Sam Hunt Remembered a Country Classic When Writing 'Hard to Forget'

With only a couple weeks until Sam Hunt's sophomore Southside album is released, the singer is opening up about his current single, "Hard to Forget." The song, which features Hunt as one of the writers on it, was inspired by an earlier generation of country music, and specifically one of his own musical heroes, Webb Pierce, and his 1953 classic, "There Stands the Glass."

"I've wanted to sample an older country song from an older era for a while, and I've tried a few times to make it work, and the songs just haven't panned out or I haven't had an idea to write with the samples that we've used," Hunt told his record label. "I tried some samples from the '90s 'cause that's kind of the era of country music that I grew up on, but it never seemed to quite work. For some reason when I heard this Webb Pierce sample for the first time, it clicked, and I knew that was gonna be the song that was gonna be the one we sampled.

"I was in a writing session with a buddy of mine, Luke Laird, and we were in the middle of writing a song," he continued. "He played this sample for me, and within a minute of hearing it, I knew, it had to be. I didn't even have an idea for the song. It was just Webb Pierce singing and then some drums came in, and I was like, 'I don't know. Just give me some time to come up with an idea for this, and when we do, we've got to write this. It's gotta be a single and we have to put it out next summer.' I want to be ale to tour around this song, and all I had was this Webb Pierce sample. So, that's how it impacted me that day."

"Hard to Forget" is one of a dozen songs on Southside, but perhaps the most important one to Hunt.

"It took me a little while but finally got the idea and got together with some of my really good songwriting buddies and wrote the song and it all panned out like I hoped it would, so that is one that I'm really excited about," Hunt said. "It's a really important song for the record, because the record is kind of built around that song in a way."

Southside is scheduled to be released on April 3. Hunt will kick off his The Southside Summer Tour 2020 in May.

Photo Credit: Getty / CMT / Viacom