Corey Kent may have been a performer for a long time – he was just 11 when he started out as the lead singer of a touring Western swing band in his home town of Buxby, Oklahoma – but it’s safe to say 2022 was his breakthrough year, culminating in 2023 with ‘Wild as Her’ providing him with his first number one hit and debut album, ‘Blacktop.’
The path to success hasn’t always been easy for Kent. After losing a publishing deal in Nashville in 2019, Kent moved his family to Texas and paused his career for a while due to the pandemic. He eventually found himself working for a time pouring concrete to make ends meet before finding success with his version of ‘Wild As Her’, a sleeper hit that left Nashville labels scrambling to sign him. ‘Blacktop’ is the culmination of a long journey for this interesting and authentic artist at the start of his major label career and we were thrilled to grab some time with him to talk all about it.
Thank you for your time today, Corey. ‘Blacktop’ is such a great album, one of the strongest debuts we’ve heard in a while.
Thank you so much, that means a lot. I poured a lot into this album. I wanted it, originally, to be a little bigger project than it is but I feel like it’s a tight album, there’s no fat on it at all.
I grew up in the 70s and 80s listening to albums in full, no shuffle or skipping. It does feel like a very tight album in terms of a cohesive project redolent of those eras. Is that what you wanted with ‘Blacktop’?
Yes I did. There are certain artists that people care about that sort of thing from. It’s a new age right now and people are consuming music in different ways but I think our fans are die-hard fans. It might not be the most massive fan base out there but they want to listen to the whole record in the right way so we definitely put a lot of effort into the running order.
A lot of what I do is based on the guys I look up to and the best Country record that I’ve ever heard is ‘Chief’ by Eric Church. That has great sequencing and something like that is important in how you enjoy the record. That’s how I want my records to feel.
Congratulations on the success of ‘Wild As Her’. What was it like to secure a number one at this point of your career and did it surpass your expectations?
Oh man! That song surpassed every expectation I had for sure. When I recorded it I was working at a pavement company in Dallas and we put it out independently. It got us a record deal and a number one slot on the charts! We had ten or twelve offers off the back of that song in terms of deals.
The cool part about my journey is that it is entirely fan drive. Word of mouth then the song lands us a deal and the fans are still consuming it so much that it got taken to radio and then it goes all the way to number one at radio. It’s still having its biggest consuming days on streaming now over a year and a half after it was released independently.
I had goals that I set myself in 2020 that seemed a little ridiculous at the time for someone in my position back then. I didn’t even have a booking agent at the time! (laughing) and all of those goals have happened, for which I’m so grateful for.
You fronted your first band back in Oklahoma at 11 years old. Would you say you were a confident child and how was music so prominent in your life back then?
Man, good question. I don’t know whether I was any more confident than the next kid. I was just trying to find out what I was good at. I grew up playing all the sports and I was good enough at those to make all the teams and play but I wasn’t the stand out athlete or star in any of them but what stood out to me was that music was the only thing that I enjoyed practising.
I loved playing sports but I hated the practise of them whereas I loved practising music. It was the only effortless thing that I did. I had to work hard at it and it was mainly hard work and muscle memory but my confidence grew at music.
I’m quite an introvert so getting up on stage at 11 years old was terrifying but like anything, if you rehearse it enough it becomes second nature. At that point I didn’t have to worry about the music part anymore but then I needed to learn how to entertain people. I’ve put in tens of thousands of hours stage time over the last decade of my life in order to be able to do that.
At what point did the dawning realisation that you needed to move to Nashville begin to happen?
It was pretty evident to me at 16 years old. The band had split up because everyone else was going to college. I was going to go back to being a normal high school kid because I was the youngest in the group but then I had a chance encounter with Willie Nelson that carved out the decision in my mind that I wasn’t supposed to just do the ‘normal’ thing. It also convinced me that I might have put in the hours as a singer and performer but I wasn’t there yet as a writer and nobody else was going to write good songs for a no-name kid from Oklahoma but me so less than a year after that day I packed up everything I had and moved to Nashville.
What happened after that?
I’ve had a crazy, winding path. I moved to Nashville for a year and then my dad really wanted me to go back to school. He’s an attorney and really equated success with having a degree. There was two conversations I had that made me go back to school after the year in Nashville. One was with my dad and the other was with Garth Brooks, which was crazy. He was retired and living in Oklahoma at that time and I met him through the music scene and told him all about the pressure I was coming under to leave Nashville and go to college. He said, ‘Man, Nashville will always be there and if you haven’t lived any life, you won’t be able to write any real songs that people will relate to.’ He advised me to go to college and get the ammunition to write great songs that people care about and then go back to Nashville after.
So at 18 I moved back to Oklahoma and went to Oklahoma State University. Two years in I was touring, skipping classes to play shows and doing what I could to graduate early. I then moved back to Nashville because I found out I could finish my degree on line and I felt like I could do both things, get my degree and build a music career.
