Sam Hunt’s sophomore album, Southside, debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart.
The 12-song set moved 46,000 equivalent units, according to Nielsen Music/MRC Data, which was also good enough for No. 5 on the all-genre Billboard 200 chart.
Southside, which features Sam’s recent No. 1 hit, “Kinfolks,” and new single, “Hard to Forget,” also includes his 2017 smash hit, “Body Like a Back Road,” and 2018 Top 20 hit, “Downtown’s Dead.” Southside follows Sam’s 2014 debut album, Montevallo, which spawned No. 1 hits “Leave the Night On,” “Take Your Time,” “House Party” and more.
“[The break] gave me some time to reflect on the two, three years prior,” said Sam to Kix Brooks of American Country Countdown. “It gave me some time to think about how I wanted to approach the next two, three, four, five, 10 years. It gave me some time to reconnect with the girl who I ended up getting married to, and kind of—I guess for lack of a better way to put it—put some roots down. Coming from a world where it was either put roots down now or probably never put roots down, it was a pretty big fork in the road for me, so I just wanted to make sure to get it right, and I took some time to do that.”
Sam’s new single, “Hard to Forget,” which samples Webb Pierce’s 1953 hit, “There Stands the Glass,” was co-penned by Sam, Luke Laird, Shane McAnally, Josh Osborne and Ashley Gorley, as well as “There Stands the Glass” songwriters Audrey Grisham, Russ Hull and Mary Jean Shurtz.
photo by NCD
