HARDY is back with brand-new music! The singer released his second EP, Where to Find Me, out Friday, January 18, which contains four more songs that HARDY is eager for his fans to hear.
“I’m super excited,” HARDY told PopCulture.com. “I feel like it’s just a slight shift in sound and song content and stuff in the last EP. And so I’m just really excited to keep showing people sides of who I am.”
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HARDY previously released his debut EP, This Ole Boy, in October, and hopes to continue building momentum with his latest set of tunes.
“I was surprised at the love that I got from everyone from it,” admitted the singer. “You just don’t know. I’ve never put out music really and we met with people, and everybody knew it was coming out. I thought that all the meetings went well. And apparently they did. We just got a lot of love from all the platforms and I couldn’t be more happy about it, really.”
HARDY is also a songwriter, penning songs not only for himself, but hits like Florida Georgia Line‘s “Simple” and Morgan Wallen‘s “Up Down,” among others. But he’s also not afraid to do things his own way, which is why he is focusing on smaller sets of music for now, instead of focusing just on a full-length project.
“We’re just going to keep putting out music for a while,” HARDY revealed. “I was just a songwriter for six years before I started doing my own thing and so I just have a pile of songs to sift through and if we’ve got them, we might as well just put them out and let the people hear it.”
HARDY, who signed a publishing deal with Relative Music Group, also worked with Tree Vibez publishing company, owned by Florida Georgia Line, whom he will tour with later this year. But in spite of the help from one of the biggest acts in country music, the Mississippi native is already amazed at how well his fans are latching onto his own music, aside from the FGL connection.
“The EP came out and I started getting all these texts from my friends and just people back home that were like, ‘Hearing you on XM,’ and stuff like that,” he recalled. “But a lot of those moments are really hard to come by until later and you kind of look back.”
Still, when asked to recall a moment he knew his hard work was paying off, he knew exactly when that was.
“I would say if I’ve had that moment it was literally this past weekend in Atlanta Buckhead Theater,” HARDY recounted. “We closed the set with ‘Rednecker.’ And I noticed like halfway through the song that almost the whole crowd was singing it. You know, you have your ears in and you can’t really just hear them.
“But the last chorus, I had never done this before but I just kind of went for it and I took an ear out and I just held the mic out to see if they would sing it, and it was like the whole crowd was singing it,” he continued. “That was a huge moment. Thinking like, ‘I’m actually doing this. This is happening.’ And I know it’s weird because you’d think hearing you on the radio, that is more real because it’s like right in front of you, and you’re actually seeing it happen. So if there’s been a moment like that it was definitely Buckhead Theatre in Atlanta. 100 percent.”
HARDY enjoys both writing and performing, but if he had to choose which role was his favorite, it would have to be writing songs.
“I’m a songwriter who sings,” HARDY maintained. “My sister, she’s an incredible singer. And so I grew up playing baseball and just doing guy, kid stuff, and she did that. So I never really got into being a musician or a singer or anything. It was just one of those things – she did that, and I did my thing. And then she moved out and graduated high school and went straight to Belmont [University]. So I was 16 or 17, started picking up the guitar and wrote my first song when I was l 17.
“But I really didn’t find my voice until probably four or five years ago,” he continued. “You really do have to learn; I mean some people are just born with it and they literally come out just literally just singing like an angel. But it took me a while to find my voice, even after I had signed a publishing deal. I go back and listen to old demos, and I just don’t even sound the same as I do now. And so I would definitely say that I was, my true passion and just my true whatever was song writing first and then singer second.”
Purchase Where to Find Me by visiting HARDY’s website.
Photo courtesy of Sweet Talk PR/Nick Swift
