Thomas Rhett Sees It Differently Now
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Thomas Rhett doesn't want to make music. He needs to. "It’s not just a thing of more," he says, speaking a week in advance of his sixth LP, Where We Started, out today. "It’s that I think these [songs] need to happen." Over the course of his decade-long career, the fans have agreed. Rhett, a singer and songwriter unwilling to be bound by expectation, has become a king in his home genre, logging 17 No. 1 country songs during his reign. He's had more than twenty songs crossover onto the all-genre Billboard Hot 100. His live show operation, known for its bombastic, good time energy, is equally lauded, earning him the ACM Awards' coveted Entertainer of the Year award in 2020.
But Rhett's home life has become its own draw for fans over the years. A husband and dad—the 32-year-old is a father to four young girls that he shares with his wife, Lauren Akins—he writes and sings about being both and, at this point, distinguishing who is following his family because they love his music and who comes to his music via following his family feels increasingly murky. "I love talking about them," Rhett says at one point during our conversation, but as the girls get older, knowing what to say and how much to share gets harder. "I never want to misspeak for them."
Last spring, he released Country Again (Side A), an understated, 11-song collection of rootsy strummers. It was a stark departure from the pop- and Motown- infused fare that made him a top line festival act in the last handful of years—and audiences loved it. Landing a little more than a year into the COVID-19 pandemic in America, Rhett announced that Side B would follow later in 2021. But when he finally hit the road in May, the first night of his five-show residency at Billy Bob's Texas was telling.
Rhett and his band had planned a setlist that featured ten of Side A's cuts, but it didn't translate. "It wasn't what I was used to," the singer admits. They scrambled. Reworked the setlist for the following evening. But a bigger conflict set in: Rhett's muse had shifted. Side A was welcome for the quiet months at home, but it's not what he wanted to go out and play. "I needed some fun," he adds. Rhett began writing, on the road with a handful of select collaborators—Jesse Frasure, Ashley Gorley, and his dad, songwriter Rhett Atkins—and arena-sized cuts began stacking up. They were exactly what Rhett craved, but they were not, decidedly Side B. That project was off for now, he told his label and the team pivoted, recording twenty-plus songs in a month for an until-that-very-moment unplanned LP, which turned into Where We Started.
Featuring Katy Perry, Florida Georgia Line's Tyler Hubbard, Riley Green, and Russell Dickerson and swerving between a wide swathe of American music sounds, it practically demands an open field, tens-of-thousands-strong throng of fans in front of it—something Rhett will get quickly, with headlining sets at Tortugal Music Festival and Stagecoach Music Festival just this month. (A full tour follows right after, weaving its way through the country all summer.)
Rhett caught up with Esquire via Zoom, beaming in from his Nashville home, for a wide-ranging conversation about trusting your creative gut, family, faith, and paying it forward. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Esquire: The next album we all thought was coming from Thomas Rhett was Country Again (Side B). Tell me about the switch.
Thomas Rhett: It was in early 2021 where I thought we were still recording for Side B, and then I got back on the road. We had this whole plan of, “We’re going to play 10 songs off of Side A for our first concert and it’s going to be freaking awesome. Everyone’s going to be on the same page as me. Everyone’s still sad. We’re all still in our feelings.” And it was the complete opposite. After the first night of the show, me and the band stayed up until almost four in the morning rearranging the set list.
Not exactly the smooth re-entry to live shows you were anticipating.
No, I was like, “What happened?” This record was so well-received. Everybody was talking about it. And then we went and played it and—it wasn’t a flop—but it wasn’t what I was used to. If I wanted to play that record, I would’ve needed to go book 100 nights at the Bluebird Café. I needed some fun.
An artist who was at an earlier juncture of their career might’ve felt trapped by the idea of Side B, feeling like they had to do it just because they said they were going to do it.
I felt trapped. I felt like there were a lot of fans out there saying, like, “I can’t wait for Side B.” And we had to have that conversation: “Does Side B need to come out, period?” I said yeah. I think that’s [a format] that I am going to follow for the next decade. There may be a Side C. There may be a Side D.
There was a time in your career where every review and interview took you to task for the influences you were willing to mix into your music. How do you look back on that era?
[My publicist] and I were just talking about this, like, whether any other genre ever gets asked the questions that we get in country music. “Hey Kendrick, did you feel like adding a banjo on your latest track was something that was going to shock people?” Like, no. We get so scrutinized in this genre. One of the big things on this record [I’m getting] is, “Why the string section?” Why is that weird? George Jones did it … I hope one day we can get to a point in the genre where a record can just be a record that someone had a blast making and someone either likes it or they don't.
Six albums in 10 years is a hefty workload, especially considering how much you tour. And your home life looks a lot different than when you started. You have a family. Your bank accounts a little fatter. 200 nights on the road is a different pill to swallow now, but you're still running.
There was a time in 2019 where part of me was wondering what would it feel like to take a forced year off. But a lot of the time—and maybe it’s just for me and I’m weird—but I do think there’s this part of every artist where their biggest fear is being forgotten. And their biggest fear is, “If I don’t keep pushing content, if I don’t keep making TikToks, and I don’t keep putting albums out, someone else is going to come along and do more work than I did and now I'm going to be forgotten.” There is a little bit of that in me.
But, at the same time, I do know that I love to make music and I love to make a lot of it. I hate looking at 1,000 songs [on my computer] just sitting there. Songs that the world needs to hear. That’s where my driving passion comes from. It’s not just a thing of more. It’s that I think these need to happen.
Touring is where artists make the overwhelming majority of their money. But it’s also the thing that is most threatening to their physical and mental well-being. Do you feel like you’ve got a handle on it this many years in?
No, it’s freaking scary. I’m not going to lie about it and say that everything’s roses all day. I have to do a better job at saying no, even if it sounds like it’s the most incredible opportunity in the world. That also then helps my wife and I’s conversation of going, “These are the things I’ve said yes to. I want you to know what’s happening so that when it does get there it’s never a shock for anybody.” The worst thing in the world is being like, “By the way, at 6:30 tomorrow morning I have to do X.” And it’s just like, “Well I have to do X. How are the girls going to get to school?” Then it’s chaos. Somebody’s got to cancel something.
What’s something you’ve learned about yourself in the last two years that surprised you?
I didn’t think I was capable of slowing down. Actually, before the pandemic, I was terrified if there wasn’t something on my calendar because it made me feel like I didn’t have to do anything. And me not having to do anything, to me, made it seem like my career was tanking. That lasted, I would say, three months into the pandemic. I had to do a complete declutter of my life. I had to redo my priorities. I had to write down on a piece of paper, “If I were to die tomorrow, what are the 10 most important things in my life?” And it was wife, kids, family, friends, work…
What got you to that moment?
For about 60 days, I was pretty miserable to be around. My wife eventually had to be like, “Honey, you can keep going to your basement and and writing three times a day if that makes you feel like you’re achieving something, but at some point you’re going to have to come to grips with the fact that you’re not touring this year. And you're going to have to come to grips with the fact that everything is going to be on Zoom. So you might as well find joy in it."
It was really hard to realize that maybe I do find all of my identity in what I do. I think a lot of us do that. You know, if you’ve ever been at a really fancy dinner and you go meet some CEO of a company, they don’t just say, “This is Jeff.” They say, “This is Jeff, he owns Amazon.” You’re attached to what you do. I had to shed that. And I'm glad that it carried over into my life now that work has gotten back to somewhat normal. I'm in a healthier heart space.
Your dad was also an artist, now a songwriter. Do you and he talk about the struggle for identity in this business?
Yeah, my dad went through it too, just in a different way. When he was an artist, all he wanted to do was be George Straight. But there came a point where, after a few failed singles and a couple of record deals, all of the sudden he was like, “Maybe I just want to write songs. Maybe this dream I have of being a huge star, maybe that isn’t my path. Maybe my path is more behind the scenes and helping other artists not make the same mistakes that I did.” And my dad is in the most healthy, happy place that I've ever seen.
Having been raised with a dad who did what you do now, what does that make you extra aware of for your own children?
I had a pretty good childhood, minus my parents getting divorced. That’s the only thing I felt I would change. But as you become a parent, you go, “Man, maybe I was spoiled as a kid.” I don’t want to spoil my kids. It’s easy. Our life is anything but normal. When we fly the kids to New York, it’s not normal to stay where The Today Show puts you up. It’s not normal at Disney World to go backstage through the rides so you’re not taking pictures all day. So my biggest thing is finding the ways I can normalize their lives, so that there is never any sense of, “I deserve X.”
As far as morals, there’s a lot of things I take from my dad and from my mom, and same with [my wife] Lauren and her parents. We had great parents that role modeled what it looked like to be a good mom and a good dad—but not pushovers. It’s easy to get rolled by your kid. Real easy.
