Following a successful run around Famous Friends in 2021 and its No. 1s “At the End of a Bar” and the title track, featuring Kane Brown, Chris Young carried on his exploratory phase running through writing sessions and seeing where the songs ended up. Young’s ninth album Young Love & Saturday Nights is another product of his continued artistic prerogative.
Young Love & Saturday Nights is also one of Young’s most ambitious offerings and lengthiest at 18 tracks—15 of which he co-wrote and filled with heavier anthemic stories and weightier ballads draped in familial, love, and other sentimental threads.
“This is what this album felt like it needed to be for me,” said Young in a previous statement. “It’s a little louder, a little more raw. Even the stripped-down songs are heavier.”
Just one of three tracks that Young didn’t have a hand in writing, Jesse Frasure, Ashley Gorley, and Josh Thompson penned the breezier title track. Driven by the guitar riff of “Rebel Rebel”—and giving David Bowie posthumous songwriting credit for the Diamond Dogs classic—“Young Love & Saturday Nights” is an homage to summer love and some of the rebels that came before: As long as pawn shops sell beat-up guitars / To a kid with some hand-me-down keys / As long as leather jackets keep stealin’ hearts / Like Elvis and Cash and James Dean.
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“I heard ‘Young Love and Saturday Nights’ pretty late in the process,” Young tells the American Songwriter. “It [the album] was just sort of an accumulation over time, and all the songs ended up fitting together.” Using “Rebel Rebel” so prominently was more of an “homage” to Bowie and his 1974 song, says Young, and not a sampling since all the guitar parts were rerecorded.
“‘Young Love and Saturday Nights’ is one of those songs that is a sort of looking back song and a love song, a party song and checks all the boxes,” says Young. “If you go through the list of songs on this album, all those boxes get checked by different songs, individually. I just thought it was incredible, and I love what they did with it and that David Bowie is credited on the song.”
Co-produced by Young and longtime collaborators Corey Crowder, who has worked with Young since I’m Comin’ Over in 2015, and Chris DeStefano, who has collaborated with him on Losing Sleep in 2017 and Famous Friends, Young Love & Saturday Nights was the product of countless writing sessions with key partners.
“Me and those guys [Crowder and DeStefano] have a great connection as friends as collaborative partners when we’re co-producing, co-writing—all of that just seems to work,” shares Young. “Those two are a staple. Corey and Chris are two of my good friends, and people I enjoy creating with.”
I ain’t afraid of getting older…afraid if we blink 20s turn to 45 sings Young on “Getting Older,” tackling mortality and the certainty of aging. Dedicated to Young’s father, Mike Harris, “Getting Older” was written by Johnny Clawson, Dave Fenley, and Kyle Sturrock and is one track Young says he wished he had written.
Along with two previously released sides, the opening “Looking For You,” and “All Dogs Go To Heaven,” a tribute to man’s best friend and Young’s own 6-year-old German Shepherd, Young Love & Saturday Nights, also explores matters of the heart and yearning with the tantalizing “Don’t Stop,” the soulful “Call It a Day,” and “What She Sees in Me,” which Young calls “a first dance at a wedding song.”
Young takes some anthemic strides on “Double Down,” written by Monty Criswell, Derek George, and Tyler Reeve, along with “Country Boy’s Prayer,” and “Drink to Remember” and through the slower brooding “Fire,” which he wrote with HARDY before closing on a the more uplifting “Down.”
For Young, songwriting has been an unpredictable journey since releasing his self-titled debut in 2006. “I would say I have more adaptability and understanding of the process now,” says Young. “Even the best songwriters in the world will tell you sometimes they write a song and say, ‘No, that ain’t it?’ And if they don’t tell you that they’re lying.”
He adds, “More people should be open to ideas, and that’s the difficult part about co-writing. You’ve got multiple people in a room—even if it’s just the two of you—who are not the same person. And you’re trying to create something with them that’s art. That’s what music is. It’s art. It’s subjective. So you have to figure out the give and take, the back and forth when writing.”
Within those vacillations is how Young landed on Young Love & Saturday Nights, which he considers his most personal work.
“More than anything, this was just an outpouring of who I am into one project,” says Young, “And that’s why it came out the way it did.”
Photo: John Shearer / Courtesy of Monarch Publicity
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