Not many people can say their first ever UK show was opening for Morgan Wallen in front of 20,000 country fans at The O2 in London – but then Larry Fleet isn’t most people.
Although he released his first album back in 2019, it was his breakthrough hit in 2021, ‘Where I Find God’, that propelled him to stardom. He followed that up with his 2023 LP ‘Earned It’ before recently becoming an independent artist and releasing his latest EP, ‘Somewhere In The South’, this June. Alongside that, he’s been regularly out on the road, including his recent trip to the UK which included a stop at The Long Road festival last weekend.
Ahead of his Long Road set, Laura Cooney caught up with Larry to chat about the response to the EP, his love for UK audiences, plans for the rest of 2025 and more.
So I guess the first thing to say is: Welcome to The Long Road!
Well, glad to be here. It's awesome.
How have you been finding it so far?
It's been great. This feels like a festival back home. Except the tents, the teepees or whatever you call them, yurts? Yeah, we've seen a few. It's been really cool though. Yeah, no doubt. And it seems like the crowd is really into it, which is awesome.
This is about the midway point of your UK tour – how’s that been going
Oh, I mean, I didn't know what to expect. You know, we’re trying it out. But Scotland, and Glasgow as a first show… I mean, you couldn't squeeze any more people in this thing. It was packed, and they sang every word. It was awesome here. And then, last night was in London, and same deal. Just people lined up down the street, trying to get in the place, so, they sang every word. That was one of the loudest I've ever heard people sing ‘Where I Find God' was actually in London last night. It was wild. I mean, that's the only two shows we had, then we got today. So, so far so good.
Are there any songs that are surprising you in terms of people’s reactions to them? Or any songs you’re particularly enjoying playing live at the moment?
Yeah, I've been trying out new stuff. So I’ve got a song called ‘Like You Used To' that dropped earlier this year. And we just played it for the first time over here. We added a couple new ones that we've never played. It's going over very well. And then last night, we had took ‘A Lotta Women' out of our set because In America, it just… it wasn't that they didn't like it, it just wasn't reacting very well. So I was like, “Let's try something else” but last night they were like, “Play ‘A Lotta Women!”. And so I played it and the place went nuts and I was like, “I guess we're gonna have to add it back to the set”.
But I mean, of course ‘Where I Find God' has been the foundation that’s built my career, and of course, that goes over well, not surprised about that one. But I have been surprised at how loud they get on singing it and they've learnt our set. They've learnt the songs. It's been very cool. And a couple of emotional points too, just from being in a different country and so far from home and see people that that love it, you know.
You’ve been over to the UK a few times now. What is it that keeps you coming back over here?
Well, being straight up, I've had a great time and I love it over here. I mean, it's summertime and at home it's 100 degrees or 37 degrees Celsius, I've learnt. And so it's very hot but like, over here, it's amazing.
But everybody's for the most part has been very nice and I just love it. I love the old homes and the architecture. And I wanna build this for my family to come over with me. So if I can make it to a point, which I think we're getting there, that I can have them with me and we come over in the summer or the winter and spend a month and play shows and have fun, and show my family this, that’s my goal.
It's a few weeks now since the ‘Somewhere In The South’ EP came out. How’s the reaction been to that so far?
It's been great. It's funny because they started playing it over here on the radio a little bit, and I was telling Baylen [Leonard] earlier I watched the iTunes UK charts. A bunch of my albums and stuff are now in the top 50 in the UK charts, and so they're loving it. And I didn't really understand – like ‘Somewhere In The South’, clearly I wrote about growing up in the South of America. And so I didn't know how that would translate here but evidently people are into that.
And if they don't live it, they want to. So a guy told me this from here, he's like “it's kind of a romantic thing to think about the South”. You know, I grew up in Tennessee, so I was in the dead centre of the South there. So I mean, that's how I grew up and I think people either want that or they also relate to it or want to relate to it.
So it's been going awesome. And the whole EP has been really good. When I made that, I just wanted four songs after I was done with Big Loud [Larry’s previous record label]. So I wanted this year to fill out a few songs and say, “Yeah, I'm not just this one thing. Here's here's this style of song, here's this. And so here's my influences put into four or five different songs”. I got other stuff I’m working on, but the four that I put out for that EP, I wanted to showcase the different sides of me. And I think it’s done well and it's kind of did that good. I think it seems to be reacting well over here.
You made a video for the title track as well which you basically crowdsourced from fans – tell us a bit about that..
[laughs] Yeah, yeah. Well, so we went out to a buddy of mine’s farm and we just got on the tractor, and so I had my family with me and we were just doing stuff that we do, fishing and hanging out. And then I was like, “Man, this song is bigger than me, I think a lot of people are gonna relate to it even if they're not in the South”.
So I just wanted to ask for fan videos because I want to see them with their family or whatever they're doing. And it was so cool to see We had 1300 videos sent in, and we can’t use 1300 videos. So we were able to save a lot of them. We're going to try to use them for other things. And really bring in the crowd or the fan base, to be a part of it. So I thought that was just really cool to see, but we can only use a few to put in there. But that was pretty crazy, 1300 videos [laughs]
I also wanted to ask you about your Gospel Song Sunday that you do on Instagram. Can you tell us how that came about? And are there any particular favourites of yours from that series?
