Coming to Rupp: Country artist so busy he jokes he’s ‘trying to keep with Taylor Swift’

Thomas Rhett has a song for you. In fact, he has a truckload of them.

The Georgia-born songwriter has long been one of country music’s more prolific scribes, having chalked up a lengthy roster of hits he has co-penned, including “What’s Your Country Song,” “Remember You Young” and the recent collaboration with Riley Green, “Half of Me.” That doesn’t even include the stable of songs he wrote or co-wrote for artists like Jason Aldean, Florida Georgia Line and Lee Brice before Rhett’s own recording career got underway in 2012.

But even for a country artist with a hearty work ethic, Rhett has been putting in a lot of overtime of late. He released back-to-back albums in 2021 and 2022, has a greatest hits package waiting in the wings for this fall and is well underway on another record of new music.

Not bad for a performer who still engages in considerable roadwork (including his current Home Team Tour, which plays Rupp Arena on June 22) and saving time for being a family man at home.

When asked about releasing three albums in three years with a fourth set to follow, Rhett jokingly replied he was “trying to keep up with Taylor Swift.” The real reason for the recent flood of recording activity is far simpler but runs a lot deeper. It began with a pandemic.

“I’ve got buddies that took the (COVID-19) pandemic as a sign to chill out and not do anything except be with their family,” Rhett said. “I’ve also got buddies who couldn’t handle it and wrote way too many songs in a very short amount of time. I would say I was one of those people that kind of balanced that decently. At the beginning of the pandemic, I started to freak out a little bit because I started to ask myself questions like, ‘Man, this is the first time in a decade where I’ve never been able to book a tour or be in the studio or play songs in front of people.’ So I just put my head into writing, which is what normally happens when my brain doesn’t know what else to do. I was about half way through the pandemic and my wife was like, ‘Hey, it doesn’t look like we’re going to be able to do anything this year, so you should just chill.’ So I would say for the first six months of the pandemic, I wrote, gosh, maybe 80 to 100 tunes.”

The first batch of those works surfaced in 2021 as “Country Again, Side A” – a collection of compositions possessing a roots-oriented, traditionally flavored intimacy when compared to the more mainstream radio hits Rhett had forged into hits in years prior.

“I wasn’t able to write with anybody in person in 2020. It was all on Zoom and Team meetings, which were so miserable. I know that everybody did those a lot, but if I don’t have to do a Zoom meeting ever again, that would be just fine. I went from writing with a bunch of producers and guys who were making really cool sounding tracks to all of a sudden writing on just the piano or guitar. A lot of these songs, just the way they came out during COVID, sounded very raw and very stripped when we finally got in the studio. For me, that was a big change of pace. Over the last decade of my life, I felt like I’ve always been the dude that was always trying to be a little bit left of center. I’m always trying to bring in my influences from growing up, no matter what the genre. ‘Country Again, Side A’ was the most cohesive project I’ve ever made because I had a vibe in mind and we stuck to it.”

Of course, releasing an album titled “Country Again, Side A” begs the question about if and when there will be a “Side B.” There will be, but once touring reconvened for Rhett in 2021, so did another writing spree that yielded the contemporary and often celebratory-leaning fare that established his presence on country radio in the first place. As a result, 2022 brought the album “Where We Started,” which debuted at No. 12 on the all-genre Billboard 200 chart.

So, again the question: Why “Where We Started” and not “Country Again, Side B?”

“Man, that’s the most asked question I’ve received in three years,” Rhett said. “I wish I had the most strategic, perfect PR answer for you, but I don’t. The only way I know how to describe it is like this. I got back on the road and put out ‘Side A’ with zero context. I was writing these songs in my basement with no one to play them for. Then we got on the road and some of them really worked on the road and some of them really didn’t, so it kind of forced me to get into a different mindset as far as writing. It was like, ‘How do I write songs to make people want to dance? How do I write songs to make people want to drink a beer while standing in the grass at a big amphitheater? That’s where my head went for six to eight months. There was conversation of putting ‘Side B’ out after ‘A,’ but the song choices that were on ‘Where We Started’ did not add up to what I thought ‘Side B’ should sound like.

“I’m back in the studio now where we’ve already cut nine or ten tunes for ‘Side B,’ I think that music just works how it’s supposed to. Now that I’m hearing these songs that we’ve just recorded, I’m so glad that we didn’t rush out ‘Side B.’ I think people are going to be really excited that we waited, wrote and really dig into what I thought ‘Side B’ was going to feel like.”

The wait for “Side B” may be a little longer than planned, though. Rhett’s next release will be a greatest hits set, the content of which is expressed succinctly in its title: “20 Number Ones.” The collection is due out in late September.

“I look back at my life and I’m like, ‘How did this happen? How did I get here?’ There have been moments in my life that really had genuine authenticity and there have been moments in my career that I’ve created out of fear or out of, like, keeping up with the Joneses or trying to sound like somebody else. I think that any time I’ve ever done that, it’s never done anything good for my career.

“Moving forward, especially this year, I’ve got such a freedom about me. That freedom of being able to create whatever I wanted to create is what got me here in the first place. There may have been a bunch of people that thought my music wasn’t cool or wasn’t country enough, but there was also a bunch of people that really related to it.

“I just feel so free in the way that I’m writing and in the way I’m creating now. I’m creating just out of pure joy, for the love of music. That’s something that I haven’t really done in the last three to five years, so I’m excited to get back on that train.”

Thomas Rhett, Cole Swindell and Nate Smith

When: June 22 at 7:30 p.m. June 22

Where: Rupp Arena, 430 W. Vine.

Tickets: $29.50-$129.50 through ticketmaster.com.