Tracy Lawrence's life reads like some sad country song. Nasty divorce. Wild days, wilder nights and a few bullets in the gut.

Yet, he persevered. Demons be gone, he may as well have said, because in the years since his stormy divorce, this straight country guy cleaned up whatever mess his life became.

Music fans are the beneficiaries. As shown on his two most recent albums, 1999's revelatory "Lessons Learned" and his brand new self-titled disc, Lawrence's life comes through not as burdensome, but as real life troubles that he's endured.

Today, he says he's a new man. He's changed.

"I have. Anybody that comes into this business and says, 'oh, I'm not gonna change,' they have no idea what they're walkin' into," Lawrence says from his Mt. Juliet, Tenn. home. "I can't see how I'm at all like the kid I was 10 years ago when I first rolled into town."

In those days Lawrence handled fame and fortune as many kids would: badly.

"I'd never had anything, so how could I know how to deal with anything," he says. "All of a sudden, I had more money than I'd had in my whole life. I had people adoring me and girls and indulgences that I'd never known before. I had star status. You get trapped in a little bubble, and you go through this emotional roller coaster. It's awfully hard not to get arrogant."

No question, he made some enemies along the way. But unlike some who've ridden along the same tracks as he, Lawrence came out on the other side a better man, as reflected in his new album and on songs like "That Was Us."

"I've fallen on my face more times than not," Lawrence says. "Most of it has been self-inflicted, things you do because you're being cocky or you're tryin' to flex your muscle thinkin' you can get away with this or that, and none of that's healthy. I'm not gonna mention any names, but there's a lot of artists that I'm friends with that are on that ride right now that I used to be real close to, who very seldom call me anymore. But I know somethins' gonna happen to 'em and whomp 'em on the head and knock 'em back down, and they'll wake up three years down the road. We are human."

As with one of his heroes, George Jones, and his past slippages (firing a gun at teenagers, a domestic abuse charge. Not to mention being shot four times in a holdup at a Quality Inn next to Nashville's Music Row. Fortunately, the wounds were not critical.), Lawrence lives much of his life in the public eye. Make little mistake here. Actor Robert Downey Jr. and any number of rap artists do not have the market cornered on bad behavior. Yet Lawrence learned.

"The bad thing about what we do as people in the public eye, especially when you get on this ride so young, you're gonna make the same mistakes that other people do in life, but you're just gonna have to do it in front of a lot of people. The pressures are gonna be greater and the consequences are gonna be greater for your actions, but it's part of it. You have to realize that for the highs you get, that the lows are gonna be just as extreme. Character will lead you through."

As reflected in Lawrence's music. With 1999's "Lessons Learned," he cleared the air on his turbulent past. With his new one, he's moved on.

"That's 100 percent accurate. 'Lessons Learned' was closure for me," Lawrence says in a Southern drawl. "I had to do it because I made a lot of strong statements on that record, and I needed to air all that out. I had very few people who really got the depth of that album. That album from start to finish had a message in it. It wasn't just about one song. It had purpose."

So does the new one. Lawrence says that he went into the recording of this one with some objectives in mind. Perhaps above all, he says that he wanted no part of Nashville's polished sound.

Instead, steel guitars mix with fiddles and dobros and drums that aren't above the mix and pounding the fire out of the music.

In other words, Lawrence has made a solid country record. When you hear him sing "God's Green Earth" or "Life Don't Have to Be So Hard," this 33-year-old Texan wants you to know that you are hearing him. Put shortly: his words are not contrived. He means them.

"I don't know any other way to me," Lawrence says. "I was the kid who grew up and when I was hearing Merle Haggard sing a song, to me in my mind that's who Merle Haggard was. I've always been very realistic when I sing a song, whether I write it or not, I become that person. If you don't realize that and you are just cuttin' what the record label tells you to cut, then you're missin' the whole point, to me, of what country music is about."

Lawrence grew up, as many in his generation did, listening to his idols such as Jones and Haggard and Waylon Jennings and George Strait. Consequently, flip through Lawrence's 10-year career which began with a number 1 song right out of the box with "Sticks and Stones," and you hear the sum of his influences.

