Adam Hambrick Launches ‘Flipside’ Series With ‘Top Down, Southbound’

Singer/songwriter Adam Hambrick has launched a new series called Flipside with the first edition, Top Down, Southbound, released on Friday, September 4. The project features two songs, “Sunshine State of Mind” and “Do The Math,” which were both co-written by the artist. Hambrick told Sounds Like Nashville that both songs were recorded over two years ago, and the Flipside series offered the perfect chance to release them.

“Especially as a new artist, I’m just trying to build my platform and build the audience,” says Hambrick. “I think doing two songs gives a bigger taste of what you’re about and what you’re doing as you’re trying to introduce yourself to people. You don’t have to burn a whole 12 songs to get the point across, I think. It’s a good middle ground to give people a taste of what I do.”

The project’s title, Top Down, Southbound, is taken from “Sunshine State of Mind,” a breezy tune about a free-spirited love. Written by Hambrick, Kelly Archer and Gordie Sampson, the song is jam-packed with detailed imagery to describe this love, especially in the chorus where Hambrick proclaims, “When the thunder in my soul starts to roll and rage, the smile on her face makes me feel the same as a two-lane, top down, southbound drive / She’s my sunshine state of mind.”

“I’ve been wanting to put ‘Sunshine State of Mind’ out for a while just because it’s such a great feel-good song,” says Hambrick. “It makes me feel the way some of those early Third Eye Blind records made me feel when I’d drive around listening to it with my buddies as a kid. It punches you like that and hooks you like that and has that same sort of feeling that I look for when I just want to turn something up and check out and go on a road trip.”

On the project’s second track, “Do The Math,” that open-road love story takes a turn, as Hambrick sings from the perspective of a man trying to drown his sorrows. The song features clever writing from Hambrick, David Fanning, and Nick Donley, as the singer realizes that after adding up all his drinks, he’s still left with the same outcome of heartbreak.

While the two songs on Flipside differ content-wise, they work together musically, both featuring sleek-sounding production. They also work off of one another by offering two different, but very relatable, life situations.

“‘Sunshine State of Mind’ is an upbeat, kind of poetic love song, and ‘Do The Math’’s a little more achy, [but] they still sound good together, so it kind of feels like two sides of a really cool coin,” says Hambrick. “Even in the highs of ‘Sunshine State of Mind’ and the lows of ‘Do The Math,’ there’s a thread of hope in there, and that’s what I want my music to be.”

Hambrick will release two more Flipside projects with the next one dropping this Fall.