Home for you is still Nashville? How is that going for you?
I love Nashville, conceptually. I grew up in a small town outside of Phoenix called Casa Grande, Arizona, and it is like a dairy farming hub in the middle of nowhere. There are a lot of things about Nashville that almost feel like idyllic versions of where I grew up – like, instead of being in the desert, I can go fishing before work. But it's Tennessee, and it just won't stop being so fucking Tennessee. It's crazy. Not to say that I don't have community and people I love, but it's been a tough thing to navigate. I don't think I'm naturally vocal. Sometimes I’m driven by the feeling of, “If I don't speak up, the next person that's in my shoes will have to deal with this thing.” But it's chill; it's fine, it's cool. I never go to Broadway [Nashville’s “Honky Tonk Highway”], so I don't really have a lot of problems.
Let's talk about your community there, and the people that you surround yourself with musically.
Even though I've played massive venues and met some of my heroes, I still feel new. I don't know how many people who are new to Nashville have their stuff in the Country Music Hall of Fame, and I think I have to let my brain catch up to what I've accomplished. The cool thing about Nashville is it's so communal, in that writing sense. There are a lot of people who just want to be healthy and make good music, and they don't care if they're involved or not. I think that's so rare.
Now you've shown people what you have to offer.
It's more like, when someone else is in the driver's seat, being able to go, “I like when my voice sounds like this,” and having a year's worth of learning to understand what I want to do moving forward. There's a universe in which people would take that poorly, and they'd be like, “Well, no. I'm your producer.” I had a great conversation with another producer that I love, Dan Wilson [Tape Op #116], and he said, “You're just us at a different age.”
You’ve also mentioned having been influenced by hip-hop, and there's a whole methodology there too.
Yes, definitely. For me, collaboration is less about clout, and more, “Who do I care about and how can I highlight them?” On this newest record, there's this rapper [Brian Brown] in Nashville who I love. Then there’s also Maren Morris, who's been one of my good friends. We have had so many conversations about the various conflicts going on in the world – genocide in Palestine, Sudan, Congo – and my parents are from Nigeria, which also has a complex history with violence and war. I wrote this song called “No Country” and I sent it to her, because this is some stuff that we've been talking about. How do we encourage everybody to care for everybody in this moment? Islamophobia, antisemitism, homophobia, and racism: How do you cut those things at the root? Having Maren on that song, to me, is like, “That's my friend and an artist I respect, an artist whose music I love.” That's where collaboration shows up in my recent work, whereas before it was a way to say, "I’m on par with this person."
You have this background of sharing music with your dad. Are there any sounds that you've come to explore where he's not with you on that?
