Issue #57: 10 Years Of Sam Hunt, King of High Bro Country
We live on a post-Hunt Music Row, right down to all the artists who say they'll use anything but a "snap track"
By Natalie
If Florida Georgia Line's "Cruise" is the ur-text of our current country radio age (in that we're still in its long, lift-kitted and broish shadow), Sam Hunt's explosive rise — which began in earnest 10 years ago this week, when he released his debut major label single "Leave The Night On" two years after "Cruise" — marked the dawn of the bygone High Bro Country Period. Out of the exhaust of so many F-250s came a surge of innovative country-pop that promised to use FGL's specific, successful but almost intentionally antagonistic genre fusion for good, led by Hunt and his banjo and his drum machine and his willfully good-timing music. He’s the guy who should have been Morgan Wallen, as friend of the newsletter Andrew Unterberger put it.
Florida Georgia Line did not invent combining hip-hop and country, obviously. Not going to go into the extremely cringe "Dirt Road Anthem" here, but that was not first either despite frequently being cited as such; we've got a whole playlist that goes into some of the history, and a conversation with Chris Molanphy that is very relevant if you'd like to learn more. What the duo did do was make mix CD (and eventually, playlist)-era genre agnosticism impossible to ignore on Music Row, eschewing any concerns about tradition or musical respectability as they chased down an irresistibly tacky, effortlessly-of-its-moment megahit. (I wrote about it for Billboard, for more in-depth FGL talk.)
Sam Hunt didn't invent it either, and might easily have been just another one of country radio's many Singing Guys. When he came through Nashville's revolving door straight from a failed run at Chiefs training camp, the ex-QB had all the small town bona fides — including a thick Southern drawl — and white maleness Music City could ask for. For all the ways that Hunt fit the expected country narratives perfectly, though, he also "brought something that neither one of us had ever heard," as Shane McAnally put it not long ago, referencing himself and frequent collaborator Josh Osborne. "He would do anything."
Hunt's musical background includes both Grand Ole Opry on the radio at his grandfather's house and Southern hip-hop in the locker room, with a healthy dose of '90s R&B on the side — in other words, typical of most people in his demo, but in a way that, at least when he was getting started, was still unorthodox to acknowledge as a country songwriter. By embracing that lineage he was able to imagine new ways to marry all those sounds that went beyond novelty, though Hunt still started out by grounding himself in a different kind of tradition. Hunt brought McAnally and Osborne Nelly and Tim McGraw's "Over and Over" (a pioneering entry in genre crossover!) as inspiration in those early days, and walked out of the writer's room with his first hit as a songwriter (alongside McAnally and Osborne), Kenny Chesney's "Come Over" — like every Sam Hunt song, it sounds better when he sings it.
McAnally and Osborne started writing with Hunt in the early 2010s as they were also working with Kacey Musgraves, developing two artists (and specifically, debut albums) that would become massively influential in the shape of country music to come. Though it may seem unlikely, their willingness to push, however mildly, at Nashville's often stringent boundaries ties the two artists together.
"They are doing what they do naturally without worrying where the genre is," as McAnally put it back when Kacey was still nominally a one-genre artist. "Hers just happens to be way over here, his just happens to be way over here. But in reality, they’re just being completely authentic to themselves. There are very few songs on Kacey’s record that anyone else could record, and the same for Sam. They are so identifiable in their lane, and that’s what makes them very similar to me."
Both also had impressive initial success as songwriters, and quickly chafed at the standard-issue corporate country trajectory — not wanting to wait their turn to be anointed by radio after the appropriate number of successively bigger gigs as openers and gradually ascendant singles. Hunt elected to release music that he recorded with his now-longtime producer Zach Crowell at Crowell's home studio as a free "acoustic mixtape" (I know, try to contain your groans) in 2013 before he had an official label deal — cribbing from the method that rappers had been using to promote their music outside the traditional industry for years.
Crowell had gotten his start as a hip-hop producer, selling beats to a pre-stardom Jelly Roll as well as established Christian rapper Lecrae. That "mixtape," Between The Pines, which UMG re-released after Hunt's career took off, takes no pains to disguise his drum-machine-made grooves — including the so-often-derided snaps and claps that are now ubiquitous in Music City. The project endures as a perfect thesis statement, an unadulterated sampling of what the ascendant producer-songwriter and singer-songwriter were all about: Country tinted with R&B and feather-light trap beats that is unpretentious and complex at once. (Usher can outsing Hunt many, many times over, but it's his conversational talk-sung storytelling that the country crooner is drawing from even more than, I think, singing rappers like Drake.) Without a major studio's gloss, the smoothness of Hunt's particular genre fusion comes across as that much more organic (and to me, compelling).
There is obviously an appropriative tension here, the same way that there is anytime white country singers dabble in Black music (or dive into it full-throatedly). It is most obvious in "Cop Car," Hunt's last major hit for someone else (in this case, Keith Urban): a fairly tone-deaf song about arrest as romantic escapade rather than life-altering, traumatic experience — sung by a white man over 808s (Amanda Marie Martinez included it in a great paper she presented at Pop Con earlier this year all about country's relationship with incarceration). Unfortunately it is extremely catchy, and a seamless example of Hunt and Crowell’s particular genre fusion — especially on the Between The Pines version. Hunt re-recorded it for his studio debut Montevallo (he was, funnily for Nashville, angry that Urban beat him to radio with the song despite the fact that he had a writing credit on it), and in that take the drum machines are pushed into the background while the (less groovy) guitars are centered.
