Country star stays true to himself
For the first time, Sam Hunt — country music’s biggest pop crossover hope since Taylor Swift — finally got a chance to talk.
Not in the form of a media interview to plug a new single or a bit of “is everybody having a good night?” banter between party songs. Instead, he sat down onstage on June 1, acoustic guitar in hand, before the thousands flocking to the kickoff concert of his first major headlining tour, to explain who he is and what he wants to be.
“I never get a chance to really sit down and kick it with y’all,” Hunt told the screaming fans who chose him over watching the hometown Cleveland Cavaliers in Game 1 of the NBA Finals.
In a nearly 10-minute monologue, he defended his signature (and polarizing), blend of country and R&B, and turned it into a call for tolerance. This kind of politically tinged commentary, gentle as it was, is rare among young Nashville artists; and it perfectly captured why Hunt, 32, remains an outlier even throughout his meteoric rise over the past three years.
Five No. 1 hits and a Grammy-nominated debut album later (Montevallo, 2014), Hunt’s early triumphs have allowed him to dismiss the haters and make his own rules in an otherwise regimented genre. He dropped a surprise track at midnight on New Year’s Eve, and he launched a massive headlining tour with no sophomore album yet in sight. And he’s talking onstage like this: “No generation has ever been as culturally integrated as you guys are,” Hunt told the Blossom Music Center audience, which was largely millennial (and, yes, as overwhelmingly white as most country shows). “Y’all don’t pay attention to genres of music. You don’t pay attention to genres of people.”