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Brad Paisley is set to headline the NFL Draft Concert Series presented by Bud Light on April 26, closing out three days of the 2025 NFL Draft in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Paisley will perform at the Draft Theater near Lambeau Field, offering a free concert to conclude Round 7 of the NFL Draft. “There’s nothing […]
If you thought Morgan Wallen had a lot of songs on his last album — the 19-week Billboard 200 chart-topper One Thing at a Time — the country superstar is ready to do you one better on his upcoming fourth album I’m the Problem.
Wallen unveiled the 37-song track list for I’m the Problem on Wednesday (April 16) — one more track than on his blockbuster 36-song project One Thing at a Time in 2023. He also revealed the much-debated featured artists on the album, including his first duet with a woman, “What I Want,” with Canadian pop star Tate McRae.
He also has repeat collaborations on the project with Post Malone (“I Ain’t Comin’ Back”), Eric Church (“Number 3 and Number 7”), HARDY (“Come Back as a Redneck”) and ERNEST (“The Dealer”).
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Wallen co-wrote 22 songs on the project, which is set to arrive May 16 via Big Loud / Mercury. The project has been preceded by five songs so far, with “Lies Lies Lies” arriving in July; “Love Somebody” out in October, and debuting atop the Billboard Hot 100; “Smile” released on New Year’s Eve; the title track (also the album opener) coming in January and landing at No. 1 on Hot Country Songs; and “Just in Case” arriving in March. Next up, the Post Malone collab “I Ain’t Coming Back” is set for release on Friday, less than a month before the full album.
The I’m the Problem Tour will kick off June 20 at Houston’s NRG Stadium, wrapping up in September with four dates in Canada.
Find the full 37-song track list — including songwriter credits — below:
1. I’m the Problem (Morgan Wallen, Grady Block, Jamie McLaughlin, Ernest Keith Smith, Ryan Vojtesak)2. I Got Better (Morgan Wallen, Blake Pendergrass, Chase McGill, Ryan Vojtesak, Ernest Keith Smith, Michael Hardy)3. Superman (Morgan Wallen, Ryan Vojtesak, John Byron, Blake Pendergrass, James Maddocks)4. What I Want (feat. Tate McRae) (Morgan Wallen, Tate McRae, John Byron, Jacob Kasher Hindlin, Ryan Vojtesak, Joe Reeves)5. Just In Case (Morgan Wallen, Ernest Keith Smith, John Byron, Jacob Kasher Hindlin, Ryan Vojtesak, Josh Thompson, Blake Pendergrass, Alex Bak)6. Interlude (Morgan Wallen, Ryan Vojtesak, John Byron, Blake Pendergrass, Rocky Block)7. Falling Apart (Morgan Wallen, Blake Pendergrass, Josh Thompson, Ryan Vojtesak)8. Skoal, Chevy, and Browning (Joe Fox, Chase McGill, Josh Miller)9. Eyes Are Closed (Morgan Wallen, John Byron, Blake Pendergrass, Ryan Vojtesak)10. Kick Myself (Morgan Wallen, Rocky Block, Ernest Keith Smith, Ryan Vojtesak, James Maddocks)11. 20 Cigarettes (Chris LaCorte, Chase McGill, Blake Pendergrass, Josh Miller)12. TN (Morgan Wallen, John Byron, Ashley Gorley, Chase McGill, Taylor Phillips, Ryan Vojtesak, Geoff Warburton)13. Missing (Morgan Wallen, Chase McGill, Josh Thompson, Blake Pendergrass, Ryan Vojtesak, Luis Witkiewitz)14. Where’d That Girl Go (Morgan Wallen, Rocky Block, John Byron, Ryan Vojtesak, Blake Pendergrass, Joe Reeves, Geoff Warburton)15. Genesis (Morgan Wallen, John Byron, Rocky Block, Jacob Durrett, Blake Pendergrass, Ryan Vojtesak, James Maddocks)16. Revelation (Trannie Anderson, Rodney Clawson, Nicolle Galyon, Chris Tompkins)17. Number 3 and Number 7 (feat. Eric Church) (Rocky Block, Blake Pendergrass)18. Kiss Her in Front