Between The Pines is my favorite Hunt album, with the Hunt-Crowell vision realized in its purest form — I prefer those versions in the case of almost all the songs that also made it onto Montevallo, and there are some great tracks on there that were never reprised. Sorry for partying to "Bottle It Up" and "Saturday Night," and "I Met A Girl" ("She could blow a kiss and leave you spinning like a Tilt-A-Whirl"...show me anyone who is not swooning!) and "Vandalizer" are sugar sweet in a way that I cannot resist. Technically, Hunt's first single was "Raised On It," which scraped the bottom of Billboard’s country songs chart as an independent release in its fully-produced (not "acoustic") form — the "sacrificial lamb," as Crowell called it to Rolling Stone. I still prefer the casualness of the Between The Pines version, though; no other can get me to buy the line "You know smoke follows beauty, baby."
His first single after signing to MCA Records Nashville was "Leave The Night On" — pound for pound, the best partying in a small town song this century. Though Hunt was critically acclaimed basically as soon as he emerged, this song was dismissed as trivial. To a degree I get it — its subject matter and sound are not as radically new as some of the other tracks on Montevallo, like "Take Your Time" and "Break Up In A Small Town."
But to my ear the song presents familiar ideas in the smartest possible way, full of vivid images and a kind of overall brightness that is particularly lacking on country radio right now. It brims with energy from that perfect first line, "They roll the sidewalks in this town all up after the sun goes down," even though the spark of drum machine beat is (once again) muted on the fully produced version. Immediately in the wake of "Cruise," Hunt was offering a related but quite different idea — one that was gentler, more precise and romantic — of how country music's stylistic well might be broadened.
Though he tends to get lumped in with the bros of his era, there is a decided lack of machismo to Hunt's seductive strain of country music. He does plenty of dirt-road sign posting (as evidenced by his biggest hit), but overall there's more vulnerability than bravado in his odes to small town good times with family and friends and also it's a Saturday, and plenty of songs driven by pathos that resists the usual box-checking. Rather than tracks for frat boys to fist pump to or toothless "boyfriend country," Hunt offered, as the inimitable Chris Richards put it, "a previously undiscovered sweet spot between Conway Twitty and Drake" (including, at his worst moments, Drake's misogyny à la the misfire "That Ain't Beautiful").
“Leave The Night On” went No. 1, the first in a string of five straight hits from Montevallo; those were followed by the inescapable "Body Like A Back Road" — the highest charting country single on the Hot 100 since "Cruise" for a second, until FGL reclaimed dominance with "Meant To Be" a year later. Hunt's output slowed — he characterizes himself as a sometimes overly-deliberate songwriter, prone to tweaking and some degree of perfectionism (yes, seemingly fluffy pop songs can require tinkering too). Meanwhile, a new generation of white guy country singers stepped up: Luke Combs, who offers something of a Stapleton-lite feel (and I like them both!!) and Morgan Wallen, who blends some of Hunt's R&B and hip-hop fluency ("Last Night" is a bad R&B song) with a Stapletonesque rasp and the sounds of the man who made FGL, Nickelback's own Joey Moi. Thinking about it in that light, it's no wonder that Wallen, a triple-threat of 2010s country trends, would become the face and sound of the genre.
Right now, country is a regular fixture of the upper reaches of the Hot 100 thanks mostly to Wallen and his ilk (holding space for "Fast Car" and Tracy Chapman, of course). Hunt is still searching for his first TikTok-era crossover hit; country radio has not turned on him yet, but he's lost his stranglehold on its sound to a wave of early-aughts rock influence (among other rock-inflected country trends).
He also hasn't ever fit neatly into a Nashville archetype besides "bro" (and don't they all…), neither an outdoorsman nor a cowboy nor fully a trucker hat/skinny jeans guy nor (now) a face tattoo guy. That helped him succeed, but it also does him no favors as a more middle-tier star; he's willing to say as much, too. "There are so many themes in country that we push really, really hard," he told Bobby Bones earlier this year. "The country boy lifestyle, that gets pushed really hard. it almost sometimes feels like it's a signal to that group, to say, 'Hey, I am one of you, I'm one of you' — it feels pander-y, like 'Like me and accept me.'"
That his latest single is called "Country House" and includes a laundry list of classic country touchstones makes this comment confusing: "Bible by the bed, double barrel by the door" sounds like pandering to "country boys" to me. (He also did a weird monologue when I saw him at the Ryman last year that included the phrase "God, family and country" — I do not have the fortitude for any Hunt 2024 election takes and I am begging him to keep them to himself.) That drum machine is front and center, layered with hooky acoustic guitar riffs and Hunt's characteristically limber, conversational voice. It sounds fantastic, and yet — his music has always been best and most creative when he's singing like he's got nothing to prove, whether to country radio program directors or anyone else.