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As country music prepares to take over Coachella Valley this weekend for the annual, sold-out Stagecoach Country Music Festival, more than five dozen acts spanning a wide array of sounds will perform on multiple stages April 25 to April 27 at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California. Two-time CMA Awards entertainer of the year […]

In the span of little more than a year, Tucker Wetmore has quickly positioned himself as an artist whose songs like “Wine into Whiskey” and “Wind Up Missin’ You” are connecting with fans, but the title track to his new album What Not To captures a life story he initially thought was too personal to sing about.

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“I was like, ‘No, I’m not going to share this, I’m not going to talk about this,’” he tells Billboard.

The song finds Wetmore shedding light on a childhood with a father battling against alcohol and pills, and Wetmore’s resulting desire and determination to forge a different path. Now, “What Not To” is the title track of his debut full-length album, out Friday (April 25) on UMG’s EMI Records Nashville, in partnership with Back Blocks Music.

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“When I started thinking more about it, I got excited to open up in that sense,” Tucker says of the song. “It’s a thing a lot more people go through or went through. When I think of why I started playing music 10, 15 years ago, it made me feel something. It saved me, it helped me, it was my therapy. This is one of those songs that could be that for somebody else. I feel like every day there’s instance where you’re presented with choices — some big some small, some life changing. I feel like when I get to that crossroad, having that ‘What Not To’ mindset, that’s the first thing that pops in my head.”

He teamed with his producer Chris LaCorte, who co-wrote the song with Wetmore, Chase McGill and Jameson Rogers, and the song spilled out during a four-day writing retreat at a rented lake house in Lynchburg, Tennessee.

“It was the last day and we were all just mentally tired,” Wetmore recalls. “We had just eaten breakfast and Chase started talking about his dad, and then I started talking about mine, and we all just talked real life — like buddies do. It was probably one of the toughest, but also easiest, writes of my life, because talking about that stuff is not easy for me. But it was a bunch of guys wearing our hearts on our sleeves, and the song came from that.”

The rest of the album finds Wetmore looking at other hard-earned lessons in love and life, blending elements of the country, gospel, rock and reggae music that Wetmore heard at home in Kamala, Washington, as he was growing up — though, throughout high school and college, his primary passion was sports, as a multi-sport athlete successful in football and track & field.

When Wetmore was sidelined by a football injury in college, he funneled his former athletic determination into his passion for music and writing songs.

“Wine Into Whiskey” became his first to chart on both the Hot Country Songs chart and the all-genre Hot 100, setting this hitmaking machine into motion and followed with “Wind Up Missing You,” which rose to No 2. on the Country Airplay chart. The songs have become back-to-back RIAA-certified Platinum hits for Wetmore and were both included on his debut EP, Waves on a Sunset.

His new album is poised to be a star-maker for Wetmore, who has amassed over 7 million monthly listeners on Spotify alone. Throughout What Not To, he distills lessons learned by both his own experiences and close observation of those around him.

Wetmore and his team narrowed down potential songs to around three dozen before deciding on the album’s final 19 tracks. “We had a lower number of songs and then we’d go back and think, ‘No, this song has to be on it,’” Wetmore says.

A couple of those last-minute adds were “3, 2, 1” (which is in the top 40 on the Country Airplay chart), and “Takes One to Break One,” which Wetmore calls “kind of the centerpiece of the record. It’s talking about bad luck, bad habits, all of those things. I’m a very album-based listener and that’s what I want to create as an artist, so it had to be on there.”

Songs like “Casino” and “Bad Luck Looks Good On Me” nod to the win-some, lose-some gambles inherent in betting on love, while songs such as “Whatcha Think Is Gonna Happen,” “Silverado Blue” and “Whiskey Again” touch on a time-honored coping mechanism. “Brunette” and “3, 2, 1” continue spiraling back to themes of heartbreak and attempts at moving on.

Tucker says “All of It” is inspired by his real life. “It’s just telling my truth — and there’s metaphors as well, like, ‘Is he really talking about the girl, or is he talking about whiskey, or his relationship with family?’ There’s some weird metaphor things and Easter eggs in the record, which I think is really cool, and it’s going to be cool to see people dissect the whole thing.”

