Brett Eldredge takes a detour for 'Sunday Drive'

Greg NoireFor his new album, Sunday Drive, hitmaker Brett Eldredge literally needed to take a detour.

"I felt in a place where there is so much more I could give," he explains. "And there's so much more that I have as an artist that I haven't shown vocally and musically... So I had to really shake up the process."

For that, he enlisted the team behind Kacey Musgraves' Grammy-winning Golden Hour.

"I loaded up my bus and I got [producers] Ian [Fitchuk] and Daniel [Tashian]... and we rode to my little [home]town of Paris, Illinois," Brett recalls. "And I showed 'em those Midwest values that I grew up in, and still carry in my life."

"I wanted 'em to feel that and see that," he adds, "so... it shows up in the music."

Instead of returning to Tennessee to make his fifth studio record, Brett set out for the Windy City.

"We... went up to Chicago...  lived in Chicago for weeks at a time," he reveals. "I could've done the record in Nashville... but I needed to get a different lens on what I was doing as an artist and as a person."

"I wanted to walk those streets in my favorite city," he continues, "and step into the studio and create some, and then when I needed to think a little bit, I'd step out."

In the end, Brett's happy with the journey his Sunday Drive took.

"It ties together a lot of my inspirations," he reflects, "and... pushes the boundaries in a way that I think [people] can relate to... It's just heavy in nostalgia, it's heavy in the people that I grew up listening to, but also things of today... It was scary to do, and also very empowering."

Sunday Drive comes out on Friday.

By Stephen Hubbard
Copyright © 2020, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.