HARDY releases his new album 'Quit!!', revealing the core of his fearless rock-star spirit

Since releasing his 2023 album "The Mockingbird and the Crow," HARDY has played country and rock music in front of upwards of 5 million people.

He's also one of Nashville's busiest songwriters, well on his way to accumulating three-dozen No. 1 hits as either a singer or songwriter by age 40.

Presume that "Quit!!," his third studio album in under four years, released earlier this month, could include a few of those chart-toppers.

In the wake of that success, his inspiration feels more limitless than ever.

Why?

He's a rock star (no, really, with a self-aware song called "Rockstar") with a country pedigree making pop music at a time when we're streaming countrified, rock-ready pop more significantly than any other style of music.

It wasn't always this way.

On not quitting along the road to 'Quit!!'

A decade ago, the creator, born Michael Hardy, was a graduate of Neshoba Central High School in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and Middle Tennessee State University. At the latter, he studied songwriting in the university's vaunted Recording Industry Management program and received a bachelor's degree in 2013.

After meeting Florida Georgia Line while still in college, he, alongside Morgan Wallen, eventually joined Brad Clawson and C.J. Solar to co-write and appear on their 2017 hit "Up Down." A year later, he was signed to Big Loud Records

After meeting Florida Georgia Line members Brad Clawson and C.J. Solar while still in college, he, alongside Morgan Wallen, joined to co-write and appear on their 2017 hit "Up Down." A year later, he was signed to Big Loud Records.

Somewhere between 2013 and 2017, a man wrote the word "Quit" on a napkin while HARDY was singing at a Nashville songwriting round.

At the time, being flat broke and emotionally raw as a struggling songwriter with a chip on his shoulder, the moment redoubled him metaphorically in a mindset born of his small-town roots in Mississippi.

"I never left my neighborhood, but I burned out of it and I turned out good if you ask me," he sings in the album's title track.

HARDY adds, anthemically: "So before you choose hate, get to know a guy / He might end up a poet that was born to fly / He might end up a man of the people, damn, what a scene, a redneck glorified / With a stack of awards on a napkin, a bored little bastard wrote to try to warn a guy / Maybe I'm just petty 'cause they're just metal / Wait, then again, so am I."

Working with Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith

He's so doggedly determined that he hasn't looked up or caught a breath in his professional life until arriving at the Super Bowl in February

The moment progressed his album and inspired his career.

Sure, he's had moments where he has stopped to smell the metaphorical roses that success has afforded him. However, the spectacle of being included among celebrities from all walks of life who attend a Super Bowl was potentially overwhelming for the performer, who attended the game with his wife, Caleigh, and his manager, Troy "Tracker" Johnson.

Seeing Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer — and his eventual "Quit!!" album collaborator — Chad Smith getting off a hotel elevator alone was one of those moments.

He shyly introduced himself.

Fast forward to entering the Super Bowl watch suite at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, which he shared with his friend and sometimes collaborator Chad Kroeger — and yes, Chad Smith.

HARDY, aware of the luck of the moment, used Kroeger's connection — and the praise he paid him to Smith — to strike up polite conversation. By the game's end, they had exchanged phone numbers.

Two weeks later, Joey Moi, the Big Loud co-founder, Nickelback producer and te man behind the boards on "Quit!!," suggested HARDY call Smith to track drums for the album cut "Good Girl Phase."

'Deceptively simple' anthems

"The type of nu-metal music that (Limp Bizkit's) Fred Durst, specifically, created spawned a generation of artists and hit songs that reached more authentically into rap than most — and he did that without the core sound losing its heavy metal and rock 'n' roll roots," HARDY says.

"For him to hear my music, understand how it compared to his vision and know exactly what he could add to make the two blend, showcases how great he is as an artist," he adds, regarding Durst's contribution to album track "Soul4sale."

It's important to note that the style of music HARDY is attempting to evolve primarily comes from an era between 1995 and 2005, when America's domestic music industry distributed and sold more physical units than in any other era.