In addition to the writers’ retreat, Wetmore wrote for the album with such top writers as Thomas Archer, Corey Crowder and Justin Ebach, and he says he poured that same passion he held for bettering his skill on the ballfield into elevating his craft as a writer.

“I try to just always be a sponge in the writing room and try to learn something every day,” he says. “Yesterday, I wrote a song with Chris [LaCorte], Jessie Jo Dillon and Jessi Alexander. The coolest thing is to just be able to sit in a room with them, learning from them about how they structure things, and how they work creatively. I’m fortunate enough to call them good friends and blessed to have the people around me that I have.”

When he goes to the ACM Awards next month and vies for a win in the new male artist of the year category, he’ll be bringing his mom with him as his date on the red carpet.

“It’s going to be awesome,” he says. “She’s happy she gets to watch her son do what he loves and she’s always supported me. She’s one the biggest reasons why I’m in Nashville and chasing my dream of music.”

In May, he’ll also headline his first show at Ryman Auditorium—the same stage where he previewed “What Not To” in February before an audience of veteran country radio executives during the UMG Nashville showcase at Country Radio Seminar.

“I was terrified,” he recalls of that CRS performance. “It was just me fighting an internal battle, but I’m very happy that I did it. And I’m so excited to headline the Ryman. I don’t think the feelings are really going to hit me until I walk in and I’m like, ‘Oh, wow, this is my show.”

Songs from the new album like “Casino” and “Brunette” have already connected with fans when he slips them into his set. “It’s probably the craziest song in our set,” he says of the latter track. “It’s just creating a buzz. I love these songs, and they are fun to play.”

He’ll bring his new music to broader audiences on Thomas Rhett’s Better in Boots Tour this year, and as he takes the songs to his fans, he’ll take forward a bit of advice he learned while opening shows for Jon Pardi.

“He said, ‘Just take it in and enjoy it all, even the smallest things,’” Wetmore says of Pardi. “He also said to, every night, take a second or two onstage to remind yourself that this is one of the coolest things in the world.”

While he may have racked up career milestones at an impressive clip already, Wetmore says future music will continue revealing more of himself.

“It feels like we’re scratching the surface to telling my story and letting people in on who I am as a person,” he says. “And as an artist, as a songwriter, as a son, as a brother, as a friend — just me.”

It’s the Wilson Phillips song the world didn’t know it needed.
Tight, three-part harmonies, infectious hooks and a light, positive air that makes it easier to hold on for one more day — that’s Runaway June’s “New Kind of Emotion,” a slow-boiling track soaked in fresh nostalgia.

Wilson Phillips was “my favorite when I was little,” Runaway June founder Jennifer Wayne says, “because my mom used to listen to them.”

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Wayne is the only original member left in Runaway June. Current lead vocalist Stevie Woodward and fiddler-vocalist Natalie Stovall found their roles in the trio’s live show through several tours, but it wasn’t until they developed “New Kind of Emotion” with songwriter Paul Sikes (“Wildflowers and Wild Horses,” “Make Me Want To”) on July 19, 2023, that they felt like they’d found their collective voice in the writing room.

A Woodward family gathering started the creative chain. Some of the guests started making music, and one of her cousin’s friends slid into a chord progression with a descending element. Woodward freestyled a melody, and she liked it so much that she recorded it on her phone for later use.

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“The song and the melody felt like it was a very summery, nostalgic song,” Woodward remembers. “My thought was, ‘Well, what if it was a song about driving down the Pacific Coast Highway?’ I saw a convertible with the roof off, and I thought of the song ‘Wild Horses’ by The Rolling Stones, one of my favorite bands.”

But no co-writers responded to that descending progression until she pitched it to her bandmates. “It wasn’t meant for those people,” she says. “It was meant to be a Runaway June song.”

But it continued to evolve. The PCH and the “Wild Horses” reference disappeared as they evaluated its foundation. “One of us was like, ‘Well, gosh, it kind of just feels like a love song,’ ” Wayne recalls. “And one person said, ‘Yeah, like a new kind of emotion.’ And then I think I said, ‘You set it in motion,’ and then we just rolled with it.”