Unlike many of his peers, you will not hear pretty-boy pop piffle from Tracy Lawrence. Indeed, with his new album, Lawrence chose songs that among other things, tells of a man who's moving on with life, a good life. And he went out of his way to include songs that in some way highlighted his influences.

"I had several key elements to prioritize with this new record," Lawrence says. "I think you can hear some things that are reminiscent of George Jones. There's a song on there that's reminiscent of some old Waylon things. It's got that great 4/4 backbeat to it. I felt like it was very important to keep key elements of what I consider the Tracy Lawrence sound, which would be a very melodic waltz, a couple of midtempo things that are reminiscent of 'Sticks and Stones.' Things I've had success with through the years, I felt I didn't need to deviate from that."

Now, all that doesn't mean that Lawrence merely stuck with complete familiarity. He indeed did experiment within the constructs of his distinctly country sound. For example, he used a dobro out front on a trio of songs: "God's Green Earth," "Life Don't Have to Be So Hard" and "That Was Us."

"I used natural dobro, used some bluegrass sounds on 'God's Green Earth' and on 'Life Don't Have to Be So Hard,' I went with a straight, true dobro sound and made it rattle a little more and got away from that slick Nashville polished sound," Lawrence says. "I put those three songs on there and cut those songs in that direction because I wanted to give myself a place to grow with a little different sound than I had in the past. It's important for an artist to grow within some sort of a boundary."

No question. At the same time, veterans like Lawrence know fully well that you tinker with care. Primary among his goals with the new album was that it had to be country. No compromises.

"That's what I came to Nashville to do," he says. "There's so much pressure from the record labels, even though I've been fortunate enough to stick to my guns and cut traditional country music, but at the same time I've always been pressured to try to straighten the boundaries and stuff."

Even now, with a decade of hits behind him and a solid fan base to draw upon thanks to hits like "If the World Had a Front Porch" and "Time Marches On," even Lawrence felt that with some of his more recent records, he may have strayed a bit far from a country sound that he wanted. So, he reeled himself in.

"When I was gettin' ready to make this album, it just kind of hit me between the eyes that all of a sudden I wasn't recordin' the kind of music that I came to Nashville to do. It wasn't drawin' from the inspirations I had growin' up. I just really wanted to go back and make this kind of record. It was very satisfying for me this go around. I really enjoyed makin' this record. I went against the grain from what everything else in Nashville is right now, and I'm happy about it."

Even though radio, to this point, has treated it with a lukewarm shrug.

"You know, the bad thing is that radio says 'give us country. Nobody is giving us country anymore.' Then when you give them country, you have a hard time gettin' played," Lawrence says. "It's very frustrating. Especially when you're trying to give them real true traditional country.

"But you know what? I made a conscious decision that I wanted to go back and cut this type of album from top to bottom. I hope word of mouth will help spread this project, that there are people out there who are passionate enough about it to tell their friends. I've gotten a lot better remarks on the content and quality of this record as compared to the last one. People are hungry for this. I don't think Nashville is giving fans this type of music right now."

Take "She Loved the Devil Out of Me," the 4/4 backbeat tune that hearkens to Waylon Jennings' best from the '70's. That's true-to-life stuff, folks. When he sings of a woman who basically rode the waves down into the pits of life and back up again with him, Lawrence speaks the truth.

"I wrote that song about my wife. I'd been through so much tough stuff the last few years, personal problems, backing out of the limelight and trying to get my life together, and I'm telling you what, she really did that for me. I wanted that song to be on this album for her because she was somebody who came into my life that believed in me when I felt like my whole world was fallin' apart. When somebody really believes in you, it can motivate you to get yourself together and really move on. She saved me."

And today, he leads a normal life. Goes shopping with his wife. Tail-gates with his buddies at Tennessee Titans football games. Life doesn't have to be so hard after all, does it Tracy Lawrence?

"Man, I go to Kroger around here. I've lived in the same house since '93," Lawrence says. "My wife and I are pretty well dug in out here in Mt. Juliet. We go to the grocery store together, go out to eat around here. After a while, people get used to seeing you, and it's no big deal. We just go sing somewhere on the weekends. It's a real good job. I'm gonna hold on to it as long as I can."