Professional ratings
Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
Metacritic	(64/100)
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
Billboard	79/100
Country Weekly	C+
Entertainment Weekly	B-
Got Country Online
Los Angeles Times
The Oakland Press
Roughstock
Taste of Country
USA Today
Country Universe

Based on a True Story… is the eighth studio album by American country music artist Blake Shelton. It was released on March 26, 2013 via Warner Bros. Records and debuted at #3 with a career best for Shelton at nearly 200,000 sold. The album became the ninth best-selling album of 2013 in the US, earning Shelton a Platinum certification by the RIAA on September 30, 2013. In 2016, Based on a True Story… was certified double-platinum by the RIAA.

"Grandaddy's Gun" was previously recorded by Rhett Akins on the 2010 album Michael Waddell's Bone Collector: The Brotherhood Album and by Staind singer Aaron Lewis on his 2012 debut country album, The Road. Lewis's version was released as a single to country radio in 2013 and peaked at number 46 on the Billboard Country Airplay chart.

Based on a True Story… received mixed to positive reviews from critics. At Metacritic, a website which assigns a normalised rating out of 100 from reviews by mainstream critics, it currently holds a rating of 64 based on 5 reviews. Joseph Hudak of Country Weekly thought that some of the songs "feel rushed, as if The Voice coach hurriedly picked songs to record in Nashville before he had to catch his flight back to L.A." He praised "I Still Got a Finger", "Ten Times Crazier", "Mine Would Be You", and "Granddaddy's Gun" as the strongest tracks on the album, saying of those songs that "Blake excels and the avowed smart aleck is found with his heart on his denim sleeve."AllMusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine found that "the very sense that more is more is essential to the appeal of Based on a True Story...: every song is bigger, brighter, bolder than the next, super-sized country for a super-sized time" and this is not good because "there's just a little bit too much of the schtick; individually the cuts work fine but they overwhelm not only the gentler moments...cancel[ing] each other out over the long run." Sarah Rodman of The Boston Globe gave a mixed review to the album, when she alluded that "Much of it is perfectly acceptable. All of it is executed competently", yet Rodman called the lone highlight the "dusty story song" of "Granddaddy's Gun". In addition, Rodman noted that the album "doesn't offer enough personal touches to distinguish it from a lot of other tales coming out of Nashville." At Entertainment Weekly, Melissa Maerz signaled that Shelton is "just not a gravitas kind of guy, and the outdated production only makes it harder to take his songs seriously, especially with the talk-box-style guitar effects and the ill-advised use of AutoTune."

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