Sam Hunt Is Back For More

After Montevallo, Sam Hunt disappeared. 

His 2014 debut went triple platinum, conquered the country charts with No. 1 singles like “Leave the Night On” and “Take Your Time,” and even picked up a Grammy nomination. Montevallo was everything an artist would want in a debut, yet it left Hunt personally and creatively burned out. The last thing he wanted to do was make another album.

Once touring concluded, Hunt rebooted. He escaped the rush of the city by moving to a small cabin just outside of downtown Nashville with his new wife Hannah, started to comprehend everything that had just happened to him, and mapped out the next decade of his life.

“I needed to refocus my life after a couple of years in the whirlwind,” Hunt tells American Songwriter. “I didn’t immediately start working on new music after putting out my first record. I was on the road pretty much full time and never really figured out how to write in that environment, and while putting off a new record for quite a period of time set me back a little, it made sense.”

Born and raised in Cedartown, Georgia, the former high school and college football player started shifting into music as a star quarterback at the University of Alabama when, post-practice, he started teaching himself to play guitar. After his football career fizzled, Hunt relocated to Nashville and jumped into the writing circles. In a few years, he wrote Keith Urban’s 2014 single “Cop Car,” 2012’s “Come Over” by Kenny Chesney, and Reba McEntire’s 2015 single “Love Somebody” — as well as songs for Billy Currington, Dylan Scott, Neal McCoy, and William Michael Morgan. All the while, Hunt started working the Nashville circuit with his band — made up of roommates and other local musicians — before signing to MCA Nashville in 2014.

Nearly six years later, Hunt is back to making music — but he’s in a different place, personally and creatively. By 2017, Hunt was experimenting and exploring new sounds and new writers, and he started putting the piece in place for his follow-up album. 

“I was trying different things, but they kind of led me to a point where I was all over the place with the songs I was writing,” Hunt says. “It didn’t feel like a record, it was a bunch of experimentation.” 

Through trial and error, Hunt eventually hunkered down for a year to write and record Southside. “I picked a lane and decided to write for a 12-month period and make a record out of whatever came from that,” he says. “That focus helped me just get a record finished, get the songs done, record them, and put them out.”

Slowly chipping away at new songs, Hunt started releasing singles like 2017’s “Body Like a Back Road” to test the waters. Immediately he found himself back at square one with a No. 1 hit. “These are songs that I put out in the interim that I included on the record, just to keep them from just floating around,” Hunt says. “It kind of felt like they didn’t have a home, so I just included them on this record to button it up a little bit. Originally, they were songs I kind of wrote as one-offs between now and then.” 

These “one-offs” included “Kinfolks,” which earned Hunt his sixth No. 1 single and has set Southside in motion.

Produced by Zach Crowell, Luke Laird and Bryce Cain, Hunt also pulled in nearly a dozen co-writers like Josh Osborne, Ernest K Smith and Ashley Gorley, as well as others from his Nashville circle including Shane McAnally, who co-produced Montevallo with Crowell.

“They’re the guys I go way back with,” Hunt says. “We all kind of started together. Josh [Cromwell] and I really hunkered down over the last 12 months and worked on a lot of these songs together. Josh [Osborne] is somebody who’s always been willing to go the extra mile with me and write in unconventional ways.”

Osborne, Hunt says, also served as a co-producer and executive songwriter. “He was very tuned into everything and knew what I wanted to get at, so it was great to have somebody like that just bounce ideas off of,” Hunt says. “He really was important for getting this record finished. Overall, it’s kind of the same group, but it’s a good little group.”

When writing together, there’s a competitiveness but there’s also an inspiration, Hunt says, because within the group, everyone is a fan of other writers in the community. Southside co-producer Crowell has been Hunt’s closest collaborator to date. “He and I both work on the music the same way we work on the songs, so it’s all a collaborative effort,” says Hunt. “We talk it all out, from a lyric to a sound of a snare or the instrumentation, or all the elements of production. So we kind of do it all at once as we go.”

