Brent Cobb has written hit songs for Nashville heavyweights like Luke Bryan, Little Big Town, and Miranda Lambert, to name a few. But throughout the handful of records he’s released under his own name, he’s always carried himself with a laidback ease, projecting backroads’ casualness instead of polished Music City ambition. He sings with a loose and languid drawl, often sounding like a passive narrator a few tokes deep on a rural front porch, telling cautionary tales or pining for simple pleasures. Even as he’s found plenty of success (he recently opened stadium gigs for Luke Combs), he always seems to be longing for a more relaxed setting. As he puts it in “Country Bound,” from his Grammy-nominated 2016 album Shine on Rainy Day: “There’s many people all around me. / But the feeling’s not here I’m trying to find.”
So Cobb, one of the chillest dudes in Americana, decided it was time to get back to his roots. Just ahead of recording his latest album, the October-released Southern Star, Cobb left Nashville for good and moved back to his native Georgia. Accordingly, his new effort is a heartfelt homecoming statement that finds him deep in his comfort zone.
To make the self-produced LP, Cobb went to Macon and recorded at Capricorn Sound Studios, the historic spot where the Allman Brothers Band, Charlie Daniels, and Percy Sledge made landmark works in the lineage of Southern rock and soul. To hone the vibe, Cobb assembled a cast of Georgia-based musicians, who helped him effortlessly move between gritty country-funk and vintage ‘70s folk-rock sounds. The result is a collection of songs with easy-going grooves and throwback influences about the relief of returning to the familiar.
“Livin’ the Dream” is a greasy, deep-in-the-pocket jam that extols the virtues of kicking it in the countryside when the world at large is overwhelming. In between wailing harmonica fills, Cobb nonchalantly sings, “There’s no phone line, so I make conversation with the warm sunshine.” The wonders of nature are also praised in “Shade Tree,” a breezy acoustic tune Cobb wrote with his wife and sister.
Cobb doesn’t spend the entire album with his head in the clouds—he also uses his cosmic pondering to process grief. In 2021, one of his best friends, Jason “Rowdy” Cope, a guitarist in the edgy country-rock band The Steel Woods, died at the age of 42. Southern Star is partially named after a bar where Cobb and Cope used to hang out, and in the album’s title track, a soulfully reflective song with gentle keyboard vamps, Cobb sweetly recalls his partying days as a “temporary treat,” before once again letting his mind drift towards home.
Being a musician—even an in-demand songwriter—is a relentless hustle. It seems from now on that if Cobb has anything more to say, it’ll come from an anonymous stretch of highway. As he sings in the swaying country ballad “Patina”: “If we get to rolling too fast, life will downshift on us.”