Sam Hunt Says ‘Body Like a Back Road’ ‘Messed My Head Up’
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Country star Sam Hunt scored one of the biggest hits of last 10 years with “Body Like a Back Road,” helping supercharge the genre’s beat-driven evolution on a massive, 9x Platinum smash. But speaking on Audacy’s Superstar Power Hour with Katie Neal, the singer-songwriter revealed a secret about the track.
Hunt was on the show to talk about his current single “23” and how he’s now working on a whole new project, giving fans an update about when they can hear it. But first, he opened up about how scoring his game-changing hit changed the game. Incredibly, Hunt says “Body Like a Backroad” success was kind of an accident, and its success had an unexpected effect on his musical confidence.
First setting the stage for the mega-hit’s arrival, Hunt says he wasn’t initially a huge fan of “Body Like a Backroad.” A lot of friends even told him they didn’t think it was “him.”
“I got that reaction from quite few people, actually,” Hunt admits.
He goes on to say that when he and his team decided to release the track anyway, it was only because they literally had no other option. Hunt needed to go on tour as a headliner, but after scoring a few hits from his Montevallo album, he’d been on the road opening for other stars. “Body Like a Back Road” was the only thing he had written in that busy time, and so it was his only choice to put out. Luckily, necessity is the mother of invention.
“I hadn’t really worked on any new music, but we needed to put out new music if we were going to tour and [‘Body Like A Backroad’] was honestly just like one of the only songs I had written,” Hunt explains. “I was like ‘Well, I got this song, we could put this out, but it’s about the only option.’ So it was really out of necessity more than it was like ‘Oh, this is the one, I want to put this song out!’
“It really messed my head up,” Hunt continues with a revealing laugh. “Because now I’m like ‘Ok, I don’t know anything [about which songs will become hits].'”
Meanwhile, Hunt will get a chance to test his musical instints again very soon, as he heads toward the release of his third album. With his reflective single “23” rising up the radio charts, Hunt says he hopes to finish up his next album this spring. He’s cautiously expecting to drop another single as well, and says the project’s theme is one of “real adulthood.”
“It’s sort of that phase in life where for me, I got out of college, I moved to Nashville and into the real world, and there are relationships that exist from your youth, there’s new relationships,” he explains. “This is sort of the phase of [going into] real adulthood, where it’s like ‘Ok, people are getting married, people are starting to have kids now.’ It’s the next step past that youthful, carefree, it’s-all-gonna-work-out-one-day attitude.”
Sam Hunt’s current single “23” is out now and just outside the Top 10 of Billboard’s country radio chart. Earlier this month he announced a string of headlining live concert dates, which kick off February 10 in Scottsdale, Arizona.