of You (John Byron, Jaxson Free, Taylor Phillips, Ashley Gorley, Ryan Vojtesak)19. If You Were Mine (Chris Tompkins, Jessie Jo Dillon, David Garcia, Geoff Warburton)20. Don’t We (Morgan Wallen, Ryan Vojtesak, Ashley Gorley, Rocky Block, Blake Pendergrass, John Byron)21. Come Back as a Redneck (feat. HARDY) (Morgan Wallen, Ernest Keith Smith, Ryan Vojtesak, Michael Hardy, James Maddocks)22. Love Somebody (Morgan Wallen, John Byron, Shaun Frank, Nicholas Gale, Ashley Gorley, Yaakov Gruzman, Jacob Kasher Hindlin, Elof Loelv, Steve Francis Richard Mastroianni, Martina Sorbara, Ryan Vojtesak)23. Dark Til Daylight (Rocky Block, Chris Tompkins, Jimmy Robbins)24. The Dealer (feat. ERNEST) (Blake Pendergrass)25. Leavin’s The Least I Could Do (Morgan Wallen, Michael Hardy, Josh Miller, Ernest Keith Smith, Ryan Vojtesak)26. Jack and Jill (Jacob Hackworth, Jared Mullins, Ned Cameron)27. I Ain’t Comin’ Back (feat. Post Malone) (Morgan Wallen, Louis Bell, Michael Hardy, Austin Post, Ernest Keith Smith, Ryan Vojtesak)28. Nothin’ Left (Josh Miller, Greylan James, Matt Jenkins)29. Drinking Til It Does (Josh Thompson, Jimmy Robbins)30. Smile (Morgan Wallen, Rocky Block, John Byron, Ernest Keith Smith, Ryan Vojtesak, Luis Witkiewitz)31. Working Man’s Song (Morgan Wallen, Ryan Vojtesak, Josh Miller, Blake Pendergrass, Rocky Block)32. Whiskey In Reverse (Morgan Wallen, Ernest Keith Smith, Ryan Vojtesak, Michael Hardy)33. Crazy Eyes (Chris Tompkins, Josh Miller, Jessie Jo Dillon, Daniel Ross)34. LA Night (Chris Tompkins, Travis Wood, Josh Miller)35. Miami (Morgan Wallen, Ryan Vojtesak, Ernest Keith Smith, Blake Pendergrass, Chase McGill, Michael Hardy, Dean Dillon, Hank Cochran, Royce Porter)36. Lies Lies Lies (Jessie Jo Dillon, Josh Miller, Daniel Ross, Chris Tompkins)37. I’m A Little Crazy (Michael Hardy, Smith Ahnquist, Hunter Phelps, Jameson Rodgers)
Dierks Bentley announced the official release date for his 11th studio album, Broken Branches, where he’s honoring some country music’s Hall of Famers, outliers and modern-day hitmakers. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news Due out June 13, the album will feature a cavalcade of country stars. On […]
Last week, reigning CMA Awards entertainer of the year Morgan Wallen teased that his new album will feature his first duet with a female artist, and ever since, fans have been speculating about who the collaborator could be. Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news They’ve thrown names of […]
Could Morgan Wallen and Post Malone have hot summer song up their sleeves, repeating the success of last year’s “I Had Some Help”? Possibly! The two announced Tuesday (April 15) that they are set to release a new song titled “I Ain’t Comin’ Back” on Friday (April 18). Last year, “I Had Some Help” topped […]
Thomas Rhett‘s surprise appearance at Contemporary Christian Music artist Forrest Frank’s recent sold-out Bridgestone Arena show in Nashville on Sunday night (April 13) didn’t quite go as planned. The eight-time ACM award winner surprised fans by joining Frank for a performance of their recent collaboration “Nothing Else” — and ended up leaving the arena in […]
Fiddler Deanie Richardson was about to go onstage for a sound check at the Grand Ole Opry in 2023 when she got word that her father had died.
He had abused Richardson verbally, physically and — during her teens — sexually. She had longed for his passing for years, but now that the moment had come, she experienced a complicated mix of emotions. She was sad to have never had the kind of supportive dad that she deserved. But she simultaneously sensed something new and hopeful.
