Sam Hunt dropped his sophomore album, Southside, on April 3.
The 12-song set, which features his recent No. 1 hit, “Kinfolks,” and new single, “Hard to Forget,” follows Sam’s 2014 debut album, Montevallo, which spawned No. 1 hits “Leave the Night On,” “Take Your Time,” “House Party” and more.
During the 1,985 days between the release of his debut album and sophomore album, Sam got married, traveled the world and dropped the biggest country song of 2017, “Body Like a Back Road.”
As Sam told Kix Brooks of American Country Countdown, he came to a “pretty big fork in the road” during the extended break between the release of his albums. As baseball great Yogi Berra once said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
“[The break] gave me some time to reflect on the two, three years prior,” says Sam. “It gave me some time to think about how I wanted to approach the next two, three, four, five, 10 years. It gave me some time to reconnect with the girl who I ended up getting married to, and kind of—I guess for lack of a better way to put it—put some roots down. Coming from a world where it was either put roots down now or probably never put roots down, it was a pretty big fork in the road for me, so I just wanted to make sure to get it right, and I took some time to do that.”
Sam’s new single, “Hard to Forget,” which samples Webb Pierce’s 1953 hit, “There Stands the Glass,” was co-penned by Sam, Luke Laird, Shane McAnally, Josh Osborne and Ashley Gorley, as well as “There Stands the Glass” songwriters Audrey Grisham, Russ Hull and Mary Jean Shurtz.
Watch Sam’s video for “Hard to Forget” below.
photo by NCD