The Place You`re In is Shepherd`s fourth album and in it he`s departed from the blues/rock of the previous three and produced instead a set of US Rock Radio freindly AOR tunes. Now, that`s fine if you like that kind of thing, but so different from his other albums that he appears to be aiming for an entirely new audience and could easily lose many of the fans he already has. He appears to have already pre-empted such criticsm in the track "Ain`t Selling Out", which basically says if you don`t like me, tough luck. The second track sounds like it was written and performed by Lenny Kravitz and the rest meld into one another to form a largely unmemorable mass off remarkably similar tunes.
Perhaps the seeds of this change were sown in earlier albums with tracks like Slow Ride and the bombastic Oh Well, so if you liked those you may well enjoy this.
With KWS leaving the blues behind and Jonny Lang allegedly going Heavy Metal, there may be some tough times ahead for good old fashioned blues/rock.