and cigarette butts / Lying on the sides of the street,” rich men who under-tip hard-working waiters, and people who give Larsen dirty looks when he prays in a diner. These songs illustrate the limits of Nashville songwriting: “I’m in Love” is a lame attempt to have sex cohabit with marriage in the same song, and “Someone” substitutes individual action for political consciousness. Where Rockin You Tonight triumphs is on “Lips of a Bottle,” a duet with Gretchen Wilson. Larsen and Johnson display a grasp of the conflicted, heavy-hearted 6/8 country ballad; its chord changes climb a familiar ladder. Larsen shows some feeling for how things go wrong, or at least steps outside his success long enough to imagine an old-fashioned failure. It’s mordant, formally perfect and brilliantly uses a series of false endings that give Rockin’ some of its few disquieting moments. The closer, “At the Gate,” is Larsen at his most bathetic. In this song, Larsen wonders who will greet him as he enters heaven. “Will it be a choir of angels / With some heavenly refrain?” Larsen sings. One could argue that “At the Gate” works within the context Larsen has created; if one is ambitious, then one’s greatest fear is to not be able to share success with your family: “I pray it’s not my wife, my daughter, or my son / Because that would mean the good Lord took them / Before my time was done.” It’s hard to take this song too seriously, since Larsen asks, “Will it be my old dog Bailey / Who died when I was 8?,” and sings a line like, “Face-to-face with fate,” with dead seriousness. Like “I Don’t Know What She Said” and his biggest hit to date, Off to Join’s “How Do You Get That Lonely” (about teen suicide), it’s a sententious song that largely avoids what makes Larsen interesting—his grit, his gift for observation and the way his huge, slightly astringent voice seems an expression of a humane and mildly rebellious human being. Still, Larsen seems to understand how his success trumps any doubt, aesthetic, commercial or personal. “Rockin’ You Tonight” makes this clear. “I lost you forever / Halfway through the fall,” he sings of an old girlfriend who’s gone to college without him. This song perfectly blends nostalgia and swagger, since Larsen wonders “who’s rocking you tonight,” only to actually rock his old flame as he becomes a star. Sometimes in country music, as in life, you get to have it both ways, and it’s those who carry it off with style who keep on getting it.