Joey Hendricks Shares the Story Behind ‘Top Drawer’

Rising country star Joey Hendricks shared a piece of himself with fans through his five-song EP, Between the Clouds. Released March 12, the collection includes the deeply personal song “Top Drawer,” inspired by a visit his childhood home. Hendricks reflects on the initial idea for the moving track in a new video called “Behind the Song,” premiering exclusively on Sounds Like Nashville today (4/14).

“My song ‘Top Drawer’ is one of my favorite songs on the EP. I’d gone home for Christmas and my parents had left a lot of stuff in my room that I grew up in the same and I had this Zippo lighter with a Playboy bunny on it, old pictures of me and my friends, old concert stubs. I brought it back to my cowriters in Nashville and I realized I’d never kind of heard a song about that, and so that was what we did. We wrote the song called ‘Top Drawer.'”

“Lighters up, sun setting over Red Rocks / With old friends I don’t see as much / I’m kissing Janie in the middle of ‘Dream On’ / Swore we were never breaking up / Damn, it takes me back / When I go back home / All the good and bad / In the top drawer,” he sings in a verse of the nostalgic track.

Sharing in own life experiences is what drew Hendricks to country music in the first place. “I think country music as a pot, and the ingredients are everybody’s influences,” he shared with SLN of the genre’s wide array of sounds. “But at the end of it, it remains country by the fact that it’s [all] storytelling-driven and lyric-driven type of songs. To me, that’s what I love about it.”

Hendricks’ Between The Clouds EP, featuring “Top Drawer” and his breakout single “Yours Or Mine,” is available for purchase or streaming now.