KU-High-Album Was The One He Was Supposed To Make (AUDIO): “I took this album, the previous album, that had a title and everything, 13 songs, took it in, played it for my inner circle of people, my team, people I trust, in February 2023, and was so excited to play it, and I must have got four or five songs in, and I could feel my own conviction level just deflating about this album. I said, it’s not it, is it? It’s not it, is it? And they’re like, well, you tell me, it’s your record. And I’m like, it’s not, I know it’s not. There’s like a few really strong songs on here. And then the others are, they’re strong too, but everything’s just a bit the same. It all was the same. And I was gutted because I knew that it wasn’t gonna be a quick time between that moment and whatever the record was gonna be to finish. I knew that was gonna take a long time. Sure enough, it took another year of writing and recording. This is the weirdest thing. I’ve made a lot of records. I usually have a very clear idea of what I wanted to do. And I had that with this other start. And it didn’t pan out. And so I was sort of thrown. I’m like, well, I don’t know what to do. And I know this sounds weird. It may not sound weird to certain people, but some people might think I’m completely loopy. But there were several songs. Messed Up As Me was one of them. And there was a few other songs that felt like they were saying to me, we don’t belong here, we belong on this other record, so take us with you and have faith in us and get back in the studio and write, and you’ll see this new record will happen with us in there, and it will be the record we belong to, because we don’t belong with this record. And I did it, I trusted the songs, I moved them over, went back to the drawing board and built outwards from those songs. And man this record came together. 40 minutes running time top to bottom and it was absolutely the record that I was meant to make but wasn’t the one I set out to make.”

KU-High-01-Blue Sky-SBTS (AUDIO): “It was born of wanting to start the record with Straight Line. But when I got into the mixing phase of the song, I messed around with a few different ways for the song to start. Cause it starts with a drum loop and then a little simple riff and then the band kicks in, but it always felt abrupt. It just felt abrupt to me. And I was like, I wish there was a way to set the song up somehow better. And I thought, well, the song makes me think of the kind of thing that might get me going in the morning. Especially if it was an early morning when my alarm clock goes off and I begrudgingly do not want to get up out of bed on a Monday morning. But a song comes on the radio and you’re like, all right, that makes me feel good. Let’s go. And I thought, well, that’s kind of what Straight Line is for. It’s to wake you up and let you know it’s all good. It’s a bit of Blue Sky. So I did the audio of me slamming my alarm clock and set the song up.”

KU-High-02-Straight Line-SBTS (AUDIO): “It’s a song that is really about recognizing that life can sometimes just become monotonous and routine for me too, for so many people. It can happen slowly. You’re doing your job, you’re showing up Monday to Friday or Monday to Saturday, whatever it is, day in, day out. It’s like rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. You’re doing it and you’re being responsible, but slowly but surely you’re like, my life is not so great. It used to be really fun. What the hell happened? Because it’s life. You’ve got to work. You’ve got to… pay the bills, you gotta take care of things, but it can start to lack color. And I wanted a song that was like an alarm clock going off to kind of wake up all of us and reclaim our life, really. That’s what Straight Line’s about.”

KU-High-03-Messed Up As Me-SBTS (AUDIO): “Messed Up As Me is a song about a relationship that is kind of pretty dysfunctional, pretty messy except for one part of it. And that one part of it is amazing. In fact that one part is so good that you figure out just putting up with all the rest that is dysfunctional, possibly toxic, and just messy between the two of you. But that one thing is well worth it.”

KU-High-04-Wildside-SBTS (AUDIO):  “Wildside was just an idea I had. I’ve been in Nashville a long time and I’ve met a lot of girls in Nashville early on, especially a lot of good Southern Christian girls, very proper, well-mannered, polite, disciplined, everything straight laced. You might think five days a week straight laced. And then on a Friday night, man, there’s this other side, there’s this other wild side and it’s amazing. And I just always wanted to write about that. And so I had the title. And then I loved the song Legs by ZZ Top, so I went, I’m gonna use that as the energy, just the energy and the absurdity of Legs. I’ll use that as the inspiration.”

KU-High-05-Go Home W U-SBTS (AUDIO): “A lot of people know Breland, the artist Breland. So Breland and two other guys, Sam Sumpser, Sean Small, the four of us were in a writing situation for two weeks doing nothing but writing songs. And one of the songs we wrote was Go Home W U. We did a sort of quick demo of it and the song set around, this is in 2020, and the song set around for coming up on four years. Three years last year because I sent it to Lainey. I went, I think you’d kill this song, you know, and she loved it.”

KU-High-06-Chuck Taylors-SBTS (AUDIO): “I was going to write with a new guy called Chase McGill and I was driving to the studio that day to write with him, Jerry Flowers and another guy, Greg Wells. I wanted to show up with something just in case nothing came on the day and I walked in with the melody. I had this whole melody but I had no lyric and God bless Chase McGill, he hands me this lyric called Chuck Taylors and I read it and I went oh my gosh this thing fits perfectly with this melody I’ve showed up with. So the lyric he had and the melody I showed up with were just beautifully waiting for each other to meet. The song was so fun to write, bristling with all the energy I was hoping we could wrangle.”

