Hardy vividly recalls his first encounter with the nü-metal troublemakers of Limp Bizkit.
“I got home from school and ‘Nookie’ was on ‘TRL,’” he says of the band’s hit from 1999’s seven-times-platinum “Significant Other” album. “[Guitarist] Wes Borland had the blackout eyes, and he was sort of dressed like a monkey? As a 9-year-old, I was like, I know I’m supposed to be afraid of this — but this is f— awesome.”
Twenty-five years later, Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst is among the guests featured on Hardy’s new LP, “Quit!!” It’s a full-body immersion into the post-grunge hard rock of the late ’90s and early 2000s from one of Nashville’s most successful songwriters: a five-time Academy of Country Music Award winner whose many hits include Blake Shelton’s “God’s Country,” Florida Georgia Line’s “Simple,” Chris Lane’s “I Don’t Know About You” and “More Than My Hometown” and “Sand in My Boots,” both by Morgan Wallen. Just this week, Hardy (whose first name is Michael) helped drive Post Malone’s much-discussed country turn, “F-1 Trillion,” to a No. 1 debut on the Billboard 200.
Says Hardy’s pal Ernest, with whom he and Wallen penned the chart-topping “More Than My Hometown”: “I’m the alpha in a lot of the rooms I write in. When I’m around Hardy, I’m the beta. He’s just built different.”
The follow-up to last year’s half-country/half-rock “The Mockingbird & the Crow,” “Quit!!” evokes the heroes of Hardy’s adolescence in small-town Mississippi, where MTV introduced him not only to Limp Bizkit but to Puddle of Mudd and Linkin Park. Eventually drawn to country music thanks to Brad Paisley and Eric Church, he moved to Nashville after college to try songwriting; the new album’s title track quotes a bar napkin someone stuffed in a tip jar during one early gig.
Hardy started recording his own songs in 2018 — “One Beer” went to No. 1 at country radio in 2020 — but he never lost his taste for the aggro sounds he expertly channels on “Quit!!” Among the album’s highlights are the dementedly catchy “Psycho”; “Good Girl Phase,” which features Chad Smith of Red Hot Chili Peppers on drums; and “Six Feet Under (Caleigh’s Song),” an acoustic power ballad Hardy wrote for his wife after he was involved in a serious tour-bus crash in October 2022. Wearing denim cutoffs and a red-white-and-blue NASCAR T-shirt, the musician, 33, discussed the record over breakfast at the Sunset Marquis during a recent trip to Los Angeles.
Should we presume you made a rock record because you’re bored with country music?
I’m actually working on a country record right now. I love writing an amazing country song more than a rock song — that’s what I moved to Nashville to do. But I do think the rock stuff is more fun to write.
What was your most recent No. 1 as a country writer?
Kenny Chesney, “Take Her Home,” in June. I got nothing on the chart right now, though — that was it, dude.
Does that worry you?
It hasn’t yet. I see it all as a pattern. I’ve been so busy with my own stuff that I haven’t written any songs in the last six or eight months — so it would make sense that I wouldn’t have any songs on the chart. This fall into the spring, I have like six months where I’m barely touring at all. I’ll probably write 100 songs and have a few on the charts next year. Hopefully.
Where did “Psycho” come from? Nine times out of 10, a guy writes a song called “Psycho,” it’s about a crazy girl. In this one, you’re the psycho.
I have a rule of respect for my mom and my wife that I’ll never get a tattoo above my neck. And one day I made a joke to my wife — I was like, “If you ever leave me, first thing I’m doing is getting a face tattoo.” I thought, Man, that’s a good idea for a song. Then from there we landed on the psycho idea.
It’s a funny song. But what did it feel like as someone who works in country music to write from the perspective of a narrator who’s genuinely unwell?
Oh, it’s very freeing. There’s so much more to talk about than what you can talk about in country music. But there’s a new wave of people who are becoming more open to talking about mental health or whatever you want to call it, which is a good thing. Jelly Roll’s got a song right now, “I Am Not Okay.”
Could a country act have cut “Psycho”?
I think a girl could pull it off — back to the crazy girl thing. People would believe it more than if a guy sang it.
Were you surprised by how much your bus crash affected you? You wrote on Instagram last year that you were still suffering from panic attacks.
Yes. I had what I guess you would call a mental breakdown in October of 2023 — like a year to the day [after the crash] — and it was all the triggers of the air temperature and the leaves and the fact that football was on. That’s what shocked me, was how much I’d maybe buried a lot of those emotions but how natural triggers could bring them back up. I thought I was over it.
And now?
For 100 shows in a row afterwards, every night when I would lay down, that was my first thought. But now I don’t think about it, just through a lot of trauma therapy and stuff like that.
What was your attitude as a kid regarding therapy?