They wrote the chorus first, catching a sunshiny vibe with a subtle spike of melancholy. That came from the chord structure, which features two major-seventh chords back-to-back. They use four notes each, rather than the standard three, to create their sound, and one is only a half-step from the root. It introduces a tinge of dissonance, adding biting complexity.

“Those major-seventh chords give you that kind of throwback feel, but also in an uptempo way that makes you just kind of want to roll the windows down at the same time,” Sikes says.

Runaway June explored harmonies as the members shaped the melody, pointedly emphasizing the trio’s signature. “The three-part is the lead voice,” Stovall says. “That’s what this band is. It’s three-part harmony, and obviously Stevie sings the lead lines. But we want to make sure that the harmonies are really supporting everything.”

The major-sevenths, by stuffing four notes into the chords, offered greater harmonic options, and Sikes was determined to take advantage of them, encouraging Wayne to incorporate the dissonant notes into her high harmonies. Initially, she found herself edging those notes up a half-step to the more conventional root, but as Sikes coached her through it, Wayne increasingly caught the beauty in the part.

“It rubs a little bit,” she says. “My brain couldn’t wrap around singing it, but once you learn it and you sing it together, you’re like, ‘Wow, that’s actually really cool.’ ”

Once they’d crafted two verses at a lower, sultry pitch, they developed another, unexpected hook. “This is what a love song feels like” popped up, and they instinctively repeated the phrase hypnotically after the second chorus.

“When you think about relationships, a lot of times they come out of nowhere,” Woodward says. “So that part, while it does come out of nowhere, it’s fitting for the message.”

“It’s not your typical bridge,” Sikes adds, “because we’re not bringing up any new information. We’re not reinventing the wheel. You might consider it a refrain, more than anything, where it’s kind of a ‘row, row, row your boat’ round-robin [of] that hook.”

They created another moment with a four-note passage in the intro that became a key instrumental riff. It operated similarly to the major-seventh chords, holding at a final note that didn’t quite resolve. It introduced more rewarding tension, similar to the fresh uncertainty of a new relationship.

“I’m always trying to find some sort of fiddle riff that is another hook in addition to the lyrical hooks,” Stovall says.

Sikes built the bulk of a demo that day, converting that riff to a programmed steel guitar in some parts of the performance. He also programmed drums, which were eventually replaced, though the members of Runaway June discovered to their surprise that they preferred the mesmeric artificial percussion, which mirrored the narcotic pleasure of new love.

They developed a game plan for the song during preproduction with their producer, Sugarland’s Kristian Bush, before recording it at Nashville’s Sound Stage in March 2024. The studio band easily grasped the goals.

“The song is a little bit about that weird floatiness you get when you meet somebody for the first time and you connect with them and you’re like, ‘Wow, why do I feel lighter?’ ” Bush explains. “Until you have that feeling, you don’t really connect to a lot of those kinds of songs.”

Woodward played one of the acoustic guitars on the track, drummer Travis McNabb captured the controlled nature of the programmed percussion and Stovall turned in her fiddle riff — though it was blended with Benji Shanks’ electric guitar and a shape-shifted Brandon Bush keyboard part.

“We use an ambient pedal a lot called the Microcosm,” Kristian Bush says. “It inserts weird, uncontrollable versions of your note, so the keyboard might be a Wurlitzer or a [Fender] Rhodes or something really normal. Once you run this thing, you kind of spin knobs until it does something wacky and pray that it goes to the good side.”

A day later, he booked Runaway June into the Starstruck Studios and had the members record their vocals simultaneously for the first time. Watching through the glass in their separate vocal booths, they could breathe as one and follow each other as they would in concert. It’s part of the reason their harmonies sound as tight as a Wilson Phillips performance.

“That’s exactly what I was going for,” Kristian says.

The track went to digital service providers in October, and programmers responded enthusiastically as Runaway June toured. That played a part when the trio asked Quartz Hill to release “New Kind of Emotion” to radio instead of a previously planned ballad. It shipped to country stations through PlayMPE on March 24.

It also tested well informally with people outside the music business; it’s the first time that all of Runaway June’s family members were in harmony on a particular song.

“It’s a good sign,” Stovall says, “when your parents tell you that they were dancing to it in the living room.”