This would be the first studio album Coe recorded for Columbia where he would contribute just one original song, with the songwriter becoming less prolific than he had been earlier in his career, but he scored two Top 5 singles in 1983 and 1984, with “The Ride” and “Mona Lisa Lost Her Smile” respectively, and just missed the Top 10 in 1986 with “She Used to Love Me a Lot.” While he was relying more on Nashville songwriters, the tunes he and producer Billy Sherrill chose to cover often sounded like they came from his own pen, such as “Ain’t Worth the Powder” and the gentle “Angels in Red,” the latter written by Raybon “Buzz” Rabin and sounding like a paean to prostitutes.

He also covers Hoyt Axton’s “Snowblind Friend," an anti-drug song originally recorded by Steppenwolf in 1970 but quite timely in the cocaine-addled 1980s during Nancy Reagan’s War on Drugs campaign.

The most curious cover on Unchained – and arguably of Coe’s career – is “Southern Man,” Neil Young’s furious indictment of prejudice and racial violence that appeared on his 1970 album After the Gold Rush.

Charges of racism levied against Coe largely stem from lyrics contained on his second independent release of explicit material, Underground Album, which came out in 1982.

It is pretty ironic.” .”[1]Typically, Coe would muddy the moral waters again on his next album Son of the South, which would display him sitting with a baby in his arms draped in a Confederate flag.