This Week’s Backstage Country Host: Sam Hunt

Backstage Country’s Elaina Smith co-host this week is a five-time Grammy-nominated artist, diamond and multi-platinum-selling, ACM and CMT award-winning hit maker with 10 number one songs, Sam Hunt! For the entire week, Hunt will be discussing the stories behind his songs, his most-viewed YouTube video, and celebrating a number one song during the pandemic.  

Hunt admitted that “Leave the Night On” is a big song for him and one of the cornerstones of his live shows. Smith asked what the country crooner feels that the song is old enough that young children who first heard it are now attending his concerts with their kids. Hunt chuckled, “Wild!” He added, “It's cool to see some of those kids that maybe were four or five, six years old, listening to that record riding around with their parents, and now they're 12 or 14 and that's some of the first music that they got to listen to.”  

Hunt’s most viewed YouTube video is for his track, “Body Like a Back Road.” What Smith found interesting is that the video is only audio. She asked him if he thought the song would be a massive hit. Hunt replied, “No, not at first. I had a tour coming up with Luke Bryan in 2017. And I have not written or recorded any new music. But I needed new music to go out. I felt like I should put out new music if I was going to go on the road with Luke."

He continues, "So anyway, I had this one song and kind of went in a short amount of time right before the tour started, recorded it, got it out. And we didn't have time to shoot a music video. We were about to get on the road, and so we just thought ‘Well, let's hope this works, let's hope this can carry my summer’ and it just started to snowball and grew and grew and grew.”  

Looking back, Hunt reflected, “It's hard to really explain why it worked the way that it did. I think it was just a timing thing, just the right time, right place. It's ended up being the biggest song of my career.”  

Hunt released “Kinfolks” in 2019. It’s his third single from his second album, Southside. It spent a week at Number 1 on US Country Airplay (Billboard). Smith asked if he was able to properly celebrate this achievement before the world shut down because of the pandemic. 

“Oh, I did,” Hunt replied. However, he added that he really did not get a chance to tour that record. “So, it did feel a little bit like a letdown, you know, work, work, work, get this album done, we finally have it, put it out. And it was almost the day that the album came out that the news started to come that the world might be about to shut down pretty soon.”  

Tune in to Backstage Country from July 21-25, and get to know more about Sam Hunt, his music, and what it’s really like living as a country music star.