Larry Fleet is a true troubadour with an unbreakable connection to his roots. Raised on a rich tapestry of musical legends including Merle Haggard, Otis Redding, Willie Nelson, and Marvin Gaye, Fleet’s upbringing laid the foundation for his distinctive sound and lyrical prowess. Fleet’s discography reads like a collection of life’s most poignant moments. His 2019 debut album, fittingly titled ‘Workin’ Hard,’ introduced the world to his musical journey. In 2021, he paid homage to his musical influences with ‘Stack of Records,’ a tribute that showcased his ability to honor tradition while forging his own path and now third album, ‘Earned It’ shines a light on the hard-working, working class life experiences that helped pave the way towards who he is today. We were thrilled to grab 30 minutes with him to talk all about it.
Great to speak to you Larry, thank you for your time today. It’s a busy time so I appreciate it with the release of ‘Earned It’ and the start of Labor Day weekend for you tomorrow.
Yes sir! Man, the high school that I went to are having a home football game so we’re going to go and do that tomorrow and then pretty much everyone in our neighbourhood is cooking at some point this weekend so we’ll get out on the four wheelers, ride to people’s houses and eat till we can’t breathe! (laughing)
Let’s jump in and talk about the album. Once you’d written ‘Earned It’, the song, with Connie Harrington, was that always going to be the title or were there other ones up for consideration?
I wrote that song with Connie a while back now but always thought it was a good one. We put the record together and then the label was, like, what do you want to call it? I’ve been blessed to be able to do this thing that I do but I’ve had to work really hard to get here. I played the bars and came up the old fashioned way: having to fight and fight and fight to get noticed and even when you do you have to make more music & tour and keep up what you’ve achieved.
Before the record deal I was doing construction work and having to work really hard at that, that is what my family do. We are good, blue collar, hard working folks. My grandaddy was a logger for a long time, so working hard is all I’ve ever seen. We didn’t have a bunch of money in our family and what we did have we had to work hard to get. My band does the same thing: we practice and we work hard to be the best that we can be and I wanted that to be the theme of the album – we worked hard and we earned our success.
It’s not a concept album but it’s an album with a strong concept behind it.
It reflects where I am in life. ‘Daddy Don’t Drink’, for example, is about where I am on that journey then there’s the fun songs about meeting a girl, like ‘Takin’ the Long Way’. That was a kind of nod back to Vince Gill and that 90s style. With the last record I did, ‘Stack of Records’, we had a song called ‘Highway Feet’ which was a Jerry Reed type song which I like giving a nod to.
Take a song like ‘Two Beer Plan’ for example. When I met my wife I was in college and had a mattress on the floor and we went from there. I’ve lived the personal experience of a lot of these songs. That’s the concept behind it. There’s a bunch of other people out there just like me and I hope they see themselves and some of their own stories in my songs.
You wrote ‘Where I Find God’ with Connie Harrington as well. What is it about her and you working together that creates this magic?
The first song we ever wrote together was ‘Where I Find God’ and it was the first time we had ever met! She already had the title and thought that it would be a good idea to write it with me as I was doing a lot of Gospel stuff at the time. We’ve been friends ever since. We write well together because we are so comfortable with each other.
With ‘Earned It’ Connie had just bought a lake house and the first song that was written there was that one. We’re both title people, so we’ll start with the title and go from there, and we were digging through our phones and found that we both had the title ‘Earned It’ stored away! We had to write it!
We both believe in the same thing and we like writing these songs that take a little bit and that you have to dig for and work at but you get a really good song out of it every time.
You have 11 co-writes on the album and 10 outside cuts. What draws you to, and interests you, in outside cuts and how many would you say you listened to for this project?
Oh, man, I probably listened to 40 to 50 songs at least and that was with people weeding them out. I’ve pretty much always written my own songs and have always been a writer on them because nobody really knew who I was ! (laughing) Now that people know a little about who I am and know what sort of style and sound I like I get pitched a lot more songs! The ones that are really good album songs, not necessarily the ones directed towards radio, those are the ones we were looking for this album.
We live in the best place in world for the best songwriters in the world. I wish I could have cut 50 of them, they were so good but I gravitated towards the ones that I wish I had written that suited what I wanted to say the best. Take ‘Devil Music’, for example. I didn’t write that one but I loved it when I heard it and it spoke to that growing up experience of listening to music that our parents didn’t want us to listen to – I identified with that right away.
It’s great to support the songwriting community too. I want other artists to record songs that I write as well. We’re all in this together.
It’s a huge album at 21 songs. I know Big Loud, with artists like Ashley Cooke and Morgan Wallen, like these big projects. Did you set out for it to be this big or did the songs just keep coming and coming?
I told them before Morgan’s ‘Dangerous’ album that I wanted to do a double album. People that tend to listen to my music pretty much push play and just it run. I’m definitely more of an album or a ‘body of work’ artist so we wanted to tap into that on ‘Earned It’. I want to put out everything I write, man, I would put out a record every week if I could! (laughing) I wanted 20 songs and then one, ‘Tennessee On You,’ came in at the last minute that Joey Moi had worked up into something that would fit on the album and so that song was a hail mary that made it onto the album on the last day.
