Music

Kip Moore is gearing up for a year filled with new beginnings, including the launch of two tours, a fresh label home at Virgin Music Group, and the release of his sixth studio album, Solitary Tracks, out Friday (Feb. 28).

Explore

Explore

See latest videos, charts and news

See latest videos, charts and news

In preparation, Moore has taken his annual trip to rejuvenate in Maui, a place he’s found respite since 2014. “I’ll come out here to surf for a month or so and relax,” Moore tells Billboard via phone.

Just over a decade ago, Moore broke through with his debut hit, “Something ‘Bout a Truck,” which spent two weeks atop Billboard’s Country Airplay chart. He would earn four more Country Airplay top 5 hits, including “More Girls Like You” and “Last Shot.” Since then, Moore has veered increasingly creative with his sound and projects, refining the grizzled, heartland rock sound that has become part of his signature creative palette.

Trending on Billboard

After Moore parted ways with UMG imprint MCA Nashville in 2024, he says he recorded the first nine songs on the album independently. Solitary Tracks was intended to encompass just 13 songs, but given the lack of time constraints, he kept creating and recording — resulting in a 23-song span, split over four parts, encompassing rock (“Live Here to Work,” “Love and War”), pared-back singer-songwriter tracks (“Forever is a Lie”), muscular folk-rock (“Learning as I Go”) and old-school country (“Alley Cat”). Throughout, he touches on themes of introspection, maturity, romance, isolation, cherishing freedom and embracing life shifts.

Moore co-produced the album with The Cadillac Three’s Jaren Johnston, with additional production by Oscar Charles and Jay Joyce. Moore has been insistent on letting the music itself signal when to embark on an album cycle.

“I wrote ‘High Hopes’ and ‘Livin’ Side’ back-to-back. I write every morning, but I don’t know I’m in an album cycle until something clicks. When I wrote those two songs within 24 hours of each other, I knew I had something to say. I compiled these songs and I had four months left to turn it in,” he says. “They were like, ‘You don’t have to turn an album in until October,’ so I kept writing. So, with sides C and D, all the extra songs just became this eclectic mix. It’s kind of all over the place, and that’s what I like about it.”“Live Here to Work” — with its opening anthem of a lyric, “F–k that, I don’t live here to work” –feels like a modern version of the 1977 Johnny Paycheck hit “Take This Job and Shove It.”

“It’s a lot of fun to play at shows, I can tell you that much. I always feel a little bad if I see a couple of young kids in the crowd, but I just step on the gas anyway,” Moore says, noting that the song was inspired by overhearing the grumblings of some construction workers near his home. “One of them said, ‘The hell with that. I don’t live here to work,’ and I thought, ‘Well, f–k, we’ll be a little more emphatic. I ended up writing around that. I’d done those kinds of constructions jobs before.”

Moore co-wrote nearly every song on the album, with the exception of the moody, swaggering “Bad Spot,” a solo write from Casey Beathard, who also contributed to seven other songs on Solitary Tracks.

“It felt like everything I wanted to say at that particular time in my life, and it felt so cohesive, and I loved the hook,” Moore says. “We wrote a lot [of songs] at my house on the East Coast, and he’s never the type of guy who’s going to try to push his own music on you — but I asked if he had written anything he would want me to hear, and he suggested ‘Bad Spot.’ It was automatic for me. It was too good of a song not to record.”

Back in mid-2017, for his third album Slowheart, Moore pledged to help songwriters, many of whom have been severely hurt by the switch from an album to a singles and streaming economy, by paying an annual bonus to writers who contributed songs to his albums that weren’t selected as radio singles. He is considering doing that again with this project.

“I’ve been thinking about going back to it on this record,” Moore says. “When I did that the first time around, my hope was that it would create a little trickle effect with other artists, but that’s not what happened. My whole hope was if we were all kind of tipping out these songwriters, that if someone has a cut with me and a cut with a Keith Urban or another artist, there’s three artists all tipping him $5,000—well, $15,000 ends up being a big difference in yearly income.”

He adds, “I realized [that] because the streaming pay is so f–ked, what it’s done is it’s made writers not just focus on writing the best song that day; it’s made writers only thing about a single for radio, and that’s detrimental to the writing process. If they’re doing the right thing and paying these songwriters the right way, the songs will only get better. But I don’t see that happening without it just becoming a law in Congress driving that force. I can’t see anybody letting go of their lion’s share.”

Compounding the problem is hit songs sounding homogenous, as many new artists chase a sound similar to massive hitmakers such as Zach Bryan’s roots-rock sound, or Morgan Wallen’s brand of pop-country.

“That’s just a phenomenon on its own, and I also knew it would create 10,000 Zach Bryan wannabes,” Moore says. “With anything that pops, you get too many artists [following] that don’t know who they are to begin with. I mean, right now, you’ve got four Morgan Wallens on the radio,” he says. “It waters down the format. Nobody’s going to do it better than Morgan Wallen, so it’s all going to be 2.0, but the crazy thing is they get rewarded and get tons of airplay. Back in the ‘80s, I can’t imagine there being someone that sounded just like Tom Petty [on the radio] at the height of Tom Petty, or someone sounding like Bruce Springsteen or Prince at the height of their careers. Variety has always been key. I love that Zach Top has popped, but I don’t want to hear 10 other clones trying to sound like Zach Top.”

The Georgia native has been particularly successful in perhaps an even more challenging endeavor: building up an international fanbase. That focus on international markets sparked when he saw how audiences reacted to his Up All Night album when he played the UK country music festival C2C in 2015.

“I was the opening act and we saw in two markets where we had the highest merch and CD sales,” he recalls. “You have to keep engaging it. Last year, we did two shows in Germany. This year, we’re doing three. We’re doing two new markets. And it’s tough because it costs so much to go over there, but it’s worth it in the long run.”

Moore has toured New Zealand and the Netherlands, while Wimpie van der Sandt, CEO of Bok Radio, helped bring Moore’s music to South Africa, producing the inaugural Cape Town Country Music Festival, held in October, which Moore co-headlined with Zac Brown Band. Moore’s dedication to international touring earned him the Country Music Association’s 2024 international artist achievement award. Moore still has his sights set on performing in markets including Brazil, Mexico and Spain.

Moore says that focus on delivering internationally was a key reason he chose to align with Virgin Music Group, rather than sign with another Nashville-based label. Though labels came calling immediately after he left MCA Nashville, he spent five months making his decision. 

“The whole time I wanted to at least get a distributor, because I don’t want to fool with that—that’s a headache, and even almost every independent artist has a label doing distribution,” he says. “So I knew I wanted to team up with a label, but I needed the right thing.

“[I needed] someone who understood the international capacity, and that is where Virgin came in,” he continues. “They had foot soldiers all over the place, so they wanted to pour gas on the international thing — which, the Nashville labels are not as focused on that.”

This spring, Moore will launch the Solitary Tracks World Tour, which will visit Sweden, Germany, Norway, Switzerland, the Netherlands and the U.K. In June, he’ll return stateside to team with longtime friend, surfing buddy and fellow musician Billy Currington for a run of U.S. shows in states including Florida, California, Virginia and Texas.

“He comes to Maui around the same time I do, and we’ve surfed together for several years,” Moore says. “Billy and I are both very solitary walkers through this life, and I think we share a bit of a kindred spirit. Billy was one of the first people to take me on tour when the Up All Night record came out and I did a tour with him in 2012 or so. I still to this day say he has one of the purest country voices in the world. When he’s doing pure country music, there ain’t a whole lot of people that do it better than him.”