Welcome to the New York Times podcast, Your own Splacavelli of Music, News and Criticism.

I'm your host, John Caramonica. We're glad that I will eat all my name

that that will serve my brain

it's my first one today. I saw your sister at work.

You're listening to hard to forget.

It's the boy, Sam Hunt, Sam The Hunt, he is back. Southside, second album five years after

Montevallo. I gotta be honest, there are a few albums that I have been actively anticipating for as long or even

one-tenth as long as I've been waiting for the Sam Hunt record. I wrote about Sam, I interviewed him,

peace came out about a week and a half ago, and just for a little backstory to let you know how much I am, how much I care about

Sam Hunt.

Montevalle came out in 2015 and I had written about the EP that came out previously.

So I didn't really write about Monte Valle because I kind of had said everything I needed to say, but I knew I knew I knew that there was a story and I was like okay well let's get the first story of the second cycle. And so I started making calls, I started starting having meetings, started having conversations.

That was through 2016.

And then 2017 rolls around and they're like, okay, he's in the studio, he's working, and we were going to do a thing where I checked in every two, three months throughout the process and then dropped a big piece when the record came.

So I went to Nashville, went up to the house that he had not yet moved in with his fiance, his wife, where he was about to move in.

So went up to the house where he lived with his bandmates.

We had really, really good conversation. We probably had two big talks on that trip.

And after that, nothing. And I was like, hmm, this is weird. I couldn't quite figure out what had happened to Sam. And what had happened is he got his personal life together. He got married. He devoted time to his wife and to healing that relationship. It was the Hannah who is his wife as the woman who he had been dating before he started

becoming a country music star and had let go in order to become a country music performer and

he did the kind of ethical and responsible thing which is put his career on a little bit of a slower path in

order to make sure that he had gotten his life right before he got his career right.

So I didn't hear from the Sam Hunt people for quite a long time.

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