"I'm scared of growing up/ I'm scared of growing old/ I'm scared of falling short/ I'm scared of the unknown." Those are the first words Kane Brown sings on The High Road, his highly anticipated followup to 2022's Different Man. Initially it might seem a less than victorious reintroduction from a country superstar hot off a constant succession of career milestones. For a moment, the laidback Brown is in a reflective space: A sudden realization that life has moved fast, at thirty one and a father of three, with the same existential wranglings anyone in the same chapter of life might feel. But these words belong to The High Road's anthemic opener "I Am," which soon counters fear with the affirmation that Brown, or anyone singing along to those words, is becoming the exact person he's supposed to be. "I know the road ahead/ Will make me who I am," he resolves.
"I Am" immediately draws a line in the sand: The High Road is Kane Brown's most personal and unapologetic album, eighteen tracks representing everything he's about and every new musical twist he wants to explore. As a Black artist without strict loyalty to the genre's old strictures, he arrived as a maverick from the start -- once prompting The New York Times to proclaim he "didn't fit the country music mold. So he made his own." Nevertheless, Brown still felt hemmed in creatively. "I was trying to please the people who are never going to be pleased, even if you write the best country song ever," he explains, before chuckling and adding: "I've been here almost a decade and I just don't give a shit no more."
At the same time, Brown is far from a niche character, but rather a key figure both in country's mainstream insurgence of recent years and in the genre's boundary-pushing evolutions. Described by Billboard as "the future of country music," the 56X-Platinum singer-songwriter has racked up a daunting array of accolades and awards since his 2016 self-titled debut. He was named to the TIME 100 list in 2021, and in 2023 became the first Black artist to headline and sell out Boston's historic Fenway Park. He's received multiple nods including the coveted Entertainer of the Year award at the ACMs as well as multiple wins and nominations at the Billboard Music Awards, American Music Awards, CMT Music Awards, and People's Country Choice Awards.
Thanks to his ongoing work with The Boys & Girls Club, he also earned that organization's Champion Of The Youth Award and the Country Radio Seminar (CRS) Humanitarian Award. The High Road already boasts another career highlight, 2024's instant classic banger "Miles On It," the Marshmello collaboration that marks Brown's twelfth #1 country hit.
Rather than eschewing that success or resting on his laurels, The High Road instead finds Brown at a new level of artistic ambition, delivering his most sprawling and nuanced explorations of not only country music's borders, but what other stylistic horizons he can chase. Conceived over two years and amidst constant touring that found Brown traversing America, Canada, Europe, and Australia, the title nods to how the road itself has molded Brown and his restless experimentation, and also doubles down on refusing to compromise with his new music. "Everybody's got naysayers, and we just keep our head high," he says.
Just as "I Am" provides a thematic mission statement for The High Road, the rousing second track "Fiddle In The Band" is something of an aesthetic overture: Over a throbbing backbeat and, fittingly, a lively fiddle line, Brown sings of his omnivorous musicality. "I'm a little bit of bass, 808s, a little bit of clap your hands/ I'm a little bit of six strings on a backbeat, with a fiddle in the band." he sings, "I can't help to be R&B with a touch of twang/ Air guitars and dashboard drumming." From there The High Road takes the listener many places: the country balladry of "Backseat Driver" and its reflection on parenthood, "Miles On It" fusing pop and country with classic car-and-love wordplay, or modern Southern rockers like "Start A Fire" and "I Can Feel It."
"I'm a walking jukebox," Brown says. The only real prompt for The High Road was trying to depart from the expected tropes of country radio. While the album has a few moments nodding to whiskey and good times (or, naturally, good times turned sour), Brown was determined to create a more complex portrait of young adulthood tumbling towards the future and new horizons. And along the way, that meant he and his collaborators followed whatever muse appeared to them. Sometimes exiting a session with a country song, sometimes with a pop song, the only guiding principle was that this time, for real, anything goes. "What's cool is we don't know what we're going to get that day, but whatever we do get, we can release it," he explains.
Accordingly, The High Road includes a series of guests carefully curated to span eras and styles. Brad Paisley, an artist Brown grew up listening to and previously collaborated with, duets on the not-quite-sober reflection "Things We Quit." Brown reconnects with Khalid on "Rescue," a twilit track making good on the "R&B with a touch of twang" promise. "Rescue" sits alongside "Haunted" as the album's vulnerable centerpiece, the latter finding Brown joining forces with recent breakout artist Jelly Roll. "There's a lot I can relate to with Jelly," Brown says. "I knew he wouldn't be scared to talk about those things because he does it all the time."
Elsewhere, Brown once more sings alongside his wife Katelyn, on "Body Talk" and "Do Us Apart," the latter the couple's nod to their favorite country duet, Carrie Underwood and Randy Travis' "I Told You So." Both of those songs sit in the second half of The High Road, and that's not a mistake. After taking special care to structure The High Road as a true album-as-album journey, Brown landed on an arc. "I Am" and "Fiddle In The Band" set the stage emotionally and stylistically, and the rest of the album is a wide-ranging trek true to its title, eventually leading back home. In the album's final moments, Brown takes it back to family and time's passage, mulling over generational experience and paying tribute to not just the road that made him, but the people too. "Stay" might be one of the album's most poignant moments, interpolating one of Brown's mother's favorite Sugarland songs.
By the end, you don't need to have traversed the globe to relate to all the different stops on The High Road. Across 18 songs, Brown gets at all the shades of waning youth and those murky not-quite-old years, growing up right alongside the fans who've been with him since the mid-'10s. It's the most honest, multi-faceted work from Brown yet, building on everything he's done before and leaving the door open for just about anything in the future. "This is me, this is Kane Brown," he concludes. "This is the artist I am."