Oh, well, so that's how this thing really got going. Because I would go to church and whenever I would leave church, whatever song we played that day in church, that kind of stuck with me, I’d just come home and play it. Because my buddy Jake Owen was like, “You need to build up your social media” and I didn't have very many followers at the time. So that was how I could put content out and show who I was and what I was into.
And so I started Gospel Song Sunday, and it was literally I just thought up ‘Gospel Song Sunday’, and just put it out and then it became a thing. And so every week, it just popped off. And then that's how “Where I Find God” came about because Connie Harrington, that I wrote it with, She had seen Gospel Song Sunday and said “I got this thing, let’s write it”. So “Where I Find God” was her title. And so we went in and wrote together.
But the Gospel Song Sunday, definitely how it started was from church. And then, as I've been travelling, it makes it harder to stay on top of it. But the other day it was Sunday, I just got home and I was like, “I should do a Gospel Song Sunday”, so I did a Cody Johnson song I never heard before. And it was very good. So I did that and put it out and it was one of the highest reacting things that we've done in a while. So people liked it. And I love gospel music
But the other side of your question… I have so many. There's a song called “Red Letters” Zac Crowder did that is one of my favourites. And then all-time favourite was a buddy of mine, Zach Williams. We've done some stuff together and he had a song called “To The Table”. That's one of my favourites. I call it a gospel… it's more working man gospel than anything. But then your old school stuff. “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”, “Will The Circle Be Unbroken”, things like that, I relate to because that's what I grew up playing, but that would be some of my favourites.
I know you’re a big fishing guy so I wanted to ask – are there any particularly memorable stories you have from your fishing trips?
Well, so let me start off by saying I'm deathly, deathly terrified of helicopters. And so we have to fly to British Columbia. So we're like way up, close to Alaska on a fishing trip the other day. So I fly up there. We have to fly to the middle of the country, get on another plane, fly to Canada, get on another flight. It took forever to get there. We finally get there. We're in the middle of nowhere, really. It's very remote. The place we stayed had to be ran by generators and stuff because there's no power. So I get there, we're out in the middle of the woods, there's bears and everything all around us.
So the next morning, we get up and they're like, “Hey, you're gonna get on this helicopter and you're gonna fly to this fishing spot”. And I was like, “Oh my God, what?!” And the the weather was pretty decent, so I sucked it up and I got on that helicopter and we flew And it was great getting there. We landed into this patch of grass and a jet boat pulls up to pick me up. And then we went up… literally, the water was so shallow that you could see fish swimming upstream. So I mean, maybe half a foot deep and we’re in a boat, going up it. Pretty crazy. Stuff you see on TV.
When we get up there and we're fishing, we had two grizzly bear cubs come, probably [about] 40 yards away. Don't know where the mama was at, but that was pretty crazy. And then on the way back we flew over a glacier, on top of a mountain, in a helicopter. And it was pretty shaky. When I got out of the helicopter, I was like, “I'm not getting back in”. On the way back the weather got really bad. It was very sketchy. That whole trip itself, I think is pretty crazy. And then another group as well as us, they seen 12 grizzly, bears in one day and wolves and all. I mean, it's crazy stuff.
But the helicopter ride than having to get in a jet boat. And then I caught a… it's called a chum. It's a salmon. And so it was about 22 pounds, which was a really, really big fish. And then they have the pink ones. I had a picture online, I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but it had that huge hump in its back and that's called a pinky or pink. So that one was probably like 10 or 12 pounds, which is a pretty good one. No world records or anything but, I mean, a 20 pound salmon, not bad for me. First time I've ever caught one.
What does the rest of the year look like for you?
Yeah, we got a fall tour in the US, it's going to be coast to coast. We're even on the west coast at the end of the year for a couple weeks there, which we haven't done a lot there. So it's going good. But I've recorded nine songs for a new album and then I've got a few more that I'm trying to… I write songs every week, so I got so many songs. But I'm trying to build the album to all make sense. It's not just like “Here, I just threw a bunch of songs together”. I want it to make sense, so I'm taking my time. I've been working on it for four or five months now – actually longer than that. I just want it to be right. That's why we put out the four songs this year, just to have some stuff going on.
I've got that going on and then I've got another concept record that I'm working on. So I'm just doing a lot of different things and it's based around music. I'm just staying in the studio now. And now that I'm independent, I can do that. We’re talking to a lot of people, a lot of things are happening right now on the business side of things.
But my main focus is putting music out for people, and I want to put together really awesome records that people like and they're going to relate to and at least feel something from it. And I’m self-producing it too, so that’s kind of fun, with my own band. So what you hear live is what you’re gonna hear on a record too.
Have you got plans to come back to the UK after this trip?
Yes. Well, we're already talking about it. That's kind of my goal, is to bring my family back. My kids just started school and so we got to figure out how to get here on their times off. So we're looking at the earlier part of the year. But then now, we might do like a block for three or four weeks or something in the summertime when they're not in school, and come over and do that, or maybe Christmas time. We’re working it out. That’s not my forte. But we got people that that's their job and they're good at it. I let them do their job, but we're definitely coming over next year for sure.
Interview by Laura Cooney. Larry Fleet’s latest EP, ‘Somewhere In The South’, is out now.