Growing up, my parents didn’t really discuss the idea. I definitely thought it was, let’s say, unnecessary for a long time. People from my hometown, they’re either like: A) You shouldn’t dig that deep into your emotions if you’re a man, or B) It doesn’t work. Then I started going and it started helping me, and that was the end of that. Now I’m very open about it, and I’m unashamed of it. I really owe that to my wife. She was the one who said, “You should probably go talk to somebody.”
She’s from California, right?
Yep, and that’s why. Completely different out here.
Talk about “Soul4Sale,” which is one of several songs you have where you’re grappling with the anxiety of selling out. That’s definitely something musicians were preoccupied with in the ’90s. But it doesn’t actually seem to vex your generation.
You’re right: People my age and younger, I don’t see a lot of comments about it. I think it’s more that I grew up a country boy, and I never want to lose that — less selling out musically and more changing who I am as a person. Also, that part of my life feeds my songwriting, especially in the country world. Maybe that’s why I talk about it so much. But I mean, we post pictures on jets and stuff because it’s fun to do. I don’t want people to think that I live in a cabin, you know?
Could you have envisioned the situations in which you’ve found yourself lately?
I constantly have to look around and be like, Holy s—. Six and a half years ago, I was a hit songwriter with no intention of ever being an artist. Now it’s like a different life.
What was the best-case scenario as a writer?
Thirty No. 1s, selling a couple catalogs, making $10 million and living off that. That was my dream for the longest time.
Did you have somebody in mind as a model?
Rodney Clawson. He still writes songs, but all that motherf— does is bass fish and deer hunt.
Last time we talked, you said you had no interest in speaking out about politics. But at Stagecoach this year, your audience started chanting “U-S-A” as you sang “God’s Country.”
I definitely encouraged that chant.
Does that contradict your desire not to speak out?
When I think of politics, it’s like, Who are you voting for? And I’ve never made a stance on that — I don’t care who you vote for. But you should be proud to live in the country that you live in.
You think there’s too little of that these days.
I do. I just think that value is going away with every new generation.
I talked with the War and Treaty at Stagecoach about whether they feel welcome as Black people in country music. Michael Trotter Jr. told me that “when you have artists standing onstage yelling about redneck culture, you know they’re not talking to you.” Your last album ends with “The Redneck Song.”
Those songs are not for everybody. I don’t think it has to do with the color of your skin. You can be a redneck and not be racist.
Is “redneck” a loaded word?
Stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason. So I’m sure that’s a threatening concept for people that want to feel more welcome in a community. I don’t blame him one bit. I’d love to go get dinner with him and talk to him about that sometime.
Another thing Michael Trotter said is that he and his wife write love songs but that Nashville’s not really in a love-song moment.
There’s not a lot of I-love-you songs, that’s true. I never write I-love-you songs. So maybe I had something to do with it.
Why don’t you?
I’m not good at it. I’m a very emotional guy, but I’m not a very lovey-dovey guy.
“Six Feet Under” is pretty lovey-dovey.
That’s my first attempt. I needed to write that song for myself and my wife. But I’m literally sitting here trying to think about the chart, and yeah — it’s all break-up right now. I think a lot of that reflects society in a weird way. There’s a lot of negativity, myself included. I catch myself all the time being negative about something.
You’re just one of the many country stars on the Post Malone album. Why has he been embraced so thoroughly by the Nashville establishment?
Because when he decided to make a country record he basically moved to Nashville for six months. He immersed himself in the culture of the town. He would go out to [the industry-favorite bar] Losers every night and stay up till 3 a.m. And he wrote with Nashville songwriters — people that grew up country that literally know how to speak the language that can walk him through it.
Hardy performs at April’s Stagecoach festival in Indio.
(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
Much has been made of the way Post was received by country music versus the way Beyoncé was received. I’ll grant you that Beyoncé didn’t move to Nashville.
No, she did not. And I think you can tell the difference. You can do it wherever you want — I’m not the person to judge or to make any sort of rules or anything like that. But you can tell that Post’s record was written by people that live and work in Nashville, which is where country records are made. I’m not knocking the Beyoncé record whatsoever.
Do you like “Cowboy Carter”?
It’s fine. There’s some songs on there that I do like. I don’t dislike it. But you can tell that it was somebody’s rendition of country more than the true it-came-out-of-Nashville country. Again, I’m not saying that’s the wrong way to do it. I’m just saying there’s a difference.
Let’s finish on your fashion sense.
I don’t know if I have any. I have like 10 shirts that I rotate through, and I wear jorts and hospital shoes. I guess you’d call it a signature look. But I’m married — I have a hot wife. I really don’t give a f—.
Has your wife tried to talk you out of the jorts?
She can occasionally be like, “Maybe we wear jeans to this function.” But she knows that I just don’t care.
Is the point of success getting to say, “I just don’t care”?
Definitely. People look at people all the time as trendsetters when I know for a fact that they just put on the first few things they grabbed out of the closet. Jonah Hill tucking in his basketball jersey — anybody else does that and you’re like, “What a weirdo.” Jonah Hill does it and now he’s a fashionista.