Thus, for all parties involved, it's plugged — benignly or directly — into their emotions and existences.

"We're seeing a return to an era defined by music by and for a culture of angst-ridden, pissed-off and riled-up kids with chips on their shoulders," HARDY says.

"In 2024, that anger has been replaced by anxiety, though. However, the music allows for an outlet for setting those emotions free. You can pick any one of many things happening in the world right now and being able to cry or party while screaming the words to songs, like the ones on this album, definitely helps."

These are hook- and melody-driven songs that are easy to sing along to because they're deceptively simple in their construction.

They're also simple because, as an album, "Quit!!" allowed Nashville's vaunted songwriting community to finally engage in writing hit songs similar to the ones they enjoyed from afar a quarter-century ago.

"(Nashville's) community is regurgitating the (rock-styled) stuff we've always loved all over this album," jokes HARDY. He cites producer Moi, entrenched in Nashville's community for a generation, as a spearheading force in the room.

"Joey produced (the Canadian rock band) Theory of a Deadman's debut album in 2002. That album was my favorite record for two years. I don't know how much more uncharted territory we can take this sound into 25 years later, but we're going to try to rediscover how that music can inspire us bittersweetly."

'Jim Bob'

HARDY is conscious that he's a leading creative in an era defined by "mind-blowing" pop culture and music that, for the first time in a half-century, is being guided and seen, foremost, via a country, rural and Western lens.

Thus, songs like "Jim Bob" — an honest, blisteringly brutal rock homage to rural Americans who smoke cheap cigarettes, drink even cheaper beer and drunkenly blow the rest of their money on whiskey, bullets and maintaining an inherited tract of 40 acres of land — define a portion of American culture's modern pinnacle.

The song stands alongside "Sold Out" as an energetic peak of his two-hour headlining set.

"People who ride four-wheelers and shoot pistols need aggressively rowdy country songs. I'm not one of them anymore, but I am aware that they exist," says HARDY, who describes himself as "a married man who lives near the Green Hills Mall in West Nashville" and not, as he did in 2018's "Rednecker," as a grain alcohol-swilling, chaw-spitting and truck-driving bass fisherman who urinates in his front yard.

"Writing a song where the chorus is first-person but the verses are third-person allows the crowd to own the song more than I do. It's a hype song. No matter where you're from, everybody knows a 'Jim Bob.' Especially in America right now, people who are extremely stuck in their ways and sometimes act foolish deserve to be discussed — but not judged."

HARDY's artistic evolution

In under a decade, because of his all-encompassing involvement in how country, pop and rock have radically redefined themselves in popular music and culture, HARDY has evolved past being merely an "artist." He's a chart-topping country and hard rock performer who, because streaming has decentralized genre from many conversations, has achieved a pop-star style ubiquity for many music listeners whose tastes are being birthed and grown in the modern era.

He's quick to make a humble attempt to compare the artistic realm he aspires for his work to reach — similar to '80s and '90s-era stars Van Halen and Nine Inch Nails and late 1970s arena and stadium rockers Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Queen (he cites the latter's four-year gap between "News of the World" and "Under Pressure") — as representing a cohesive evolution of live artistry that achieves simultaneous commercial and critical acclaim.

On one hand, that means he's releasing covers of Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg's three-decade-old hip-hop classic "Gin and Juice." On another, it's surprising his wife with "Six Feet Under," a song about how the hope of marrying her helped him to survive an October 2022 tour bus crash in which he suffered physical injuries that affected his mental health.

"It's hard for me to wrap my head around needing the gratitude to encompass so many special moments," the performer adds.

Emotionally existing in a creatively fertile season of gratitude has colored how he contemplates his future.

"There may never be a moment when I'm truly at my creative peak and fully comfortable in who I've become as an artist," he says. "Pushing boundaries develops moments that continue to influence music as a creative vehicle for everyone. Discovering the perpetuity of (the art of making music) is the s---. Picking up torches and revisiting ways that we can expand music's universe is special."

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Nashville singer-songwriter HARDY releases his new album 'Quit'