“It felt like all the chains [were broken],” says Richardson, a founding member of all-female bluegrass group Sister Sadie. “I felt like a prisoner to him my whole life. But that moment, I felt free, and for the first time in my life, I got onstage and I felt like I was playing for me.”
Her father had been abused by his father, and when he got Richardson’s mother pregnant at age 16, he resented the marriage and the child. He dealt with his anger in the same way he had learned from his father, doling out severe levels of abuse to the family.
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After his death, Richardson, Erin Enderlin and Sister Sadie lead singer Dani Flowers co-wrote “Let the Circle Be Broken,” bending the title of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” a country standard that has been shared through multiple generations. They wrote it in a way that was “less about what I experienced and more about how I chose to stop it,” Richardson says. “It can die right here.”
Sister Sadie released the song on April 4. It captures Richardson taking control over her life and demanding to tell her story, which she believes can help other females in similar situations. But it also parallels the way that women in country have evolved creatively.
“I think Deanie’s story can be a powerful metaphor for what is happening with women in country music,” says Middle Tennessee State University College of Media and Entertainment dean Beverly Keel, a co-founder of Change the Conversation, a Nashville organization that supports women in the music business. “They are reclaiming the narrative and sharing things from their perspective.”
Murder Ballads: Illustrated Lyrics & Lore (April 29, Andrews McMeel/Simon & Schuster), authored by Katy Horan, documents some of the most horrific male aggression toward women. It compiles the histories of numerous early folk and country songs about stabbings and drownings, including songs in which men kill women, usually to hide an out-of-wedlock pregnancy. The perpetrators prioritize their reputations in the community over the life of their girlfriends, who would have been viewed more like an accessory than an equal partner in that era.
“These songs were used to force women to control their behavior,” Horan notes, “but they never hold men accountable.”
Caroline Jones‘ first BMLG release — “No Tellin’,” out March 28 — finds her mining an abusive relationship from her youth, demonstrating how bringing oppression out of the shadows can deflate its power.
“The shame and the manipulation around secrets is the way that people are able to stay in abusive situations,” Jones notes. “The song is about the freedom of telling the truth, because as long as something is a secret, there’s no oxygen around it, and the only story that you know is the one that you’ve been told. Once you tell the story to other people, you can get a different truth from people that truly love you.”
Richardson carried the secret that inspired “Let the Circle Be Broken” for years as she became a prominent Nashville musician. She toured with the likes of Patty Loveless, Bob Seger and Vince Gill, and regularly plays fiddle during the Country Music Hall of Fame inductions as a member of the Medallion All-Star Band. Sister Sadie became the first all-female ensemble to win the International Bluegrass Musicians Association’s entertainer of the year award. Richardson, after first playing the Opry at age 13, became a regular member of the show’s band. Her father inevitably haunted those performances.
“I knew every night he was listening, and I knew I was going to get the same reaction on the way home from the Opry,” she recalls. “I would call him and I would just ask if he had been listening, hoping to get some sort of encouragement, hoping that one day he’s going to say, ‘Wow, you really killed it tonight.’ But it was always some sort of little jab, you know — it was always ‘not good enough’ or ‘never going to measure up.’ But I was always trying, at least before he died, to get that one moment where he said, ‘Wow, you’re really fucking good.’ “
Abuse, she would discover, has affected a number of people that she knows, but was allowed to flourish in silence.
Hiding the violence, as they did in her house, mirrors the way society treated it until the late 1800s, when laws were first enacted in some states that made domestic assault a crime. Though discussed rarely in everyday conversations, the subject found its way into murder ballads such as “Ommie Wise,” “Delia’s Gone” or “Knoxville Girl,” covered by The Louvin Brothers in 1956.
“They’re so damn chipper when they’re singing that song,” Horan says. “It’s so weird.”
The women in the murder ballads were almost uniformly desirable, and they were pitied in their deaths, but also blamed for them. By killing them, the murderers were able to gain full control since the dead women could no longer act of their own accord.
“The dead white woman is almost like this image of perfection,” Horan says. “She has no agency. She cannot transgress any rules. She is perfect in her stillness.”
The threat of violence is one of the methods that abusers use to control others. Richardson witnessed that in her father.
