NEW YORK — NEW YORK (AP) — Kane Brown is in his new house studio simply exterior Nashville, getting ready to have the primary sit-down dialog about his fourth studio album, “The Excessive Highway.” It is a becoming title, as a result of pounding the pavement is one thing he is greater than accustomed to. Just a few quick days in the past, he was in Los Angeles, performing on the iHeartRadio Jingle Ball alongside an eclectic mixture of the largest performers — SZA, Tate McRae, Madison Beer, T-Ache, Paris Hilton and Okay-pop group NCT Dream amongst them.
To the untrained ear, it might sound uncommon pairing — one of many nice fashionable nation voices alongside pop acts. However genre-mixing? That is one thing Brown knows a little bit about, too.
Nation is on the coronary heart of every part he does — the style’s narrative type, fiddles, slide guitar and Brown’s signature twang carry all through — however “The Excessive Highway” is not afraid to play with totally different sounds. He says he is “at all times been type of nervous to push boundaries and do sure issues. However I’ve been right here for nearly a decade now, so I wanted to cease hiding and simply do what I like to do. And nation is at all times my primary.”
“That is by far my favourite album, from the sequencing to the songwriting to the totally different sounds. There’s undoubtedly a music for everyone,” he continues. “My different albums, I at all times type of, you realize, cared what folks considered. And this album, we don’t… we gave our every part into the songs.”
He is additionally no stranger to working with quite a lot of artists, from regional Mexican nation celebrity Carin León on “The One (Pero No Como Yo),” which launched earlier this 12 months, to 2019’s “One Factor Proper” with EDM big Marshmello. The helmet-wearing DJ is again on “The Excessive Highway,” with the radio smash “Miles On It.”
This album, which will probably be launched Jan. 24, contains extra options than every other in Brown’s discography, together with tracks with Khalid, Jelly Roll, and the legendary Brad Paisley.
They took place naturally: Khalid expressed curiosity in eager to go nation, Brown helped him make it occur. For the Paisley monitor “Issues We Stop,” Brown shared a video of him singing it on social media, and “lots of people mentioned, ‘This feels like a Brad Paisley music,’” he says, smiling. “And it is type of a comedy nation music, a bit bit, so he was good for that.”
And as for Jelly Roll, on the music “Haunted”? That one was written whereas Brown was staying in a resort in Manchester, England.
“It was this huge resort, and I had the suite, which was a financial institution vault. So, the financial institution vault was truly in my room and there have been these, like, outdated work on the wall. And we wrote three or 4 songs that day and we couldn’t consider a music title. And I used to be like, ‘That is place is haunted,’” he recollects. “Let’s write a music known as ‘Haunted,’ about despair and all that. So, I imply, it truly, it got here out actually fast and, you realize, it’s significant to me. So hopefully it’ll be significant to a number of different folks.”
Jelly Roll has by no means been one to veer away from matters of psychological well being, and he made the perfect collaborator. “That music is so him,” Brown says. “He didn’t suppose that I used to be going to launch it, so he was making an attempt to maintain it for himself. In order that instructed me that the music meant much more to him than what I believed it was going to imply.”
Vital to Brown, little doubt, are two new duets together with his spouse Katelyn, following the success of their 2023’s single “Thank God.”
“Our music is about telling our story,” she instructed The Related Press.
There’s the R&B-pop of “Physique Speak,” and a traditionalist’s nation tune in “Do Us Aside” — pulling from an extended custom of nation music greats performing with their companions. The latter ought to come as no shock. “Our favourite duet to sing collectively is Randy Travis and Carrie Underwood’s “I Instructed You So,” so we’ve at all times wished to have that kind of music,” he says.
And nation songs, he is obtained a number of them: the jukebox “Fiddle within the Band,” the slow-burn “Backseat Driver,” the barstool swaying of “Says I Can.”
Or the nearer, “’When You Overlook,’ a music that I wrote about my granddad with Alzheimer’s. To me, that is ‘90s nation music storytelling,” he says. “That is preserve the custom there — after which I am going far left with another songs.”
On “The Excessive Highway,” Brown believes every monitor tells a narrative — and he appears to be like ahead to sharing them, each by way of the document and on a North American tour subsequent spring.
“I simply hope folks can discover a piece of themselves in every music,” he says. “Or… a minimum of one music.”
1. “I Am”
2. “Fiddle Within the Band”
3. “Backseat Driver”
4. “Miles On It” (that includes Marshmello)
5. “Says I Can”
6. “3”
7. “Rescue” (that includes Khalid)
8. “Haunted” (that includes Jelly Roll)
9. “Begin A Fireplace”
10. “Physique Speak” (that includes Katelyn Brown)
11. “Beautiful”
12. “Beside Me”
13. “I Can Really feel It”
14. “Issues We Stop” (that includes Brad Paisley)
15. “Again Round”
16. “Keep”
17. “Do Us Aside” (that includes Katelyn Brown)
18. “When You Overlook”
