Kane Brown Credits Florida Georgia Line and Sam Hunt With Creating Lane for Him as an Artist

In the years since he burst onto the country music scene, Kane Brown has not only become one of the genre’s fastest-rising stars; he’s also made a name for himself in other genres, continually collaborating with artists including DJ Marshmello, rapper Nelly and singers like Khalid and Becky G. He also experiments within his sound, something he credits artists like Florida Georgia Line and Sam Hunt for doing themselves.

“I feel like I’m just a little guy just doing music,” Brown told Zane Lowe on Apple Music. “I’m just doing my thing. I don’t know, because I feel like, for me, music, it was already changing, like Sam Hunt and Florida Georgia Line, and I felt like that was my open doors when I heard them. So I feel like they made the change and I’m just the guy that’s jumping on that train, but switching it just a little bit. You know what I mean? I’m turning the train that they started.”

Despite his experimentation, Brown confirmed that country music will always be his home base. “I’ll always have that country single before anything else, because that’s fam. That’s longevity. But it’s amazing to be able to have a song at Pop Radio and a song at Country Radio. If I can keep that going, there’s not really a lot of other artists that’s doing that,” he said before referencing Morgan Wallen‘s recent collaboration with Diplo, “Heartless.” “You’ll have an artist that has … like Morgan Wallen’s ‘Heartless.’ That song to me is a perfect mix of both. But he don’t have the one in one. I haven’t seen another artist in a while where they have a country song and a pop song on both charts.”

Florida Georgia Line was actually the first act that took Brown out on tour, inviting him on the road after he had played just a handful of shows. “Man, they took a big chance on me and I’ll appreciate it for the rest of my career,” he said. “They took me out, I think I only had done six bar shows before I had went out with them to amphitheater. You got to think, you’re going from a thousand people, 800 people, to 17,000 people. But anyway, it was an amazing experience… It was my first time getting on a big tour like that, just seeing everybody as a family. Then after half the tour, they started bringing me out with them and I was a nervous wreck because the amphitheater was actually full and I had never seen that unless I was in the audience.”

Now, Brown is headlining shows of his own — he was scheduled to be on his Worldwide Beautiful Tour this year but postponed the trek to 2021 due to the coronavirus pandemic.