“He controlled how I wore my hair, the clothes I wore, who I talked to at school every single day,” she remembers. “As a teenager, my stomach was just in knots knowing at 3:30 he was going to walk through that door and I was going to have to endure all these questions: ‘Who’d you talk to today?’ ‘Who’d you sit with at lunch?’ ‘Did you talk to any boys?’ There was anxiety every single day, just living with him.”
She knew the penalties if she didn’t please him.
“He would crush my fingers if I didn’t play the way he wanted me to play,” she says. “He was just very, very abusive on all fronts.”
Several generations of women have retaliated against that kind of abuse, though progress is typically gradual. That was particularly true in country music. Kitty Wells was the first female to earn a No. 1 single in 1952 with “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels,” an “answer song” to Hank Thompson‘s “The Wild Side of Life,” which blamed a man’s heartbreak on female philandering.
Women were, for years, widely referred to condescendingly in country as “girl singers.” Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, Faith Hill, Shania Twain, Martina McBride, The Chicks and Carrie Underwood were among those whose music supported females claiming their independence, in some cases taking revenge for domestic violence.
During the bro-country era in the last decade, women were often reduced to sexual objects, and their voices were mostly silenced as airplay waned for many females. Those who broke through — particularly Underwood, Miranda Lambert and Kacey Musgraves — embraced empowerment themes.
By building on the strength of the women who preceded them, country females in 2025 continue to push the boundaries. A trio of current songs — Ella Langley‘s “you look like you love me” (a collaboration with Riley Green), Dasha‘s “Not at This Party” and Chappell Roan‘s “The Giver” — feature women in frank discussions about their most private moments. Instead of repressing their personalities, as they would have likely been forced to do in previous generations, they are operating in control of their own stories and their relationships.
“They’re owning all the aspects of their life: their needs, their desires, their hurts, their pains, their dreams, and they’re not ashamed by any of it,” Keel says. “Shame and blame have been so strong in so many women’s lives.”
These songs would have likely been poorly received in previous eras. But instead of being shunned, Langley is the Academy of Country Music’s top nominee and Roan earned a No. 1 single on Hot Country Songs. Dasha, an ACM nominee for new female vocalist of the year, is insistent that women should fight for their full expression.
“No one else is going to do it,” Dasha says.
The current generation of country women is addressing difficult topics more readily than ever, pushing the envelope in their frankness about relationships, but also increasingly pulling the curtain back on the family secrets.
“A lot of these things are being addressed as never before, so I think it makes for a much more open conversation,” Jones says. “And I feel very lucky to be living in a time when that’s possible, because we’re going to help a lot of people.”
Women may need to fight to maintain that possibility. Recent national developments — from the Supreme Court’s rulings on abortion to the dismissal of several women in leadership roles — have reduced the gender’s autonomy and influence.
“We’ve got the federal government erasing the history, experiences and accomplishments of women on their websites and in their language,” Keel says. “Female military leaders are getting fired, so we need to hear about the entire female experience.”
Richardson personifies country females’ creative development. After hiding the misery of her family’s abuse for most of her life, she has publicly shared her story in “Let the Circle Be Broken,” conquering her father’s domination each time Sister Sadie plays it.
“When we do this song every night, it’s coming out of my fiddle, which is so ironic and so therapeutic because the fiddle was a thing that he tried to control,” she says. “And now I’m up there playing this song about him, and every night we do this improv thing at the end of it where I just play as long as I want to play. Some nights I just cry and play. And some nights I play for five minutes. It just depends on what I need.”
Just as Richardson has claimed the freedom to tell her story in recent years, the women of country have fought for the same privilege.
“We’ve gone from women being impregnated and killed, and everything blamed on them, to women singing about, ‘Hey, I’m going to rock your world tonight,’ ” Richardson says. “That feels very empowering to me.”
In this week’s crop of new tunes, Jelly Roll releases a new song that ties into his recent acting debut. Meanwhile, Turnpike Troubadours and Muscadine Bloodline both issue new albums, while Avery Anna goes deep into fan connections on her latest track.
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Check out all of these and more in Billboard‘s roundup of the best country, Americana and bluegrass songs of the week below.
