Country hit-maker’s foray into rock strikes chord
Hardy album debuts at No. 1 while single ‘Jack’ lands in Top 10
Michael Hardy wandered into the bar at the Troubadour in
West Hollywood, California, on a recent morning. In a few hours, the singer with a dozen No. 1 hits was set to take that stage and then head to the Roxy to play a second sold-out show.
Hardy, 32, who performs under his last name, didn’t ascend through the Sunset Strip’s storied hard-rock scene in Los Angeles. His success has come on the country charts with songs he wrote for other acts such as Blake Shelton’s “God’s Country,” Florida Georgia Line’s “Simple” and a string of tunes by Morgan Wallen, including “Sand in My Boots.” In 2020, Hardy scored his first No. 1 as an artist with “One Beer,” a slyly touching account of a couple’s quick trip from shared Bud Lights to a shared baby.
Yet with his new album, “The
Mockingbird & the Crow,” Hardy is leaning way into the rock music he says he loved before he ever thought about writing in Nashville, Tennessee. Released in January, 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.
So far, Hardy’s foray into rock is paying off. “The Mockingbird & the Crow” debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s country albums chart, while “Jack,” a moody single narrated from the perspective of a bottle of whiskey, was recently in the Top 10 at active rock radio behind tracks by Metallica and Five Finger Death Punch.
For Hardy, the bruising guitars and screamy-growly vocals are a way to differentiate his stuff from Wallen’s slicker, hip-hop-inflected country music. 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, Linkin Park and P.O.D. for himself on MTV. “Country music was corny to me,” he says. “You couldn’t bang your head to it.”
Hardy began to change his mind about country music thanks to the deeply crafty tunesmithing of Brad Paisley — “You see Post Malone do ‘I’m Gonna Miss Her’ on YouTube?” he asks excitedly — 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.”
Hardy 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’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.
One highlight of “Mockingbird’s” rock half is “Radio Song,” which consists of three parts: a talky verse in which Hardy lays out the requirements of a hit bro-country tune, a sweetly melodic chorus that embodies those tropes and a furious, Rage Against the Machine-style bridge featuring Jeremy McKinnon of the metalcore band a Day to Remember. “Well, this ain’t no radio song,” McKinnon shrieks, folding the whole thing in on itself.
Hardy’s also more emotionally complex when writing for himself, as in “Wait in the Truck,” a stark acoustic ballad about a man who kills a woman’s abuser. Lainey Wilson, who duets with him on the track, remembers receiving a text from Hardy telling her he’d just come up with the best song he’d ever written.
“Which I thought was pushing it,” she says. “But when I listened to it, I knew what he was talking about. This is a subject that a lot of people don’t want to talk about, but it’s real life; it happens behind closed doors all the time. And the way he tells the story, it reminded me of why
I fell in love with country music to begin with.” She compares the song to Garth Brooks’ “The Thunder Rolls” and “Whiskey Lullaby” by Paisley and Alison Krauss.
Hardy’s gotten some of that writerly nuance into his hits for Wallen. “More Than My Hometown” 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 a racial slur to refer to a friend — as caught in a video published by TMZ — threatened to derail their partnership as radio stations and music-industry 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. …
“Cellphones and the internet make it really tough to do what you want. I’d love to do some wild (stuff ) every now and then, but it puts a damper on things when you know everybody’s out there filming or watching.”
Then again, it was the internet that enabled Hardy to build a following on streaming platforms before radio programmers started spinning his songs. And Seth England, chief executive of Hardy’s label, Big Loud Records, says it’s streaming that’s driving artists to super-serve their fans in highly specific musical niches (like Hardy’s neo-nu-metal) instead of going for more broadly universal styles.
In fact, Hardy’s got plenty of company in reviving those early-aughts rock sounds, both in Nashville — think of Jelly Roll or Bailey Zimmerman — and among the veteran acts booked for upcoming festivals such as Sick New World in Las Vegas and Welcome to Rockville in Daytona Beach, Florida, where Hardy’s on the bill alongside Evanescence, Chevelle and Godsmack.
Hardy welcomes some of the changes he has 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.
“I hated when the women were struggling” during the peak bro-country years, says Hardy. “I had a weird guilty pit in my stomach just for being a dude. It was mostly older white men that ran those stations, and they all kind of looked down at girls. But they’re kicking ass right now,” he says, pointing to recent hits by Wilson, Miranda Lambert, Ashley McBryde and Carly Pearce. “It seems like more of a level playing field.”
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.”