Why Ernest aims to revive the sound of classic country music
The country artist known simply as Ernest is a couple of cocktails deep on a recent afternoon in the rooftop garden of West Hollywood’s Soho House, a diamond pendant the size of a AA battery nestled within the open neck of his blue western shirt.
The pendant, which reads DANGEROUS, is one of three matching pieces he commissioned from a jeweler in Orange County — one for Ernest, one for Hardy, one for Morgan Wallen — as a memento of the trio’s time writing songs together for Wallen’s six-times-platinum “Dangerous: The Double Album.” The western shirt, meanwhile, reflects Ernest’s love of Ralph Lauren. The designer’s career in fashion, as depicted in the 2019 documentary “Very Ralph,” “changed my life,” Ernest says. “Seriously. I watched it three or four years ago and shortly after cleaned out my closet and started shopping Double RL.” Ernest’s mood board for the cover of his new album, “Nashville, Tennessee,” contained a picture of Lauren leaning against a barn with an American flag in the background.
“We shot the cover in my barn,” he says of he and his wife, Delaney Royer, who handles Ernest’s visual content. “But we made the mood board before we even bought our farm.”
As a songwriter, Ernest specializes in creating melodies and vocal lines that adapt a rapper’s flow patterns to the cadences of country music; his tunes embody the casual hybridity of a generation that grew up in the overlapping shadows of Garth Brooks and Snoop Dogg. His latest hit, ” I Had Some Help ” by the duo of Post Malone and Wallen, dropped Friday and rocketed over the weekend to the top of Spotify’s Global Top 50 chart with more than 13 million streams.
“Ernest is one of the most magical songwriters in Nashville,” says Jelly Roll, the Southern rapper turned country singer who wrote his chart-topping “Son of a Sinner” with Ernest. “When we look back at the 2020s, he’ll be one of the names remembered for bringing an entire sound to this decade.”
Yet as an artist he’s trying something slightly different on “Nashville, Tennessee,” his second LP under his own name after 2022’s “Flower Shops (The Album).” It’s a sprawling 26-track collection that reaches back to an old-fashioned country-music sensibility, with rip-roaring honky-tonk jams up against finely detailed string-band excursions and handsome tear-inyour-beer ballads. Among Ernest’s goals for the project is introducing these traditional styles to the younger listeners tuned into his more modern work.
“If you like how this feels,” he says, “go check out Vern Gosdin or Roger Miller or go listen to Ray Charles’ ‘Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music.’”
At the same time, he’s eager to broaden the minds of older folks potentially predisposed to write off the likes of Wallen or Hardy. “Some of the songs I’ve written for other artists definitely fall into the thatain’t-country category,” he says. “It’s easy for somebody to say that because they’ve got 808s or trap beats or whatnot. But that’s coming from the same hands that wrote a song on my album like ’ Ain’t as Easy,’” he adds, referring to a sumptuous weeper draped in pedal steel.
The result has a kind of musicological sweep that not only honors the cultural breadth of Ernest’s hometown — a city he loves enough that his and Royer’s 3-year-old son is named Ryman after Nashville’s storied Ryman Auditorium — but also evokes ideas of lineage and inheritance.
“Ernest is a real student of country music, and I think he’s on track to becoming a master of his craft,” says Lukas Nelson, who joins Ernest for a duet in the jumping western swing number “Why Dallas.” “He’s already had commercial success, but I think he and I would agree that mastery has nothing to do with that. Mastery is more about the depth of your artistry.”
Indeed, you can look at Ernest’s ambitions with “Nashville, Tennessee” as his way of spending some of the music-biz capital he accrued over the last few years. “That’s what I did with ‘A Star Is Born,’” says Nelson, who views the songs he wrote for the 2018 Bradley Cooper/lady Gaga blockbuster as “a vehicle to further fuel my creativity.”
“I want this album to live beyond just being a hot, sizzling record right now,” Ernest says. “That’s secondary to the importance of it being one of those albums we’re talking about down the road.”