Jelly Roll, “Dreams Don’t Die”
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Tied to Jelly Roll’s acting debut on CBS’s Fire Country, the Billboard 200 chart-topping artist released this moody, anthemic track, which he wrote with Chris Tompkins, Daniel Ross and Jessie Jo Dillon. Here, Jelly Roll pleads with a lover for real, unconditional love and support on lines such as “I know how to hurt, been doing it all my life/ Please don’t bring me down/ I just wanna fly.” Sonically, the polished, soulful and rock-infused track fits right in Jelly’s wheelhouse and he wrings out every nuance of anguish and far-flung hope.
Turnpike Troubadours, “Heaven Passing Through”
One of Red Dirt country’s most revered groups just digitally released the new album The Price of Admission, via Bossier City Records/Thirty Tigers. The group also just launched a four-concert run at Stillwater, Oklahoma’s Boone Pickens Stadium, marking the group’s largest shows yet.
Among the standout tracks on the new project is the Evan Felker-written “Heaven Passing Through.” Shimmering guitar work backs this pensive musing on soaking in good moments as they come. The song’s lyrics depict the swift changes life brings, from the wide-eyed perspective of a young child gazing at nighttime stars and wishing to grow up, to party-seeking teenage impulses, and finally to the wisened viewpoint of an adult looking at those same stars and trying to recapture that childhood perspective again. Gentle fiddle and guitar put Felker’s warm voice and timeless message forward, culminating in the feel of a new, timeless fan favorite song.
Avery Anna, “Danny Don’t”
Anna has a sterling, gripping vocal that she wraps around this response to a letter from a fan who was battling internal struggles and contemplating giving up on life. “Can I just talk you through it?” she entreats as she traces the man’s journey from growing up in an abusive home to now, as an adult, struggling to change the habits he’s learned. “You don’t wanna talk and you don’t wanna listen/ Don’t know why you’re broken, so how could you fix it?” she sings. The song is the first from her upcoming Warner Music Nashville album, Let Go Letters, out May 16. The project is built upon letters Anna received from fans, and serves as her response to the struggles, heartaches and trauma that her fans shared with her through those letters.
Brett Young, “Drink With You”
A mesh of acoustic guitar and twangy pedal steel elevates Young’s newest release, which marks a bit of a departure for the soulful country singer. He’s known for loved-up songs such as “In Case You Didn’t Know” and “Here Tonight,” but on his latest, his lends his simmering, honeyed vocal to a tale of two ex-lovers who tend to make poor decisions when alcohol flows. The song is an early glimpse from his upcoming album 2.0, marking Young’s first project since 2023’s Across the Sheets.
Muscadine Bloodline, “Borrowing a Broken Heart”
On their new album …And What Was Left Behind, the ACM Award-nominated duo offers a varied palette of sounds, from the bluegrass-dipped “The High Horse vs. The White Horse” to the bluesy grit of “Ain’t For Sale.” “She won’t ever be mine/ Am I just wasting my time?” they ponder on the rustic, self-reflective “Borrowing a Broken Heart” — a particularly stellar track, one that adds to Muscadine’s potent canon of top-shelf heartbreak anthems.
The SteelDrivers, “The River Knows”
Bluegrass group The SteelDrivers, known for songs such as “If It Hadn’t Been for Love,” offers up another entry in bluegrass music’s legacy of murder ballads, this one written by SteelDrivers fiddler and singer Tammy Rogers along with songwriter Tom Douglas (“The House That Built Me”) and artist-writer Daniel Ethridge. The group’s signature blues-bluegrass mesh works particularly well on this haunting track, filled with fiery fiddle and jaunty mandolin scaffolding the song, along with the group’s coolly intertwined harmonies, as the lyrics spill out a mystery of small-town denizens pondering how the death of a known scoundrel came to be. “The River Knows” will be featured on their new album Outrun, which releases May 23 on Sun Records.
Country music songwriter Larry Bastian, known for penning songs including Garth Brooks’ “Unanswered Prayers” and “Rodeo,” died on Sunday (April 6) at age 90, Billboard has confirmed. Bastian’s passing was previously reported by the Porterville Recorder.
Bastian, a longtime writer for Major Bob Music, was born Sept. 1, 1934, in Porterville, Calif. He was born into a family who farmed in California’s San Joaquin Valley. After graduating from Porterville High School in 1952, he went on to work as a biologist for 15 years at the Department of Agriculture in Kern and Tulare counties. He also harbored a love for music and songwriting.
