Brian Mansfield

Special for USA TODAY

Here's the weird thing about Lee Brice: He's one of the finest singer-songwriters country music has to offer right now, but he hasn't written his biggest hits.

He certainly has had hits writing songs for other people — Garth Brooks' More Than a Memory, Tim McGraw's Still, the Eli Young Band's Crazy Girl. But when it came to his own biggest singles — A Woman Like You, Hard to Love and I Drive Your Truck — those came from other writers' pens.

Brice finally starts putting everything together on his third album, I Don't Dance, premiering at USA TODAY. Brice co-produced the album, out Sept. 9 on Curb Records, and wrote 10 of the album's 13 songs, including the title track, his most recent No. 1 hit. He also co-wrote all three songs on the deluxe edition of the album.

When Brice writes a party tune — and there are plenty on I Don't Dance — there's more going on than just a party. And nobody in Nashville writes a love song like Brice. Just listen to the album's first song, I Don't Dance, written to be played at his wedding last year.

As an album, I Don't Dance brings Brice the recording artist even with Brice the songwriter. On previous albums, he often pulled material from his older songwriting catalog. Now, he says, he's singing about what he's living.

"Now, I can show people where I've been personally and musically in the past two years of my life," the former Clemson University linebacker recently told The Tennessean. "This is where I'm at. This is as good as I can do putting a record together right now."

As an artist who's also an in-demand writing partner, Brice has some high-profile collaborators on I Don't Dance. Rascal Flatts guitarist Joe Don Rooney worked with him on Always the Only One, and Thomas Rhett co-wrote Girls in Bikinis. Jerrod Niemann co-wrote one of the deluxe-edition tracks, Closer.

Brice brings a wide range of sounds to I Don't Dance, most notably live-in-the-studio recordings like the rapid-fire story song Sirens, which features Brice playing banjo, and Panama City, a gorgeous ballad that sounds like real people harmonizing around a piano than the buffed and polished spring-break record its title might suggest.

"You do get blemishes and you can't mix it perfectly, but you do get that thing about live," Brice told a group of journalists at a listening event in June. "There's a magic and you can't get it unless you do it live."

Take a listen, and you'll hear plenty of magic in I Don't Dance, which is currently available for pre-order.

Here's the track list for I Don't Dance: