Emily Hackett Feels the ‘Strong Force’ of ‘Nostalgia’ On New Single

As a devoted lover of music growing up and remembering the passion within from her childhood days, Emily Hackett wanted to recreate those intense emotions with a rocking chorus on her single, “Nostalgia.”

Working together with Mikey Reaves and Steph Jones, Hackett painted a musical picture of the pivotal moments of a young person’s life, from driving your parents’ car to impress a date all the way to singing along with your favorite songs on MTV. Nevertheless, Hackett brings the listener back in time to the days they reminisce all too often and hopes to inspire those carefree memories to flow into the future rather than stick in the past.

“‘Nostalgia’ fell out one night. I was writing late in the evening with Mikey Reaves and Steph Jones. Mike had done this guitar loop. There was something about it that was captivating to me. We do that thing where we’re going through ideas. He hit that, and I was like, ‘Stop. Let me sit on that for a minute.’ The was something about it that took me back to high school. I started talking about that, and they all agreed. We just started writing about different nostalgic feelings. I don’t know what really came over me, but I was like, ‘What if we try to personify this?’ It’s such a such a strong force, such a strong feeling. It only made sense to bring it to life in a way where it was humanistic,” Hackett said to Sounds Like Nashville exclusively during a phone interview.

Hackett experimented with her rock-country sound on “Nostalgia,” but didn’t lose sight of the authentic songwriting perspective featured throughout her upcoming release. She sought out inspiration from her own emotional journeys, from breakups to self-confidence, and infused them into lyric form, just like on “Nostalgia.”

“‘Nostalgia’ is a little bit of a wild card on the record, but not so much,” Hackett described. “It’s the most colorful on the record, but there’s a lot of other songs that are what we’ve been calling ‘sister songs’ to ‘Nostalgia’ that have that same energy. The thing about the record is that all of the songs that are on it are all nostalgic. They all have a quality to them—I pretty much wrote them all around the same time, going through a post-breakup, doing some self-discovery. They’re all coming-of-age songs in a way. There’s a consistency with that on the entire record.”

At the end of it all, Hackett just holds a tight grip to country music for its truth-telling and “Nostalgia” represents the sentimentality she has toward her prominent past and hopeful future.

“It’s cool to be in the country industry, especially having not really grown up in country music. The song may not be necessarily what people are used to in the country market. What I admire about country music is the fact that it’s story-telling and it’s truth-telling. That’s what I’ve always been about. If anything pulled me into that genre, it’s that,” she told SLN.

“Nostalgia” is available for streaming and purchase now.