Brett Young Opens New Chapter With ‘Weekends Look A Little Different These Days’
The album made Young step outside of his comfort zone.
Brett Young admits that life is looking a little different these days. He’s now a father to his 1-year-old daughter, Presley, and he and wife Taylor have another baby girl due this summer. In his new studio album, Weekends Look A Little Different These Days, which is his first full project since the birth of his daughter, Young sings about that new chapter.
Upon listening to the eight-song project, fans are immediately met with the title track, which is a lively and authentic ode to his new life as a dad. In the tune, Young sings about how he’s no longer the “barstool fixture” who used to “stay up late” and sleep all day, and marvels at his new life with “toys and clothes and bottles scattered everywhere.” While he admits his life has turned upside down, he thanks God for those changes. Young continues to sings about the two leading ladies in his life — his daughter and wife — in the album’s second track and his latest No. 1 single, “Lady.”
While Young included songs about his current life on the album, he also wrote songs about his past experiences and the experiences of his co-writers, which he admits required him to branch out creatively.
“I’ve always just written about what was going in on my life, but with this project, I couldn’t do that because you guys would have gotten lullabies,” Young shared with Sounds Like Nashville and other reporters. “I can’t just write eight songs about Presley and be like, ‘And all of you guys that are falling in love or dealing with heartbreak, just skip this record.’ The interesting thing writing for this project was that I had to write things that I wasn’t living in the moment, and it was a stretch, but it was a good stretch.”
Some of those songs include “Dear Me,” which forced Young to look back at the road he and wife Taylor took to find each other. The couple met in 2008 and went through a “handful of breakups” before eventually getting married in 2018. In “Dear Me,” the singer talks to his younger self, in the midst of heartbreak, and encourages him to press on. Young also confronts lost love in the album’s last track, “You Didn’t,” a matter-of-fact break up song that finds him coming to terms with the simple fact that his love interest doesn’t reciprocate his feelings.
“I think those breakup songs somehow hurt worse when nobody did anything wrong; it just didn’t work out. I think everybody’s had that,” says Young.
The album also includes plenty of up-tempo, feel-good tunes which still feature Young’s emotion-packed songwriting. Among these is his new single, “Not Yet,” co-written by Young, Kelly Archer and Justin Ebach. In this song, the singer paints a picture of the perfect night with a new love and desires for such a night to never end. Then there’s “Leave Me Alone,” which is the antithesis of “Dear Me,” as Young waits for an ex-love to finally exit his life. He turns the tempo up yet again in the flirty “You Got Away With It” and feels grateful for his life path in “This.”
As the third studio album from Young, who has earned seven consecutive singles with songs like “In Case You Didn’t Know” and “Here Tonight,” Weekends Look A Little Different These Days begins a new journey, but it’s one that continues to establish him as the genuine artist he’s proven to be.
“This is a very different chapter in my life, so the goal was just to capture that in eight songs or however many it was going to be,” says Young. “To capture that a little bit more, pull the curtain back a little bit further, and let the fans know that they’re going to continue to get a very honest, vulnerable me every time they come to a show or every time they buy a record.”
