Nashville singer-songwriter HARDY releases his new album “Quit”
“Quit!!”, HARDY’s third album in four years, explores the breadth and depth of modern country and rock pop inspirations.
HARDY: “Everyone knows a ‘Jim Bob’”
HARDY talks about his song “Jim Bob” before his performance at CMA Fest at Nissan Stadium on Sunday, June 9, 2024
Since the release of his album “The Mockingbird and the Crow” in 2023, HARDY has played country and rock music to over 5 million people.
He’s also one of Nashville’s busiest songwriters and is on pace to have three dozen No. 1 hits as a singer or songwriter by the age of 40.
It’s safe to assume that Quit!!, his third studio album in less than four years, released earlier this month, could include some of those chart hits.
After this success, his inspiration seems more limitless than ever.
Why?
He’s a rock star (no, really, with a confident song called “Rockstar”) with country pedigree making pop music at a time when we stream more country-inflected, rock-inflected pop than any other genre of music.
That was not always so.
On the topic of “Don’t give up” on the way to “Giving up!!”
Ten years ago, the creator, born Michael Hardy, graduated from Neshoba Central High School in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and Middle Tennessee State University. At the latter, he studied songwriting in the university’s prestigious Recording Industry Management program and received a bachelor’s degree in 2013.
After meeting Florida Georgia Line while still in college, he eventually joined Brad Clawson and CJ Solar along with Morgan Wallen to co-write and perform on their 2017 hit “Up Down.” A year later, he was signed to Big Loud Records.
After meeting Florida Georgia Line members Brad Clawson and CJ Solar in college, he joined the band along with Morgan Wallen to co-write and perform on their 2017 hit “Up Down.” A year later, he signed with Big Loud Records.
Sometime between 2013 and 2017, a man wrote the word “Quit” on a napkin while HARDY was singing at a songwriting competition in Nashville.
At the time, he was a broke, emotionally turmoiled songwriter who was struggling to make ends meet and harboring a grudge against time. This moment metaphorically reinforced a mindset that stemmed from his small-town Mississippi roots.
“I never left my neighborhood, but I burned it out and, if you ask me, I turned into something good,” he sings in the album’s title track.
HARDY adds anthemically, “So before you choose to hate, get to know a guy / He could end up a poet born to fly / He could end up a man of the people, damn what a scene, a glorified redneck / With a stack of awards on a napkin, a bored little bastard wrote to try and warn a guy / Maybe I’m just petty ’cause they’re just metal / Wait, but so am I.”
Collaboration with Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith
He is so stubbornly determined that he didn’t look up or take a breath in his professional life until he arrived at the Super Bowl in February.
This moment propelled his album and inspired his career.
Of course, there were moments when he paused to smell the metaphorical roses that success has brought him, but the spectacle of being surrounded by celebrities from all walks of life attending a Super Bowl may have been overwhelming for the artist, who attended the game with his wife, Caleigh, and manager, Troy “Tracker” Johnson.
One of those moments was when I saw Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer and later collaborator on the “Quit!!” album Chad Smith stepping out of a hotel elevator alone.
He introduced himself shyly.
Fast forward to entering the Super Bowl spectator suite at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, which he shared with friend and sometime collaborator Chad Kroeger – and yes, Chad Smith.
HARDY, aware of the happiness of the moment, took advantage of Kroeger’s connection – and the praise he had given Smith – to strike up a polite conversation. By the end of the game, they had exchanged phone numbers.
Two weeks later, Joey Moi, co-founder of Big Loud, producer of Nickelback and the man behind the scenes on “Quit!!”, suggested that HARDY call Smith to do the drum recordings for the album track “Good Girl Phase”.
“Deceptively simple” hymns
“The kind of nu-metal that Fred Durst (of Limp Bizkit) in particular created gave rise to a generation of artists and hits that reached more authentically into rap than most – and he did it without the basic sound losing its heavy metal and rock’n’roll roots,” says HARDY.
“The fact that he listens to my music, understands how it compares to his vision, and knows exactly what he could add to blend the two shows what a great artist he is,” he adds of Durst’s contribution to the album track “Soul4sale.”
