The Hometown Kid

If you’ve spent time in Nashville, you know how rare it is to meet an actual native of the rapidly growing city. Gabe Lee’s third album *The Hometown Kid* nods to that phenomenon, as the critically acclaimed singer-songwriter grew up and cut his musical teeth in Nashville, making him uniquely positioned to write about the city at the heart of so many country songs. “Authenticity is what *The Hometown Kid* strives for,” Lee tells Apple Music. “It\'s pushing that idea, that there are in fact honest folks out there who have everyday feelings about sadness, joy, love, fear, sorrow. All of those things are okay to feel through music and this record, especially.” *The Hometown Kid* opens with “Wide Open,” an origin story of sorts, told in three parts, that traces Lee’s roots from a young man singing in church to the artist he is today. “Longer I Run - Hammer Down” is a double track, with each half serving to offer a different perspective on similar feelings. It’s one of several points on the album where Lee employs a more literary approach to his songwriting, something that has set him apart in the crowded emerging country field since he made his debut. And on closing track “Angel Band,” Lee nods to his roots growing up singing in the church with a gospel-tinged celebration of the players who keep Nashville worthy of its “Music City” nickname. Below, Lee walks Apple Music through several key tracks on *The Hometown Kid*. **“Wide Open”** “It\'s three vignettes, essentially: childhood, adolescence, and growing into adulthood. So, and there\'s also a cycle of birth and birth and death. The first line is \'You woke up in the hotel room and you feel like you needed to chase something.\' And then by the end, it\'s talking about an old stone wall and talking about just civil rights parades and civil wars. There\'s a lot of mortality in that as well. So it\'s definitely the three vignettes are just moments captured in my memory of places that I essentially drive around in, in Nashville. Whether it was as a kid in high school or growing up around the area, just images that popped out when I was writing a song.” **“Over You”** “It’s hard to have a good record without throwing in at least one or two heartbreak or heartache songs on there. But ‘Over You’ is really about, in a lot of ways, more than just the struggle of the internal emotion that you might have, more than just ‘F you’ to whoever the other person in the relationship is, or whatever it is you may be leaving behind. It doesn\'t have to be interpersonal. I mean, I\'ve framed the song as a romantic relationship. But it could be the distance between a person and a community, or multiple groups of people. Or even, on the *Honky Tonk Hell* record from 2020, there were even relationships that I was, I guess, metaphorically writing about, but they were more about tradition and new culture happening. So all of that plays in when I use lyrics that sound very interpersonal, like just a normal breakup.” **“Rusty”** “‘Rusty’ absolutely encompasses that vibe that sometimes you have to leave a place and return to it to really appreciate it. I think there was a crossroads. There have been many crossroads, but I think there was one, especially, that is very, very formative and is a huge linchpin for how my life was going, post-college. And it was a crossroads of having to make decisions based on trying to learn and better yourself. I think, at a time, I had essentially soured or spoiled a lot of relationships in my life on my own end and was looking for, I guess, a restart in a lot of ways. And it eventually did lead to me to come back to Nashville, which was exactly what needed to happen.” **“Longer I Run - Hammer Down”** “‘Longer I Run’ and ‘Hammer Down’ are obviously a double track on the record, and we just intended that from the beginning, to meld the tracks together because they told two sides of the same story. And it leads off with ‘Longer I Run,’ essentially someone who\'s not settled, someone who, while they may have things to ground them and a home even, they\'re seemingly having taken it for granted and feeling like their spirit needs to wander more. And it leads to ‘Hammer Down,’ which is a story about someone who\'s been locked out or has locked himself out. And I ended up just being inspired to write about that, to connect that ‘Longer I Run’ story to this slow country swing ballad. I guess, in a lot of ways, it’s about shooting yourself in the foot and knowing it and being aware of it.” **“Angel Band”** “It is a goodbye, in a lot of ways, on the record. The last two records we\'ve put out had solid, very obvious farewell songs. But the Honky Tonk Angel Band, it\'s like it\'s an ode to Nashville pickers and musicians. Because in a lot of ways, I think the industry sees itself apart from others and even other art and entertainment because it\'s its own crazy world. And where else would we all be if we didn\'t have music or country music or the industry of music in Nashville? So I think there\'s a lot of folks who see themselves as lucky misfits in this town. It\'s like, ‘You know what? If I can\'t do anything else in this life or beyond, just at least let me play guitar in the Angel Band. If I can\'t succeed at anything else, at least let give me that.’”