The first time I heard ‘Lucky Dog’ I thought it sounded like HARDY’s penmanship. What drew you to that song?
I love HARDY too. We’re good buddies and he’s an amazing songwriter. That one got pitched to me but I didn’t know who wrote it when I first heard it and I said, ‘That one sounds like HARDY,’ just like you did! Nobody said anything and I said it 2-3 more times! He has his own thing and I have my own thing but we kinda met in the middle there. He’s really hard to sing after on his songs because he has different phrasing to me and the melodies he uses are a little different to mine too so it was a challenge for me to do that song, which made it fun.
HARDY is great at twisting things and plays on words. He makes you think one thing and then goes a different way a lot of the time and that’s what ‘Lucky Dog’ does. It takes a couple of listens for some folks to realise who that song is about!
There’s a lot of very personal songs on the album. You’ve mentioned ‘Daddy Don’t Drink,’ for example. Then there’s songs like ‘Things I Take For Granted.’ Is there one song on the album that means the most to you above any other?
‘Things I Take For Granted’ is very personal. I wrote that song out on the road in the bus with some buddies – on the same day that we wrote ‘Man Made a Bar’ that Morgan Wallen and Eric Church ended up recording. We were talking about being home and the things that you take for granted that you don’t know you miss till you got out on tour – the little things, right? And we got up on the bus and wrote the song!
My little boy just turned four the other day and my little girl is two and I don’t know where the time has gone! My boy rides his bicycle now without training wheels and I don’t know when that happened, it just did and you don’t necessarily pay attention all the time because life is so busy. That’s what ‘Things I Take For Granted’ is about, I’m living that one every day so it’s probably the most personal song on there.
‘Daddy Don’t Drink’ was a very personal one too. Then there’s songs I didn’t write, too, like ‘Grow.’ I think that that one is a really special song. I’m a sucker for ‘family’ songs and I think a lot of the people that listen to my music are in the same age group and are going through the same life experiences too. People relate to what I’m putting out there because they are in the same boat as me.
Picking up on ‘Daddy Don’t Drink.’ Doing what you do, is it hard to stay sober and do the people around you help to keep things on the straight and narrow?
For me, I didn’t have to go to rehab or anything, there wasn’t a problem. I just decided to stop drinking. Nobody can force me to do something that I don’t want to do. I know that temptation is strong for a lot of people and working at night in clubs and arenas alcohol is always around but a lot of my band don’t drink now as well. There’s a couple of guys who might have a whiskey after the show and have a night cap before they go to bed but there’s nothing really else happening.
I miss beer and the social aspect of hanging out with my buddies around it so we now drink non-alcoholic beer. It’s great to crack open a cold one after a show and talk about what just happened and we still do that its just that the beer is non-alcoholic now. I don’t miss being drunk at all – I miss the taste but I don’t miss the after effects.
There’s so many good songs on this album. How are you going to decide what to send to radio or what to make videos for? ‘Ain’t Mad at Jesus’ is a single for me. ‘Try Texas’ too. ‘Two Beer Plan’ needs a life outside the album alongside so many other of these songs.
That’s a very good question! I’m with you in that I hear something in ‘Ain’t Mad at Jesus’. I’m biased because I wrote a lot of them but I think a lot of these songs could be singles or radio songs! (laughing) When it comes to the radio stuff, however, who knows? I thought that ‘Where I Find God’ was going to be this massive hit and it got pulled off radio at 41 on the charts, which blew my mind. I play it now, I played it the other night and 10,000 people held their phones up for it and sang along, so go figure! (laughing)
The record label get stats and analytics and they kinda go with what they think might work. We’ll see what happens, there’s some good material there so surely we can find a radio song, right? I let them do their job and they let me do mine! (laughing)
You’ve had a busy summer out on the road with Parker McCollum and Jon Pardi and headline shows of your own. Was Red Rocks the most spectacular place you played or was there somewhere else?
Last year I was out with Morgan Wallen a lot and we did Madison Square Garden in New York and Bridgestone Arena in Nashville, they were pretty special places. Red Rocks was definitely one of those places we were all looking forward to and when we got there it was different to what I had in my mind. I’d only ever seen fan videos of people looking down at the stage, right? When I got there and looked out in the other direction, it was so beautiful. The sound system they have there is crazy.
We have a little place called ‘The Caverns’ just outside of Nashville which I played last spring. You are actually inside a cave and I love that place, it’s a natural stage. In a couple of weeks we’ve got my first headline show at the Ryman here in Nashville, which is going to be very special too. There are always milestones and sometimes you don’t even know something is going to be a milestone until you do it!
Talking of milestones – we can expect to see you over in the UK in December, supporting Morgan Wallen at his show at the O2 arena.
My first time across the pond! We are trying to figure out if I can play a show or two around the Sunday show with Morgan but the booking agents are struggling a little bit because everything looks like its full. After the show might be a better time. It’s a long trip so I want to be able to come over and do more than just the show with Morgan. I want to see everything and play as many shows as I can and I know that the UK is a good market for me. If I have to stand on a street corner and just play somewhere, I might do that! (laughing)
Check out our review of Larry Fleet’s ‘Earned It’ album right here.
