Sam Hunt's "Hard to Forget"

When Sam Hunt kicked off his string of hits in 2014, the country world had never heard anything quite like his music—the product of an enviable fluency in blending traditional small-town narratives and imagery with the broody cadences and sampling techniques of hip-hop and R&B. A perfect distillation of this was “Hard to Forget,” a track from his 2020 album SOUTHSIDE whose innovation was sourcing a sorrows-drowning honky-tonk hook from Webb Pierce's recording of "There Stands the Glass" and repurposing it as the chopped-up, slowed-down, pitch-shifted refrain. During the chorus, over spry beatmaking and digitally altered performances from session pros Jenee Fleenor and Ilya Toshinsky, Hunt conveys wry self-awareness about the character's soused, and possibly even delusional, obsession with an ex: "You've got a cold heart and the cold hard truth/I got a bottle of whiskey, but I got no proof/That you showed up tonight/In that dress just to mess with my head." The track was produced by Luke Laird and Hunt's longtime co-conspirator Zach Crowell, and Hunt’s co-writers are a large, in-demand, generation-spanning bunch, including Laird, Shane McAnally, Josh Osborne, and Ashley Gorley—most of whom helped shape the many chart-toppers on Hunt's prior album Montevallo. Also credited are the original authors of Pierce's vintage gem, Audrey Greisham, Mary Jean Shurtz, and Russ Hull.