Songs About You

Brett Eldredge has never been an artist to follow a formula. The country star has certainly notched a number of radio-ready hits, but that hasn’t stopped him from exploring new sounds, as on 2020’s Sunday Drive and on his two holiday albums. Songs About You takes his penchant for pushing genre boundaries and pairs it with his most vulnerable songwriting yet for an LP that almost feels like a reintroduction to the artist first known for his 2012 hit “Don't Ya.” “I found my sweet spot,” Eldredge tells Apple Music. “And I found confidence in that, to where I was waking up every morning singing these melodies in my head, getting these lyrics in the middle of the night. It was just coming to me.”

Opener “Can’t Keep Up” takes listeners to New Orleans with its horn-heavy arrangement and moments of call-and-response, for a track more indebted to Bourbon Street than Music Row. Elsewhere, Eldredge gets introspective, as on “Get Out of My House,” which can be interpreted lyrically in varied ways, and “Holy Water.” Closer “Where the Light Meets the Sea” is a standout, too, serving as a showcase for the more tender side of his dynamic voice. Below, Eldredge shares insight into several key tracks on Songs About You.

“Can’t Keep Up”
“It’s a very high-energy horn. It’s almost like being at a party in New Orleans or something. I want to tell stories for the people you couldn’t even keep up with—how much hell we were raising at that time or that night. We had a hell of a time. And I just think it reminds you to put a smile on your face and dance a little bit and enjoy the simple stuff, as well. And it’s just so much fun.”

“Get Out of My House”
“The idea was coming out of frustration of the things that weigh down on your mind, and that you let take up real estate in your mind, whether it be worries or somebody not being so good to you or whatever it is. When you hear the record, most people will hear it as somebody that tried to change you in a relationship, and they weren't very good to you and they were trying to change the person that you are and ‘Get out of my house.’ But I love when there’s another meaning, and the main meaning.”

“Wait Up for Me”
“I had a goal: I want to write a really sexy, beautiful song. And I want it to be broken down and stripped down to where it’s so intimate it just grabs ahold of you. I didn’t know what it was going to be. I just knew that I had that intention. But it’s not only sexy, it’s sacred in a way. And it’s about that weight of searching for somebody and that wait when you can’t wait to see somebody and that mutual feeling of, ‘I can’t wait to see you, you can’t wait to see me,’ and the importance of that person to you.”

“Holy Water”
“I wrote ‘Holy Water’ right at the end of last year. That was the first time I wrote with Heather [Morgan], and so that gave me a thought of, ‘What’s something different I could do?’ So, I had a little bit of this, ‘Oh, there’s so much of a deeper level of what I’m trying to do with my music that I’m finding in this.’”

“Where the Light Meets the Sea”
“I wrote it five years ago with Jordan Reynolds. We were in Malibu, and we’ve done a couple retreats there. I just love Jordan, and we’ve been writing for years, but at that point I had this idea called ‘Where the Light Meets the Sea’ and I just love the title and I love what it said and the imagery. We’re looking out at the ocean, and this was the moment to write it. And he’s so musical, and he plays a gut-string guitar. Just amazing. So, he’s playing this thing and the birds are singing and the waves are coming in, which we actually recorded. If you hear the end of the song, that’s from the day we wrote it from the ocean, which is so peaceful.”