- 2022-04-02
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MUSIC
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Thomas Rhett Releases New Album “Where We Started”: Streaming
American country music singer-songwriter Thomas Rhett released sixth studio album “Where We Started” on April 1, 2022.
The album comprises 15-track, featuring guest appearances from Riley Green, Russell Dickerson, Tyler Hubbard, and Katy Perry.
“For me, getting into the entertainer headspace and back onstage was euphoria,” Thomas Rhett said of the album. “When you go a year and a half without it, then feel it for the first time again, it's the coolest thing in the world. That's really where my brain has been and where these songs came from — they're some of my favorite songs that I've ever been a part of. I'm just enjoying life so much right now, getting to be a dad, collaborating with incredible artists, playing shows with my friends, and watching people smile from the stage. It has really filled my soul.”
He worked with producer Dann Huff, Jesse Frasure and Matt Dragstrem on the album. He told Kelleigh Bannen of Today's Country Radio, “It'd be easy to make a record that did really well and be like, 'Well that works, so let's just do that again.' I feel like as artists, we're always soaking in information from all over the place and listening to all these new things that come out. And you go, 'God, that's really cool. That's really cool. How could we take a lot of this stuff and kind of morph it into what I do?' And so every record is a challenging process between me and my producers… But I think at the end of the day, if I can just continue to lead with a fresh story and a new way to say I love you, and always trust my producers to take that production to the next level, that's all we can do. And I'm pretty dang proud of it.”- eNkI7_PTr6k
Thomas Rhett explained of some tracks for the album.
“The Hill”
“If you look back at some of the credits of my last few records, you're not going to see very many songs without my name on them. After I wrote 'Die a Happy Man', I felt like if I wasn't involved with the song, then it would always be a great song, but not have that sense of personalness that I bring to a session. I think people can write a song about love, but it's never going to fully represent how I feel about my wife, without at least me throwing my two cents into the song. And I'm a fixer in our relationship, so anytime [my wife] Lauren is upset, I'm just wondering what I can do. 'How do I fix what I just said?' 'Oh, Lord, could I please take that comment back?' And they sent me this song the next day and I was in tears in the kitchen listening to it, because I was like, 'I feel like I wrote this song.'”
“Church Boots”
“I think the whole idea of that song is that I'm the same dude regardless of the situation that I'm in. I hold on to things that mean something to me. I wear the same jeans Friday that I wear on Sunday. I wear the same boots on Sunday that I wear to work in the field on a Monday or Tuesday. And I just felt like that song was so relatable to so many people of just being like, 'Hey, are you going to wear that? Are you going to dress like that for church?' And you're like, 'Well, I am. I wipe the dust off my boots and we're ready to go.' That's how my dad is. That's how my granddaddy is. That's how I am, and obviously how a lot of people are in the world, too. So it just felt like a unique way to say that I'm always the same dude through and through.”
“Angels”
“I wrote that song with Teddy Swims, Josh Thompson and Julian Bunetta. I wrote it from a personal perspective, just like, 'Dang, the things that I have done with you by my side, I don't understand how you're still here. You've travelled with me for 800,000 shows, you sat with me during radio interviews, you went everywhere with me and were always my rock and did it with such grace.' Because this is just not an easy career to be married in. I just looked at my wife and I was like, 'I think that you might not be a real human sometimes. I think that you might be a living, walking angel.'”
“Half Of Me”
“The story of that song is one of my favourites, I think, on the record. We were on the road, just me and my dad, Josh Thompson and Will Bundy, and we had just got done writing a song that no one really liked, which is always a bummer on the road. Stepping off the bus, I looked at Josh and I said, 'Hey, man, let's get after another song later tonight, I'm tapped for now. Do you want to go work out? Do you want to go eat some food?' And he was like, 'Nah. Half of me wants to drink a cold beer, and so does the other half.' And we both looked at each other and we were like, 'Okay, let's go write that,' and literally went on the bus and wrote that song in 45 minutes.”-
“Death Row”
“Me, Tyler and Russell got asked to go sing some songs for some inmates that were currently serving time on death row. Before you know it, we played for an hour. And at the very last song that we sang, one of the guys was like, 'Y'all have to get this guy to sing you his version of “Amazing Grace”.' And so this guy up top, whose foot was chained to the ground, he came down into where we were sitting, and God, he sang the most beautiful version of 'Amazing Grace' you ever heard. I don't know what I felt, but I do know that after getting done playing the songs and just talking with some of them, I just felt this empathy, like, 'We've all made terrible mistakes in our lives and some end up being way worse than others,' but also realising there's always room for redemption.”
“Slow Down Summer”
“Looking back at my catalogue, I think people loved songs like “Marry Me” just because that was a weird concept coming from a guy that writes so many love songs. So I felt like putting this song out brought back a little bit of what people loved from “Marry Me” and turned it into a different, unique idea called “Slow Down Summer”. And it's been a really cool way to start this record off, because I feel like, if that's the introduction, there's a lot of different directions we can go now that I think will completely catch people off guard, in a good way.”
“Us Someday”
“During the time of that recording process, I'd been listening to a lot of Beatles songs. One of my favourite Beatles songs is “Eleanor Rigby”, and that song starts out with a string section and it continues the entire way through. In country music, strings are not a super popular instrument, because, I think, it makes you feel like Sinatra or big-band stuff. But it was interesting once the strings came in with drums and acoustic guitar and a steel guitar; it just all made sense. And I think it makes that song really stand out on the record, just from a production standpoint. And lyrically, it's something that I think a lot of people enjoy hearing from me.”
“Where We Started”
“[Allison Jones from Big Machine] called me and said, 'Hey, how would you feel about making this song a feature?' And I was like, 'Well, who do you have in mind?' And she was like, 'Well, I was thinking about sending this song to Katie Perry.' And I kind of laughed because I was like, 'First of all, she doesn't know who I am. And second of all, she probably gets sent millions of songs a day and she's never done a country collaboration before.' And the next day she literally hit us back and said, 'I resonate with this song so much. Please send me the files. I want to put my vocal on it.” And a week later, I'm in the kitchen and my wife's standing there and I get a FaceTime from a LA number. And it's just Katie Perry shows up on my screen. And my wife's like, 'What are you doing?' I was like, 'I don't know.'”
Photo by John Shearer - source : Apple Music