For Southside, they didn’t abide by the typical 10-4 Nashville writing sessions. “You get together in a room with a couple of guys, you write, you wrap it up, and come back and do it again the next day,” says Hunt. “We did actual retreats. We’d leave town, holed up in a little cabin somewhere and wrote for three or four days. Josh [Osborne] and I even talked on the phone and texted at night about songs.” 

More rhythmic beats percolate throughout Southside, moving from “2016” which was a year of exploration for Hunt, a time when he was starting to think about his future and the next 10 or more years ahead. “This was a new lifestyle, stepping into this career path and trajectory,” says Hunt. “I started asking myself, ‘How am I going to approach it? Who am I going to be on the other side of this — in a year from now, two years from now, five years, 10 years from now?’ This was something I was exploring a little bit during that year.”

On the flip side of Montevallo’s heartfelt “Break Up in a Small Town,” Southside’s “Breaking Up Was Easy in the ’90s” is a tongue-in-cheek take on breaking up in today’s age when social media often effaces daily life. When approaching social media, Hunt says he uses it sparingly. When he wasn’t releasing music, he didn’t feel the same need to try to engage on Instagram or other platforms, yet he recognizes the significance as an artist to maintain that fan connection.

“It’s kind of like maintaining a relationship,” Hunt says. “It’s like a long-distance relationship with your fans. You want to call and check in every once in a while, even if you don’t have anything to say. And social media can be that, but at some point you want to have something to say. Now that I have music, I feel a little more comfortable engaging on those platforms.”

Hunt says there are two tiers to it: You want to put out good music and you want to stay connected to your fans. “Nowadays there’s also a cultural relevance, and if you can tie that into the music as well, I think it does help you connect with your fans,” he says. “I don’t think it’s a requirement, but I think every artist is different and you just kind of have to find your sweet spot in that world.”

Hunt’s sweet spot on Southside is his R&B, pop-fused country, but a set genre was never a prerequisite when writing this time around. Always rooted in country, labeling himself within one specific genre is something Hunt tries not to ponder often because it mixes the business with the pleasure of making music.

“I think about it in so far as knowing that there are parameters within the business to be successful, in terms of being played on certain platforms,” he says. “When you’re writing or you’re in this creative process, you’re inspired by a lot of different styles of music and something inspires you and you want to go down the road, but you’d have to stop and ask, ‘Wait a minute, does this fit into a box that is going to be better for business?’ That can start to cloud up the creative process a little bit and make it less fulfilling to make.”

He adds, “I would just like for there to be kind of no limitations on it. There are just certain things I can’t do and won’t be able to do, so it kind of reflects those influences and sounds country at the end of the day. But I think I can live on the fringes some of the time. Why can’t we tell our stories over different beats and rhythms that we like? It seems like a pretty good recipe.”

There’s kind of a strand right now where people are taking it to the extreme, says Hunt, referencing a recent Rascal Flatts cover he found on YouTube. “The video looks like a rap song out of Atlanta from the ’90s, and it just like throws all these elements from completely different worlds into this one song,” Hunt says. “That’s an extreme version of it, but it’s obviously a novel thing. But there is something in combining those different worlds and taking them in at the same time.”

Sometimes genre-bending doesn’t work, sometimes it does. “It’s like being a chef,” says Hunt. “Do you want to use these ingredients because there’s so many styles and approaches or do you just start throwing ingredients in the pot and take it as you go? Some of it is not going to work, but some of it might. You have to find something new.”

Now Hunt finally feels more in tune with his sound. Living in rural Nashville has given him the necessary solace to create again, and he’s already working on new music for a third album. “Nashville is a great city in that way,” he says. “You can be outside the city and out in the country in 15, 20 minutes. It’s peaceful, but it may be because it’s comfortable and familiar to me, you know, being from rural Georgia.”

At the moment, it’s the calm before the Southside storm again, but it’s hard for Hunt to predict how the album will be received. If there’s a connection, he did his job.

“I just hope it makes people feel, how the music I like makes me feel,” he says. “And the people who have been fans and were fans of Montevallo, hopefully they can see how this record came from that. More than anything, I’m excited about continuing to make music going forward. I feel more inspired than I have been the last few years. I’m reconnected.”