‘Empty Words,’ Album ‘Heartland Rock and Roll’

When Corey Kent released his collab with Koe Wetzel, “Rocky Mountain Low,” late last year to introduce fans to his next record, it should have been a layup single. But a few months later, while the song was still climbing the country charts, things went off-script.

In early February, Kent posted a video to social media of him singing a different song, “Empty Words,” during a soundcheck before a show in Denver. Kent was wearing sweatpants and a hastily buttoned flannel shirt. “I looked like a mess,” he says, admitting he posted the performance just to meet his content goals for that particular day.

“Coming out with ‘Rocky Mountain Low,’ I knew our fans would resonate with that song, and Koe and I were both excited about it,” he tells Rolling Stone. “It was a no-brainer. ‘Empty Words’ was not a no-brainer. It was a sonic chance. It was a complete departure, really, from almost anything I’ve done in the past. I thought this was gonna be a deep cut on our record — a nice hidden gem. The more in-line stuff with country music would be the stuff people knew, and then they could find this.”

Kent was wrong.

At his next show, just three days after posting the soundcheck video, fans showed up for “Empty Words.” “They sang it word-for-word, louder than anything in the set that night,” Kent recalls. “It was bigger than anything I could have ever imagined.” By March, a Denver radio station picked up the track, with Dallas and Nashville following in short order. Suddenly, Kent didn’t just have a pair of singles working for him, he had a hit on his hands.

“Empty Words” went on to set the tone for Heartland Rock and Roll, his new 16-track LP dropping this Friday. The album shows Kent broadening the musical boundaries of a career that has, so far, yielded a pair of platinum singles and three Top 10 hits at country radio, including “Rocky Mountain Low.” Kent was born in Oklahoma and hails from Frisco, Texas, and his musical influences range from Red Dirt and Texas country to the R&B and soul that gave “Empty Words” its melody.

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“Contrary to popular belief, not every country artist you hear on your radio lives in Nashville,” Kent says. “Some of us live out West. That’s really where this record took root. A lot of my influences — even before the Red Dirt scene — were John Cougar Mellancamp, CCR. I listened to a lot of Ray Charles and Clapton and Bobby Bland. I was the weird kid on the back of the bus in middle school listening to Boston and the Eagles. I just loved great music and great songs, and I didn’t care if they fit in a box. But, for so long, I felt this need to be inside of a box that people could understand.”

When it came to Heartland Rock and Roll, Kent all but destroyed the box. “I was like, ‘Screw that!’ I just want to make stuff that I love,” he says, “and I want it to sound like where I’m from and what I grew up listening to.”

At various points in the recording, Austin Goodloe, Jon Randall, and Chris Farran each produced tracks. When Kent envisioned Wetzel’s collaboration, the two artists worked it out over text and recorded the song as soon as they were able. It was a feat Kent repeated with the song “Rather Be Here” and its collaborator, Jason Aldean.

“The one prerequisite for any collaboration was, they gotta be an actual friend,” Kent says. “If they are not actually somebody that I text on the regular, they were not gonna be a part of this record, because this is me.”

If Kent has a near obsession with the melodies on the new album, the lyrics serve as a reminder of where he’s from. “Rather Be Here” is his view of a party anthem, complete with a “country band playing to a wasted crowd.” The album closes with “Bixby,” a reverent ode to the Tulsa suburb where Kent grew up and its “Friday night lights and oil fields.”