KU-High-07-Daytona-SBTS (AUDIO): “Some songs are literal and then some songs are metaphoric. And for me, Daytona is a song that doesn’t have to be about the place if you’ve never been to Daytona. But if you’ve ever had a relationship that was intense, but maybe really brief, and it comes back to you time and again, and something triggers a memory, wherever that place is for you, that’s your Daytona.”

KU-High-08-Love Is Hard-SBTS (AUDIO): “Love is hard. This song just floored me when I heard it. I knew it top to bottom. I knew it inside and out. I knew I had to put it on this record. I knew there was gonna be the perfect place for it. It’s an incredible song. And I loved getting to sing it and bring the story to life.”

KU-High-09-Heart Like A Hometown-SBTS (AUDIO): “Heart Like a Hometown is one of the four songs that I kept off of my first record that didn’t work out called 615. I loved it when we did it and I didn’t want to lose that. My parents moved around a lot. We moved around a lot when I was a kid. Lived in about nine different homes by about the age of 10. So a hometown for me was my family, my guitar. That very much became my metaphoric hometown, the place where I felt at home and kind of really a place inside of me, a place inside of me. And then when I moved, of course I moved to Nashville and I’m on the other side of the world from where I grew up. And okay, this is gonna be my hometown now and Nashville becomes my hometown. So it’s a beautiful song. And I hear songs metaphorically. They don’t have to be literal for me. And Heart Like a Hometown, I think, is that kind of a song. It could be literal or the hometown could be somebody, but someplace that you can always go back to when you get lost, you want to have that place where you can re-center and remember who you are. Then you can go back out in the world again. And I love those kinds of songs.”

KU-High-09-Laughin All The Way To The Drank-SBTS (AUDIO): “When I play soundcheck with my band, I have a drummer, Terrence Clark, he’s a great drummer. I found on soundcheck days, he would always play something that I would start jamming. And I’d be like, I feel like we’re writing a song. It’s so inspirational to play with him. So I called Michael Lozando, who’s a great producer, musician, songwriter, and I said, can I bring my drummer Terrence in and… Can the three of us just jam music all day, just as a three piece? You play bass, he’ll play drums, I play guitar, and we’ll just jam all day. And we’ll just see if we get a bunch of music happening. And we ended up capturing nine different tracks, one of which was the music for Laughin’ Away to the Drank. We’re making it up just in the zone, jamming. We’re just jamming, really jamming. And the song came out of it, and I call Ben Burgess who I really wanted to work with because I love his lyrics. And I played him all these things we’d worked on and we got to that one. And he went, man, I like this song. And I said, well, I don’t have a title or anything. And he said, what about laughing away to the bank? And when he said it, I immediately went, Oh, laughing away to the drank would be so much better. And I know what the song is going to be about. So let’s go for it. And, um, but the song was born of a jam session, which is why the band sounds so loose and spirited and energized and then we built a song on top of it.”

KU-High-11-Dodge-In-A-Silverado-SBTS (AUDIO): “Track 10 on the album is a song called Dodge in a Silverado and was actually the last song that we recorded. Actually, the album was pretty much done and this song came along. There’s just certain songs that I feel immediately and I felt this song, it felt classic, felt like this song had been around forever and I just loved it. I loved the song. When we finished recording it, I just felt like I wanted to keep playing and we did. So there’s a bit of a long guitar outro on this one.”

KU-High-12-Break The Chain-SBTS (AUDIO): “When we wrote it, I knew I wanted to end the album with it. And the album wasn’t even finished or I didn’t know what songs were going to be on the album, but I knew I wanted to end with that. That’s just one of those beautiful divine days that happen when it’s time for that song to come out. And this was meeting a guy called Mark Sibley. Troy Tomlinson said, you should meet this guy. I think the two of you would hit it off. And I call him and go to his house and meet him for the very first time, walk into his studio. And he had a guitar in a stand, this acoustic guitar, but it looked really unusual and I picked it up and started playing this guitar pattern. And while I’m playing it, he’s already got a microphone and he’s putting it next to my guitar and we’ve said nothing to each other. We’re like, okay, here we go, we’re writing a song. And this melody came and this lyric came too late, is it too late for me to listen, for me to change? And it just, it just flowed, it just flowed out. I did the music quickly. Mark went over and started working on, on building a bit more of the track. I went and sat on his couch and I got a legal pad out cause I like to write, write and I’m writing. And I get to this second verse and I just, I just start weeping on this guy’s couch, like just crying, crying on this guy’s couch who I’ve just met. He looks over at me and he goes… must be true. And then went, went right back to work. And it was the perfect reaction because it let me stay in, in the place I was at with no judgment and I could finish the song. And then I got on the mic and I sang it top to bottom and then did some harmonies and everything just went quickly. There was no, I didn’t second guess it. I just did it. He sent me the track the next day, pieced together, and I just said, I think we should leave this one alone. I think this is, this is real. I’m not going to go and track it with the band on a proper session and all this BS. We’re just going to leave it like that.”