COUNTRY HIT-MAKER IS READY TO ROCK
SINGER-SONGWRITER HARDY MIXES GENRES IN NEW ALBUM
Michael Hardy wanders into the bar at L.A.’s Troubadour on a recent morning and catches sight of some heroic-looking scuzzbuckets on the wall.
“What’s that say?” he asks, pointing a skullringed finger toward a framed flyer advertising a Guns N’ Roses gig at the Troubadour in the mid-1980s.
In a few hours, this 32-year-old singer with a dozen No. 1 hits under his belt would take the same West Hollywood stage that once hosted GNR, then zip up Doheny Drive to play a second sold-out show at the Roxy.
His tour arrives at the House of Blues in Anaheim on March 10, and he’ll play July 14 and 15 at San Diego’s Petco Park supporting Morgan Wallen.
Hardy, who performs under his last name, didn’t ascend through the Sunset Strip’s storied hard-rock scene. His success has come on the country charts with songs he wrote for other acts like Blake Shelton’s “God’s Country,” Florida Georgia Line’s “Simple,” and a string of tunes by his good buddy Wallen that includes “More Than My Hometown” and “Sand in My Boots.” In 2020 he scored his first No. 1 as an artist with “One Beer.”
“Hardy has a way of taking something that sounds familiar but adding a flavor that only he can bring,” Wallen said. “His instincts are just almost perfect. I don’t know anyone touching him when it comes to those lyrical qualities.”
Yet with his new album, “The Mockingbird & the Crow,” Hardy is leaning into the rock music he says he loved before he ever thought about writing for Nashville. Released last month, the 17-track LP is split into halves: eight polished country tunes and eight jock-jammy aggro-rock tunes, the two sides connected by a title cut that gradually shifts from plaintive strums to fuzzed-out riffs.
Recording artist Hardy performs at the Troubadour in Los Angeles.
So far, Hardy’s foray into rock is paying off. “The Mockingbird & the Crow” debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s country albums chart — the only LP other than Wallen’s blockbuster “Dangerous” to reach the peak since July — while “Jack,” a moody single narrated from the perspective of a bottle of whiskey, is climbing the rock charts.
But the rock sounds also point to Hardy’s upbringing in small-town Mississippi, where his dad introduced him to Led Zeppelin and Pearl Jam before he discovered Puddle of Mudd and Linkin Park and P.O.D. for himself on MTV.
“Country music was corny to me,” he said. “You
couldn’t bang your head to it.” Asked whether he identified with the adolescentmale rage coursing through turn-of-the-millennium nü-metal, Hardy scoffs.
“Nah, dude. I didn’t even understand half the lyrics. I was going to church on Sunday and going to Little League baseball practice, then getting home and putting my headphones on and listening to ‘Break your (expletive) face tonight!’ ”
he says, quoting Limp Bizkit’s era-defining “Break Stuff.”
A naturally gifted writer who excelled in English class, Hardy began to change his mind about country music thanks to the deeply crafty tunesmithing of Brad Paisley and Eric Church, who was “the first country artist I heard that appealed to good ol’ boys who grew up like I did, deer hunting and fishing and all that stuff.”
After high school he studied songwriting at Middle Tennessee State University then moved to Nashville, where his older sister was trying to start a career as a singer and where he fell in socially with the crew around Florida Georgia Line. His big break came at the expense of hers, he says now. “This was right as the whole bro-country thing was blowing up, and so there was just no room anymore for a soulful White girl,” he says. “That was done.”
Defined by Hardy and Wallen’s producer Joey Moi as “active rock with a banjo on it,” bro-country dominated Nashville for much of the 2010s through the likes of FGL, Luke Bryan and Jason Aldean. And though he was well aware of its creative limitations, Hardy quickly mastered the form.
Indeed, there’s a shrewd self-awareness to Hardy’s own music that lifts it to a kind of meta-bro level, where you can’t quite tell if a given lyric — “There ain’t no ‘I’ in country / But there’s a ‘Y-O-U’,” for instance — is brilliant or stupid.
“That’s kind of my thing,” he says with a grin.
Hardy’s gotten some of that writerly nuance into his hits for Wallen. “More Than My Hometown,” which has more than 319 million streams on Spotify, paints a convincing portrait of a guy torn between a lover and the city she wants him to run away from. Yet two years ago, Wallen’s drunken use of the N-word to refer to a friend — as caught in a video published by TMZ — threatened to derail their partnership as radio stations and musicindustry groups shunned Wallen (at least until his enormous popularity drew them back).
Asked how the Wallen episode affected him, Hardy says, “It made me way more conscious of who I’m around and how much I’ve had to drink. It made me think about everything I say and just be extremely careful, which is a good thing.”
Hardy welcomes some of the changes he’s seen in Nashville since he arrived in town a decade ago. For one thing, he says, men “don’t have to look like professional athletes anymore. Luke Combs, Chris Stapleton, even Morgan and myself — just bigger dudes that are more normal-looking are accepted now.” He’s also happy to see that female country artists are finding a place again on the radio.
Does their success — and Hardy’s pivot to hard rock — spell the looming end of bro-country? Hardy shakes his head.
“The bro moment will always exist,” he says. “And I’m OK with that.”