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He launched his songwriting career in the 1970s, when he connected with Bonnie Owens and other musicians forging the Bakersfield Sound. He soon became friends and cowriters with Jim Shaw, and together they wrote a song called “This Ain’t Tennessee and He Ain’t You,” that was recorded by Janie Fricke and released in 1980 (Eddy Arnold and Tom Jones would later also record the song).
He has written songs recorded by Merle Haggard and David Frizzell (“Lefty”), Tammy Wynette (“Back to the Wall”), Conway Twitty (“Saturday Night Special”), Tracy Byrd (“Why”) Sammy Kershaw (“If You’re Gonna Walk, I’m Gonna Crawl,” “Yard Sale”), Reba McEntire (“The Girl Who Has Everything”), Rhett Akins (“Somebody Knew”), Moe Bandy (“Nobody Gets Off in This Town”), George Jones (“Forever’s Here to Stay”) and Craig Morgan (“Look at Us”).
Some of his biggest country chart successes came in the 1990s as a writer on Brooks’ “Unanswered Prayers” and “Rodeo.” Bastian solo wrote the latter, which, according to Garth Brooks: The Anthology Part 1, was originally titled “Miss Rodeo” and written for a female artist.
“This was a song I had written probably six or seven years before I met Garth … it was about a gal lamenting the fact that her guy was in love with the rodeo rather than her,” Bastian wrote in the Brooks anthology. “Finally, Garth said to me, ‘I’m going to record it.’ I said, ‘You can’t record it. It’s a girl’s song.’ He said, ‘Just watch me.’” The song became a top five Billboard Country Airplay hit in 1991.
Garth Brooks: The Anthology Part 1 also notes Bastian provided a key lyrical hook for “Unanswered Prayers” (co-written by Brooks and Pat Alger), which became a two-week Country Airplay chart No. 1 in 1991. Beyond those hits, Bastian also wrote and/or cowrote other songs recorded by Brooks, including “I’ve Got a Good Thing Going,” “The Old Man’s Back in Town,” “Cowboy Bill,” “Nobody Gets Off in This Town” and “Man Against the Machine.”
“That type of drive, first off you have to know that you can do it,” Bastian said during an interview on The Paul Leslie Hour in 2020. “There was no doubt in my mind that I could write a song. I think you have to be that driven to succeed, and then there’s a lot of luck. They have a saying, ‘You can’t get out of the way of a hit song,’ and that’s so right.”
A celebration of life is pending.
The first track on Jon Pardi’s new album may be called “Boots Off,” but don’t expect the project to simply be a repeat of songs similar to his signature hits “Dirt on My Boots” and “Head Over Boots.”
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Each of his previous four albums reached at least the top 5 on Billboard’s Top Country Albums chart, with his 2016 album California Sunrise debuting at the listing’s pinnacle. He’s lodged several songs in the upper echelons of the Country Airplay chart, with five No. 1s — such as “Heartache Medication” and “Last Night Lonely.”
On his fifth studio album Honkytonk Hollywood, out on UMG Nashville today (April 11), Pardi continues paying homage to his California roots and penchant for rock-infused, neo-traditional country, but he also crafted an album that showcases both the 39-year-old’s maturity as a person (he’s now a father to two young daughters) — and how, more than a decade into his career, he continues eschewing any creative confines.
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With the new project, the Red Light-managed singer-songwriter leaned into the influences of classic rock artists such as the Eagles, Tom Petty and Fleetwood Mac.
“The ‘70s country of the West Coast was Hollywood; when I say rock ‘n’ roll, that’s what I’m thinking about. Sonically, it’s there in the snare drums and the grit of the guitar and the grit of the whole recording itself. Classic rock, it blends so well with traditional country music, ’cause it doesn’t sound too crazy or modern. I feel like this record has good soul to it.”
Key to that sonic shift was Pardi’s choice to switch up producers and work with Jay Joyce, known for his no-boundaries, music-forward approach to making records. Grammy winner Joyce has fashioned enduring albums for Eric Church and Cage the Elephant, with Pardi crediting Church’s Carolina as a factor that drew him to working with Joyce.
