Brett Eldredge Discusses Mental Health and Finding Confidence on 'Songs About You'

While the world was dealing with the Coronavirus pandemic, country singer Brett Eldredge dropped one of his most vulnerable records, Sunday Drive. Full of introspection, contemplation, and deep songwriting, the 2020 LP showed a new side of the artist that fans weren’t familiar with. On his latest album, Songs About You, Eldredge, once again, reveals another new part of himself to his listeners: a more confident side.

“Music is definitely a piece of therapy for me,” he tells The Nash News. As he continues on he references Sunday Drive where there are tracks about his hometown, the want to be wanted by another, and thoughts about death. On the almost-five minute long title track he reminisces on his childhood.

While becoming more open in his lyricism, he also became more open to his fanbase. He talked about his own mental health, the pressure he feels from social media and its ever-evolving landscape, and even discussed how seeing a therapist changed him on Good Morning America. Through his own eyes, it seemed as though he wanted to make everyone else around him happy and lost focus on himself. “Sunday Drive was the start of that work for me and Songs About You is the stepping into myself in a way that I never even could’ve imagined I could,” he shares, “Going through making this record, I’ve never felt more confident in myself, and more importantly the person I am away from all the music. I really had to work on myself.”

The new album has songs about standing up for oneself and being your own best friend. It’s different from any other project he’s put out before it. “I like to try to take every record to a different place every chance I can because I don’t want to do the same thing over and over again. It is a pressure but I like that pressure sometimes because it makes me dive deep into what I want to say,” Eldredge remarks with passion.

On Sounds About You he worked with trusted collaborators Heather Morgan and Nathan Chapman. The beautiful ballad “Hideaway,” was created by Eldredge and his co-creators when they rented a house in Montana on a ranch as he exclaims, “Snow was everywhere, cows and horses in the stable outside the house, it was such a magical place.”

In the official recording you can hear intimate details like the fire crackling because Eldredge decided to use the original demo they recorded. The finalized product is an escapist fantasy land where listeners can truly feel lost. He speaks of the subject matter adding, “Everybody has that thought of what if I sold everything I have and I go move far away, go out in the woods somewhere, build a little house, and hide away.”

The opener on Songs About You, “Can’t Keep Up,” is a high-tempo, bluesy, New Orleans-esque bop. “Holy Water” has a choir-like radiance and “Wait Up For Me” is a sultry, seductive love song. A wide range of emotion is packed into the 12 tunes.

“Where The Light Meets The Sea,” the closing track on the LP, was a favorite song of Eldredge’s for a long time. It’s the only older track on the tracklist; he wrote it five years ago on a writer’s retreat in Malibu, California. “It started as a song about self-discovery, then it started to roll into this whole concept that really deals with death and what we’re striving for, trying to become the person we hope we can be,” Eldredge explains.

In the visceral, imagery soaked lyrics he sings, “When you wake up, I’ll be gone just like a sailor / Hope you know that I didn’t want to leave / But I’ll be where I always said I’ll be / In the place where the light meets the sea.”

Eldredge also discusses the broad title for the album and where it came from as he mentions who the new tracks are truly dedicated to. “I mean honestly anybody,” he says directly without a question. “I thought to myself, I sit in a room and I write these songs and I love to sing and it makes me feel something, but at the end of the day, these songs are about you. These are the songs for the people that are listening to it and that’s why I do it. For that connection and helping people through their lives. That’s where the whole title came about. The ‘You’ in these songs is about everybody.”

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