Thomas Rhett Uses Daughter Willa Gray to Announce New Music for ‘SNL’ Performance

Thomas Rhett is releasing new music! The singer used his daughter, Willa Gray, to announce the good news.

“Willa Gray, what’s daddy doing on March 2?” Rhett asked his oldest daughter, while he was holding her.

“Saturday Night Live,” Willa Gray answered.

“Make sure y’all tune in on March 2,” Rhett continued. “Playing some new songs off of a brand-new record. It’s gonna be fun.”

Rhett’s latest album, Life Changes, was released in September of 2017. Rhett released five singles from the record, including his latest “Sixteen,” with all five becoming No. 1 singles.

“I’ve been doing nothing but writing my face off since the last album came out,” Rhett said, adding that he’s written over 150 songs for his new project. “It is my goal to just keep putting more music out there.”

The 28-year-old has seen plenty of changes in music, even since his debut It Goes Like This project was released in 2013.

“I remember on my second record, man, we didn’t make a new record for like two years or something like that,” he recalled. “But I just think it’s the way that a lot of fans are consuming music today. When my [Life Changes] album came out that was the first time that we’d ever gone out on the road after an album and got to play album cuts that people knew all the words to.”

The singer-songwriter included both his Maren Morris duet, “Craving You,” and “Drink a Little Beer” with his father, Rhett Akins, on Life Changes, and hints that there will be a few more collaborations on his next set of tunes.

“I just feel like singing songs alone is fun, but singing songs with your friends is so much more fun, and I think that that’s what this community is about,” he told PopCulture.com at a recent media event. “It’s about really supporting each other, and getting your buddies on song to making it a party, and so I think that on this record there will definitely be two [collaborations].”

Part of the fun for Rhett is writing songs, especially about his own life, which includes both Willa Gray and Ada James, along with his wife, Lauren.

“The moment you get the momentum back and you start to get into a room, and you start writing, and you realize that there’s a million things you haven’t said about your life, or about past experiences,” Rhett admitted. “As your life changes, there’s so many different ideas that you can pull from and when you get in the studio somehow, some way, the song gods make things fresh again for you.”

Photo Credit: Getty images/Jason Kempin