Kane Brown 'gave everything' on his new album, 'The High Road.' The journey home meant experimenting

NEW YORK (AP) — Kane Brown is in his new home studio just outside Nashville, preparing to have the first sit-down conversation about his fourth studio album, "The High Road." It's a fitting title, because pounding the pavement is something he's more than familiar with. A few short days ago, he was in Los Angeles, performing at the iHeartRadio Jingle Ball alongside an eclectic mix of the biggest performers — SZA, Tate McRae, Madison Beer, T-Pain, Paris Hilton and K-pop group NCT Dream among them.

To the untrained ear, it might seem unusual pairing — one of the great modern country voices alongside pop acts. But genre-mixing? That's something Brown knows a little bit about, too.

Country is at the heart of everything he does — the genre's narrative style, fiddles, slide guitar and Brown's signature twang carry throughout — but “The High Road” isn't afraid to play with different sounds. He says he's “always been kind of nervous to push boundaries and do certain things. But I’ve been here for almost a decade now, so I needed to stop hiding and just do what I love to do. And country is always my number one.”

“This is by far my favorite album, from the sequencing to the songwriting to the different sounds. There’s definitely a song for everybody,” he continues. “My other albums, I always kind of, you know, cared what people thought about. And this album, we don’t... we gave our everything into the songs.”

He's also no stranger to working with a variety of artists, from regional Mexican country superstar Carin León on "The One (Pero No Como Yo)," which released earlier this year, to 2019's "One Thing Right" with EDM giant Marshmello. The helmet-wearing DJ is back on "The High Road," with the radio smash "Miles On It."

This album, which will be released Jan. 24, includes more features than any other in Brown's discography, including tracks with Khalid, Jelly Roll, and the legendary Brad Paisley.

They came about naturally: Khalid expressed interest in wanting to go country, Brown helped him make it happen. For the Paisley track "Things We Quit," Brown shared a video of him singing it on social media, and "a lot of people said, 'This sounds like a Brad Paisley song,'" he says, smiling. "And it's kind of a comedy country song, a little bit, so he was perfect for that."

And as for Jelly Roll, on the song “Haunted”? That one was written while Brown was staying in a hotel in Manchester, England.

“It was this big hotel, and I had the suite, which was a bank vault. So, the bank vault was actually in my room and there were these, like, old paintings on the wall. And we wrote three or four songs that day and we couldn’t think of a song title. And I was like, ‘This is place is haunted,’" he recalls. "Let's write a song called ‘Haunted,’ about depression and all that. So, I mean, it actually, it came out really quick and, you know, it’s meaningful to me. So hopefully it’ll be meaningful to a lot of other people.”

Jelly Roll has never been one to veer away from topics of mental health, and he made the ideal collaborator. "That song is so him," Brown says. "He didn't think that I was going to release it, so he was trying to keep it for himself. So that told me that the song meant even more to him than what I thought it was going to mean."

Important to Brown, no doubt, are two new duets with his wife Katelyn, following the success of their 2023's single “Thank God.”

“Our music is about telling our story,” she told The Associated Press.

There's the R&B-pop of "Body Talk," and a traditionalist's country tune in "Do Us Apart" — pulling from a long tradition of country music greats performing with their partners. The latter should come as no surprise. "Our favorite duet to sing together is Randy Travis and Carrie Underwood's "I Told You So," so we've always wanted to have that type of song," he says.

And country songs, he's got a lot of them: the jukebox “Fiddle in the Band,” the slow-burn “Backseat Driver,” the barstool swaying of “Says I Can.”

Or the closer, “'When You Forget,' a song that I wrote about my granddad with Alzheimer's. To me, that's ‘90s country song storytelling,” he says. “That's keep the tradition there — and then I go far left with some other songs.”

On “The High Road,” Brown believes each track tells a story — and he looks forward to sharing them, both through the record and on a North American tour next spring.

“I just hope people can find a piece of themselves in each song,” he says. “Or... at least one song.”