Country singer-songwriter Joshua Hedley will release his new album Neon Blue on April 22nd, 2022 via New West Records. Hedley teased the new album with the release of its title track, the rowdy honky-tonker "Neon Blue."
The 12-song album, co-produced by Jordan Lehning and Skylar Wilson and mixed by Kyle Lehning (George Strait, Randy Travis), is the follow up to Hedley's critically acclaimed 2018 debut Mr. Jukebox.
While Mr. Jukebox drew on Hedley's knowledge and passion for classic country ballads of the '50s and '60s, Neon Blue examines '90s country.
"The last bastion of country music was the early 1990s, roughly 1989 to 1996. You could turn on the radio and immediately know you're hearing a country song," Hedley said in a press release. "You could still hear steel guitar and fiddle. But there was a hard fork around 1996 or '97, when country veered off into pop territory. Neon Blue asks, What if that fork never happened? What if country kept on sounding like country?"
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Hedley enlisted a group of all-star professional session players for the album.
"All the players on this record are the people who are playing on Top 40 hits. They're the professionals playing two or three sessions a day, and it was crazy to see them work," Hedley said. "I came in with skeletons and they put flesh on them. They made them into human beings."
Neon Blue Track List:
1. Broke Again
2. Country & Western
3. Old Heartbroke Blues
4. The Last Thing In The World
5. Down To My Last Lie
6. Free (One Heart)
7. Neon Blue
8. Bury Me With My Boots On
9. Found In A Bar
10. Let's Make A Memory
11. Wonder If You Wonder
12. River In The Rain