In my freshman year at college I’d met a girl who would become my wife and we now have three kids together, which prompted a final move to Texas, and that was entirely to chase my now wife! (laughing)
‘Man of the House’ is such a raw song. What did your family think about it the first time they heard it?
Nobody saw that one coming! (laughing) I needed to address something that nobody knew I was feeling. My dad kinda, unintentionally, became the villain of that song, right? I have a great relationship with my dad now but it wasn’t always that way, we’ve rebuilt a lot over the years and have both grown and matured but it was a tough conversation that I had to have with him. I basically said, ‘Look, just because I felt this way as a kid doesn’t mean I have ill-will towards you now.’
I was very careful to write the song but not mention the dad or what he’d done. I wanted to respect my dad and I also wanted to make sure that people could insert their own situations into the story. Maybe their dads had died in the military or they’d never met their dad, you know? The main character of the song is the kid – it’s easy for people to hear it and put themselves in the parents’ position but that’s not what the song is about. It’s the boy. It’s his story.
I’m a big fan of ‘BiC Flame’ – can’t wait to hear that song live. Do you have the old soul that you sing about in the song?
I don’t know whether I feel like I have an old soul but I get told I have by other people all the time! (laughing) In my mind I’m 21 and it’s weird that I am allowed to drink but I’m 28 and I have three kids! (laughing) It’s maybe the ideals that I hold to that make me old fashioned. Love. Hard work. Respect. It’s my mindset alliance that maybe makes me an old soul I guess. I know who I am enough to be able to do things the way I want to do them and not necessarily do what other people in my generation are doing.
Maybe there’s some maturity that came along with becoming a father that I stopped caring what people thought of me as much and that doesn’t happen for most people until later in their 30s and 40s. I do what I think is right for my family and I want my kids to look up to me. If that’s not cool to the rest of the world, that’s OK by me. That’s where the line in the song comes from, ‘the world can go do its thing and I’ll go do mine.’ With social media right now, everybody wants to be accepted but that’s not my goal in life. My goal is to do right by family and love people well and that’s not always the popular choice. That’s what the song is about.
‘Hood of that Car’ has possibly got the most infectious chorus I’ve heard this year so far.
Oh man, thank you. I recently met Ashton Kutcher and Scooter Braun at Stagecoach – Ashton said that ‘Hood of That Car’ should have been in the set when it wasn’t. We’re at that point now, and it’s a great problem to have, that we have so much music that our fans want to hear that we can’t play everything! I have a lot of people coming up to me after shows going, ‘Dude, you didn’t play my favourite song!’
“Hood of That Car’ is like a John Cougar Mellencamp song to me, that’s what I feel about that song. It’s a great nostalgia song. It’s blue-jean Rock ‘n’ Roll from the 70s and 80s and I love that era. I wish it had been the world I grew up in to a certain extent.
Do you feel any pressure in choosing the radio follow up to ‘Wild As Her’ or is it something you are not going to worry about?
Yeah, a little. We have a lot of people that depend on me to take home money for their families and I want to be able to keep providing for them to do that. There’s pressure with being on a major label too. When you are an independent artist, if you take a massive swing at something and strike out nobody cares but a strike out when you’re a major label artist costs effort and money and people use you as an example of what not to do, right?
We hit a home run with ‘Wild as Her’ but you can’t do that if you’re not swinging for the fences, that’s my theory. The mentality that got us here is what we have to stick with and we have to trust ourselves and we’re going to ruffle the feathers of traditional Country radio a little along the way. That’s OK. We’re a band based out of Texas and Oklahoma and we’re doing it a little differently. We would never have got to where we are today by asking ourselves ‘what do people want to hear,’ the reality of what we do is say to ourselves, ‘what do we love to make,’ and then we hope people come along on the journey with us.
‘Something’s Gonna Kill Me’ was a really great differentiator for me from ‘Wild As Her’. ‘BiC Flame’ is also a great follow up song. I don’t know how either would do at radio but if they solidify my brand and resonate with the fans it would seem like they would be the next obvious choices.
You’re touring with Jason Aldean a huge amount this summer. How does a father of three manage to pull that off!
(laughing) I’ll let you know at the end of the tour! My wife is a really strong woman and we’ve decided to home school our oldest girl for a while to buy ourselves some more time for us to travel together as a family. We’ve also got really creative about looking at opportunities to tour and yet keep the family together. Last week I had a show down in San Antonio and we left a few days early and made a family trip of it.
Any successful marriage in music is based on the real rock star being the one that is at home. That’s the harder, thankless job. I’m really excited for the Aldean tour, he’s a family friendly guy and it will be great to see how a guy at his level keeps his family together and is a good husband and father. We’re in it together!
When the time is right we can’t wait to see you back in the UK again. It was great to see you at the C2C festival last March.
We have some stuff in the works and have some offers out right now. It was our first trip outside of America and we loved it. We’ll come back as soon as we can.