It is important to note that the style of music that HARDY is trying to develop essentially comes from the period between 1995 and 2005, when the domestic American music industry distributed and sold more physical units than in any other era.
Thus, for all those involved, it is linked – in a benevolent or direct way – to their emotions and their existence.
“We are witnessing a return to an era that was defined by music made by and for a culture of angsty, pissed off, angry kids with an inferiority complex,” says HARDY.
“In 2024, however, that anger has been replaced by fear. Music, however, provides an outlet to let those emotions out. You can choose any of the many things happening in the world right now, and being able to cry or celebrate while screaming the lyrics to songs like those on this album definitely helps.”
These are catchy and melodic songs that are easy to sing along to due to their deceptively simple structure.
They are also simple because Quit! was an album that allowed Nashville’s vaunted songwriting community to finally devote themselves to writing hits similar to those they enjoyed from afar a quarter of a century ago.
“(Nashville’s) community is bringing out the (rock-y) stuff we’ve always loved on this album,” jokes HARDY, who credits producer Moi, who has been rooted in Nashville’s community for a generation, as the driving force in the room.
“Joey produced (Canadian rock band) Theory of a Deadman’s debut album in 2002. That album was my favorite record for two years. I don’t know how much new ground we can take that sound into 25 years later, but we’re going to try to rediscover how that music can inspire us in a bittersweet way.”
“Jim Bob” – The song of Jim Bob
HARDY is aware that he is a leading creative in an era defined by “mind-blowing” pop culture and music that, for the first time in half a century, is being viewed primarily through the lens of country, rural and western.
And so songs like “Jim Bob” – an honest, incredibly brutal tribute to rural America, smoking cheap cigarettes, drinking even cheaper beer, and squandering their leftover money on whiskey, ammunition, and the upkeep of an inherited 40-acre property – define part of the modern high point of American culture.
Along with “Sold Out,” the song represents the energetic highlight of his two-hour headliner set.
“People who ride ATVs and shoot guns need aggressive, raunchy country songs. I’m not one of them anymore, but I know they exist,” says HARDY, who describes himself as “a married man who lives near the Green Hills Mall in West Nashville” and not, as in 2018’s “Rednecker,” a grain-alcohol-swilling, gum-spitting, truck-driving bass fisherman who urinates in his front yard.
“If you write a song where the chorus is in the first person but the verses are in the third person, the audience can get more out of the song than I can. It’s a hype song. No matter where you come from, everyone knows a ‘Jim Bob’. Especially in America, people who are extremely stuck in their ways and sometimes behave silly deserve to be discussed – but not judged.”
HARDY’s artistic development
In less than a decade, HARDY has evolved in popular music and culture due to his extensive involvement in radically redefining country, pop and rock, and is more than just an “artist.” He is a successful country and hard rock musician who, because streaming has removed the genre from many conversations, has achieved pop star ubiquity for many music listeners whose tastes are born and evolved in the modern era.
He quickly makes a modest attempt to compare the artistic level he aspires to with his work – similar to the stars of the ’80s and ’90s Van Halen and Nine Inch Nails, and the arena and stadium rockers of the late ’70s Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Queen (he points to the four-year hiatus for the latter between “News of the World” and “Under Pressure”) – as a whole with the level of a coherent evolution of live art that simultaneously garners commercial and critical acclaim.
For one thing, that means releasing covers of Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg’s three-decade-old hip-hop classic “Gin and Juice,” and for another, surprising his wife with “Six Feet Under,” a song about how the hope of marrying her helped him survive a tour bus accident in October 2022 that left him with physical injuries that affected his mental health.
“It’s hard for me to understand that I have to feel gratitude for so many special moments,” adds the artist.
Living emotionally in a creatively fertile time of gratitude influences how he thinks about his future.
“There may never be a moment where I’m truly at my creative peak and feel completely comfortable with who I’ve become as an artist,” he says. “Pushing boundaries leads to moments that continue to impact music as a creative vehicle for everyone. Discovering the eternity (of the art of making music) is awesome. Picking up torches and rethinking ways we can expand the universe of music is special.”
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