“Some people call him a mad scientist. I call him a professor,” Pardi says of Joyce. “He always had an edge, something different about him. He’s a respectful music guy and I’ve been a big fan of his. I felt more than ever this was the time to reach out and he doesn’t work with everybody.”
They holed up at Joyce’s east Nashville church-turned-recording studio for the better part of a month, recording and piecing together the album’s 17 songs. Pardi also welcomed in his touring band to play on the album, placing the band’s tight-knit musicianship at the album’s fore.
“He took me and my band to school and we became even better players,” Pardi says of Joyce. “I remember him telling my guitar player, ‘Why are you f–king playing so much? You played so much on every song.’ It was just funny and we were learning. We had time on our side and that really helped this record be what it is. I’m not saying anything bad about the Nashville way. It’s a machine, it’s fast, it’s great, but it was nice to slow down. We were always in the studio, focusing on music. I wasn’t out bush-hogging or feeding cows.”
Honkytonk Hollywood builds upon and broadens the country-leaning, tough-minded sounds he forged on songs such as “Dirt on My Boots.” That rock influence is threaded through songs such as the slinky groove of “Hey California” and hard-charging “Friday Night Heartbreaker.”
The album isn’t all night-out party anthems. “He Went to Work” pays tribute to a father’s dogged determination to provide for his loved ones. Alongside “Hard Knocks,” it offers a double set of songs that inspired by his family and his father.
“Looking back as a grown man, he had a lot on his plate,” Pardi says. “He had ran a big construction business and just a lot of hustle and bustle. We learned so much. We were always out in the country, either on big construction sites developing land or in agriculture. His side of the family is all farmers. And he could fix anything.”
Meanwhile, “She Drives Away” finds Pardi looking to the future and the kind of days that are ahead of him as a parent to his daughters Presley Fawn and Sierra Grace. Though Pardi wrote eight of the album’s 17 songs, he couldn’t resist recording this song, penned by Seth Ennis, Jordan Minton, Zach Abend and Jimi Bell.
“I wanted to write a Presley song, but that song showed up in the inbox and how are you not going to record that? You hear that song and you’re like, ‘I’m not going to write a better one. That one’s great.’ So I got my dad and daughter song, and I feel like the universal aspect of that song touches so many people. I was like, ‘This is going to be a father-daughter dance song all day… that is the pure emotion of songwriting, and that is why we write songs.”
It’s not lost on Pardi that his new album comes at a time when country music’s impact — both domestically and globally — has been surging, with artists including Morgan Wallen, Zach Bryan, Luke Combs and Kane Brown doing headlining large international tours in areas including the U.K. and Australia, while continuing to headline arenas and/or football stadiums stateside.
“It’s not just one artist. There’s a handful. We’ve now entered the level where there is the football [stadium] level [of performers] and multiple artists are doing it,” Pardi says. “It’s always been like one guy— Garth, and Kenny Chesney — now it’s a bunch of people. It’s crazy.”
Though artists such as Jelly Roll and Morgan Wallen have released elongated, 30-something track albums, Pardi says he won’t be following suit anytime soon.
“I mean, I thought [long albums] were going away,” Pardi says, “Then Morgan came out and was like, ‘I’m doing another 37.’ I’m like, ‘D–n it, I thought my 17 was a lot.’ That’s 20 more songs. I don’t think I’d ever go that many. I think 20 is a good amount of songs. I don’t think I would go more than 20.”
Pardi has seen the country music genre’s progressive-to-traditional ebbs and flows, and takes a “rising tide lifts all boats” perspective.
“Traditional country will always come back and save country music when it’s gone too far,” he says. “I compare Zach Top to when Randy Travis came out with songs [in the 1980s] and it’s like just a stone-cold country comeback. I’m always on everybody’s team. Country’s going to be poppy and popular, but you’re going to get all these new artists coming out with more of a rootsy-country song, or [a] traditional song that starts picking up steam.
“But all that pop, hip-hop and all the super-popular songs — that helps everybody, and it’s good for a traditional artist. It sucks sometimes — I mean, I’m on the Pardi train and I’ve been a steam engine since 2012. I’m never going to get a rocket ship, but I’m fine on the train tracks. Still chugging along, but you stay your path and you do what makes you feel good.”