You’ve got four girls. They’re all young, but is anyone musically inclined?
They all are in their own sense. Well, Lillie’s five months, so not really. But they all love attention. They love to entertain. The more people at our house every day, the better. That’s one new person that they get to tell their joke to that they learned at school. That’s one new person they get to bring into the playroom so that they can sing them Moana karaoke and be affirmed that it was incredible.
I’ve got a little studio down in my basement and sometimes when I’m writing Willa Gray and Ada James will come down here and start banging around on my piano or guitar. I’ll pull up a little track beat on the computer and have them freestyle into the microphone. They’ll sit down here for three hours and just dork out over music. For me, I’m like, “This is it.”
Your family has become a huge part of the reason why people follow you. What’s the mental push-pull for you in terms of how much you share of your children?
It’s really hard. Lauren and I have been super honest about our lives really since Day One. That was fine when it was just us two. We can hold our own. But when you have your kids and you're in a family like mine where almost every interview I do consists of, “How are the kids doing?”...I love talking about them. But I never want to misspeak for them. I don’t ever want them to get to 14 or 15 years old and one day dive back into the metaverse, which they’ll probably be using in the next five years, and be like, “Man, dad didn’t really represent us very well.”
It’s a constant battle of how much is too much. What do we share? What do we not share? My whole life it was, “What was it like growing up with a daddy that sang country music?” I don't want that to be their identity.
"Angels," on this album really stands out to me as the collection's centerpiece.
It’s my favorite song on the album. I actually saw that quote, I was scrolling through social media or something, but it said, “Some angels don’t have wings.” And you’ve heard that before. But I started to think about that. I was just like, man, for Lauren to have been doing this with me for…This is not an easy gig. Following someone for so long when it’s really not your passion and doing it with grace, it does take something a little more heavenly than flesh to do that.
I found it really compelling to hear a man say they’re struggling to meet their partner’s expectations.
Our marriage has been romanticized in a way where, sometimes, it feels like it would ruin people’s idea of love if they ever knew that we fought. That bothered me. It put this huge weight on having to portray the perfections of what was not perfect. So I have my rainbows and butterflies love songs because there are days that are rainbows and butterflies. But a lot of days aren’t. I think people needed to hear that from me.
Angels is a word of faith. It’s normal in country music to talk about beliefs, certainly Christianity, but it can also invite a lot of judgement. If getting into that scares you and Lauren, I haven’t seen it.
Everybody has got their non-negotiables in life. For me, my faith has gotten me through some pretty strange times. I feel like I have seen miracles happen. And I bet a lot of people have, and I bet a lot of people say that how you see those moments stems from whatever you believe in. Everyone is entitled to whatever they want to believe, but for me, it’s been so prevalent in my life that that’s one thing I am not afraid to talk about.
When were you leaning on that support system the hardest?
With the adoption of Willa. Lauren was in Uganda for seven-plus months, and I was there for three months and traveling back and forth to do shows in America. And it just felt like this was never going to happen. I gave up so many times. Not on Willa. But I was like, “how many more hoops do we got to jump through? We’ve done the case study. We’ve met everybody we need to meet. You’ve seen us interact. Everything on paper is here. Why is this happening?”
Lauren got pregnant during that adoption, and it all came down to this one final court date in Uganda. We thought the judge was going to say that Lauren needed to be there for another year and a half. And he looked at her and she said that she saw a shift happen in the room. I wasn’t there so I can’t describe it, but he was just like, “Alright. You are all good.” All it took was continuing to hold onto that little bit of faith.
I’m sure at that point, you were both just desperate to start your family.
Yeah. And not that me and Lauren tried in the standards of “trying” for a long time to have a baby, but we did for a minute. And that’s when we were led to adoption—and then all of the sudden we’re pregnant? We have two kids within three months? It was like, “Alright, God. Thank you.”
Tyler Hubbard of Florida Georgia Line is on this album. Your friendship seems to be an important relationship in each of your lives.
He was one of the first people in this business who really took the time to help me. When I toured with FGL, that would’ve been my third big time tour. And after shows, he would help me critique my show. I respect him so much for that.
What advice do you pass down?
Whether my advice is right or not, I’ve at least been in the situation of feeling, “Why can’t I have a hit?” There’s always going to be that one person in your life that’s doing it better than you are. But you can’t let comparison dictate your decisions. I did it too many times, and that’s why I ended up putting out songs or records that felt like they were chasing somebody else. I thought, “Maybe I got to be more them to make it.” It’s just not the truth.
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