Music

It’s late January, and Kane Brown is 21 days into crushing his New Year’s resolution — obliterating a long-held nicotine habit.
“Right now, I’m really going through it, because my New Year’s resolution was to stop nicotine, and I’ve been dipping since I was 18,” Brown tells Billboard. “So, 21 days without nicotine and it’s been kind of crazy, especially the last four or five days.”

In conversation, Brown sounds like a fighter in the thick of the battle, but also someone who knows he’s done hard things before.

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After all, this is an artist who overcame childhood hardships, numerous family moves and financial struggles prior to finding musical acclaim. A decade ago, he was working a job at FedEx and posting videos of cover songs on YouTube. He launched his musical career without the aid of a major Nashville label, funding his debut independent EP Closer with a Kickstarter campaign, then watching the album debut at No. 22 on Billboard’s Top Country Albums chart.

He quickly signed with Sony Music Nashville, and in 2017, became the first artist to simultaneously top all five of Billboard’s country charts. To date, the Neon Coast-managed Brown has earned 12 No. 1 Billboard Country Airplay hits, became the first touring artist to play all 29 NBA arenas on a single tour. His boundary-less approach to his music has built a career that has resonated with audiences far beyond the confines of Nashville.

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Brown has often distilled his life story in his songs, such as “Learning,” from his full-length debut album, and his 2023 Country Airplay No. 1 “Thank God,” a romantic collaboration with his wife Katelyn. On his new, 18-song album The High Road, out today on Sony Music Nashville, the Georgia native offers a gripping look into his life now, both the high points and struggles, mixing feel-good songs such as the high-octane “Fiddle in the Band” and the sultry “Gorgeous,” with songs of deep resonance.

Perhaps chief among those songs is Brown’s duet with fellow genre-blurring singer-songwriter Jelly Roll, who joins him on “Haunted,” a song that addresses ongoing struggles with depression.

Of “Haunted,” he notes, “That song means more to me now than it ever has and it’s about to come out at the perfect time,” he says, adding that the support he’s received from Katelyn has been essential. “My wife has been amazing and she’s a hundred percent there for me,” he says, adding his hopes for anyone who hears “Haunted.” “I hope you have somebody like that in your life, and if you don’t, find something to take the depression off your mind, like video games or something like that.”

The song’s serious subject matter falls in line with Jelly Roll’s mission of supporting those who are incarcerated or hurting, a mission Brown supports. “Hanging with Jelly is fun, and you never know what he’s going to say — and I’m not a big talker, so it’s cool,” Brown says. “He’s funny and honestly just a comedian. I love what he’s doing. My dad’s been in prison since ’96, so everything Jelly has been doing with prisons, just going and giving them entertainment, kudos to him. He’s a great dude.”

Elsewhere on The High Road, Brad Paisley plays guitar on the traditional country-minded “Things We Quit,” which features a raw lyricism about pining for things that don’t serve a positive purpose.

As with his previous albums, The High Road reflects Brown’s ability to mirror his generation’s genre-fluid listening preferences, his songs fusing elements of country, rock, pop and dance. The album features six collaborations. He rejoins previous collaborators, teaming again with Khalid for “Rescue” and Marshmello for “Miles on It,” which reached No. 15 on the all-genre Billboard Hot 100 and became the first song to hit the top five on both the Hot Country Songs chart and the Hot Dance/Electronic Songs chart (“Miles on It” spent 36 weeks at the latter chart’s pinnacle). “Miles on It” follows Brown’s previous hit Marshmello collaboration, “One Thing Right.”

“It has definitely surpassed my expectation, but I had a feeling it was going to be a bit song,” Brown said of “Miles on It.” “I remember getting offstage [after a show] and Mello calling me and saying, ‘You ready for part two?’ I listened to it like eight times and at first, I didn’t know, because it went against everything that I don’t like to sing about in country music, which is the trucks and tailgates and it had all those words in it. I’ve run away from those, usually. I showed it to my team and everyone loved it, so Marshmello came to Nashville, came to my house and worked on it in my studio. I’ve heard it everywhere—football games, random people working out to it—and it’s been fun to watch it [grow], especially across the world.”

Building on the success of their 2023 hit “Thank God,” Brown and Katelyn team up again on the smoldering R&B-inflected song “Body Talk” and “Do Us Apart.” Meanwhile, “Backseat Driver,” one of the few songs Brown himself didn’t write for the album, focuses on seeing life from a childlike perspective. Brown and his wife Katelyn are parents to three children, daughters Kingsley and Kodi, and their youngest child, son Krewe, born in June 2024.

Of his new role as a “boy dad,” Brown says, “I love my girls, but it’s just different being boy dad. With my girls, I’m like, ‘They’re so precious.’ Just this morning, seeing him in his little [rolling] chair going across the floor, I was like, ‘He’s fast. He’s going to be an athlete.’ It’s just different.”

He adds that his oldest daughter Kingsley seems to have picked up her parents’ musical inclinations.

“Kingsley can carry a tune. Kodi tries to do everything Kingsley does, but I think Kodi will be more an athlete. Kingsley’s taking piano lessons. If she sticks with it, I think she’s going to be a pretty good piano player.”

The closing song on the album, “When You Forget,” touches on facing another hard situation: helping a family member in their battle with Alzheimer’s Disease. Brown wrote the song for his grandfather.

“It was a crappy thing to get told that my papa was forgetting things,” Brown says. “I remember calling my nana and just asking her everything I could about my papa. I wrote it all down and when I got in the writing room, I told the other writers about my memories of him. I remember getting teary-eyed while I was writing it, so I don’t know if I’ll be able to perform it without crying. But I’m excited for people to hear it and if they are going through it in their family, they can relate to it.”

He calls his grandfather “our family’s rock,” adding, “He made  his own work on boats, like big ships to do the oil rigs. Any financial problems my family had, he had ‘em covered. There was never anything in my life that I could say my papa did wrong. Literally a gift from God. He was always on the move, cutting the grass or chopping wood. If I wanted to hang out with him, I was working. When he first taught me to drive, it was on the tractor or the lawnmower.”

Elsewhere, Brown reimagines the 2007 Sugarland song “Stay,” incorporating snipes of the song’s melody and lyrics into a composition he wrote with Gabe Foust and Jaxson Free (Sugarland’s Jennifer Nettles also gets a writing credit on this track).

“That was my mom’s favorite song back in the day,” Brown says of the Sugarland original. “What’s funny is, the two writers I wrote with had not heard the Sugarland version before. I got this feeling like I’ll be showing another new generation this song, and then their parents will be like, ‘Oh, he took it from this song,’ and hopefully they will go back and discover the original ‘Stay,’ which I think is really cool.”

Brown will launch The High Road Tour in March and he’s laser-focused on elevating his live shows and crafting a setlist that envelops his new music alongside his canon of hits.

“Touring is my favorite part of the job,” he says. “We have band rehearsals coming up and I’m not normally part of the band rehearsal, but I’m going to go in and work on ideas that will make me love the show even more. Last year [on tour], we did a lot of up-tempo [songs]. This tour, I want that as well, but we have some really cool acoustic songs, like “When You Forget,” “Stay” and “Backseat Driver.” I think there’s cool stuff we could do with that.”

More than a decade into a career that has seen Brown achieve musical success on his own terms, the goals currently driving his work ethic and ambitions — both professional and personal — seem perhaps akin to those of the grandfather Brown so admires. “I just want to make it where [my family and my kids] have nothing to worry about,” he says. “When people ask about their dad in the future, hopefully someday they’ll say he’s a legend.”