Sam Hunt Defends His Country Cred on New Album ‘Montevallo’
In 2007, the University of Alabama at Birmingham athletics department filmed a video about their doe-eyed star quarterback, a philosophy major named Sam Hunt, who sat a little awkwardly in a pair of boot-cut dad jeans and a boxy black t-shirt in the Blazers locker room. Perched among the uniforms with field-reddened cheeks, all 215 pounds and 6’3″ or so of him, Hunt strummed the gospel classic “The Unclouded Day” on his pawnshop guitar.
“Football sometimes is stressful,” a smiling Hunt says in the video, his voice thickly muddled with a Georgia accent. “Music is more of a kind of laid-back type, chilled-out kind of activity. It kind of keeps me balanced, I guess.” Snippets of him singing, with a deep, delicate country inflection laced with hints of a bluesy growl, are spliced with action shots of him throwing touchdown passes. Hunt was a starting player, known for his quick runs. “[Music’s] made me new friends, unlikely friends I might not have met,” he adds, “being a football kind of guy.”
Friends, maybe, like Keith Urban, who would later record the Hunt-penned “Cop Car,” or friends like songwriter-producer Shane McAnally, or maybe just friends like MCA Records Nashville, who signed him to his first major-label deal and released his debut LP, Montevallo, today. These weren’t exactly the type of folks someone like Hunt, growing up in a prototype of Friday Night Lights existence may have ever met, or even thought about. Hunt certainly didn’t think he would, being “a football kind of guy,” but, then again, quarterbacks aren’t always known as artistic types.
“It took me a couple years to get over the stereotype I was letting myself get caught up on, being a football player trying to start a career in music,” Hunt tells Rolling Stone Country seven years later, calling from Dallas, where he’s playing a show with Kip Moore and Charlie Worsham. He’s coming from a workout at the local gym, though he’s not always that healthy. “I did have a lot of pizza last night,” he says. Hunt doesn’t play much football these days, and he barely likes watching it on television. But he’ll play a game of hoops — he lettered in basketball in high school — to exercise that competitive spirit.
That UAB video is an essential part of understanding Sam Hunt. Not because of the football skills, or the 1900 passing yards he threw that year. It’s because the most shocking part (besides the bad denim and Drew Brees bangs) is just how country he is. Which is in stark contrast to the music he released this week.
Montevallo is not, by traditional definitions, a country album. Nor is its lead single, “Leave the Night On,” currently Number Three on the Hot Country Songs chart, a country song. But, like many things in the Hunt doctrine, it’s all about how you define things — you’d think he majored in linguistics, not philosophy, or at least pre-law.