Kip Moore digs deeper with ‘Wild Ones’

Kip Moore has gone two years without having a hit single, an eternity for many artists in the competitive, radio-driven country music genre – especially someone like Moore who is trying to regain the commercial momentum he enjoyed with his first album, “Up All Night.”

That 2012 release sold about 400,000 copies, produced a pair of top-five country singles, “Something About a Truck” and “Hey Pretty Girl,” and got Moore touted as one of country music’s breakout stars.

Moore, who performs Thursday at Hartman Arena, knows he needs another hit, and he’s hoping his second single from his new album, “Wild Ones,” will do the trick. It’s a full-bodied ballad with a big chorus called “Running for You,” and it cracked the Top 40 on “Billboard” magazine’s Country Airplay chart.

“I feel really strong about this song,” Moore said in a recent phone interview. “I always felt like this song was special. I almost gave the song away a couple of different times to really big artists back when I needed money as a writer, back when I was barely getting by and people wanted the song. But I always kept it in my back pocket because I felt like I always knew where I was going as an artist, and I felt like I was going to need it one day.”

It’s not as if his label, MCA Records, didn’t try to get Moore back on the country singles chart sooner. In fact, Moore had a second album ready to release in early 2014.

But when two singles – “Young Love” and “Dirt Road” — intended to fuel anticipation and first-week sales for the release of the second album stiffed at radio that spring, the album was put on hold.

Moore didn’t stand still. Feeling the album wouldn’t reflect where he was in his life by the time it was released, he scrapped the original album. “Wild Ones” now has only two songs that were on the original version of the second album.

Not surprisingly, “Wild Ones” shows an evolution in Moore’s music compared to “Up All Night.”

For one thing, Moore (who worked with, among others, frequent songwriting partners Westin Davis, Dan Couch and Brett James) digs deeper lyrically on the new album. While there are good lovin’/havin’-a-good-time songs (“What Ya Got On Tonight” and the title cut are examples), other songs examine issues like his struggle to believe that lasting love is possible in the song “Magic” and dealing with the desire for a woman who may be out of reach in “Heart’s Desire.”

“I think the first record was definitely a little lighter,” he said.

“I feel like we took some interesting takes on some of those topics that maybe have been done before.”

Musically, Moore wanted to create melodies and moods that matched the tenor of the lyrics.

One key, he felt, was to create a sound that had space and wasn’t as instrumentally dense as most country albums. Where he recorded with seven musicians for “Up All Night,” the basic tracks for “Wild Ones” were mostly recorded as a trio. The leaner approach, Moore said, enabled the instruments to sound bigger and left room to create an almost U2-like atmosphere and ambiance that contributes strongly to the mood of many songs.

“It was just always about creating music that was going to make you feel something that was going to match the heaviness of these lyrics,” Moore said. “ ‘Heart’s Desire,’ that’s probably the most vulnerable I’ve ever been in a song in my whole life. I was relentless on that song. I had that music for five months, and I wrote four different songs over the top of it, and it never matched the intensity of what that music was saying. That’s how it was on this record. Then I finally landed on (the right lyrics for) ‘Heart’s Desire.’ That’s as stripped down and as vulnerable as I could be. I think there was more of that on this record. There was more of me just exposing myself.”

The depth in the lyrics and the determination to stay true to himself have helped Moore develop a loyal following that continues to turn out for his live shows and is invested in all of his songs and not just the singles.

“Our live show has been our bread and butter, to where I feel like once people actually come to a show, I think they always leave a fan,” Moore said. “That’s been the key to this whole thing, for it to be able to sustain when we haven’t had success necessarily over the last couple of years on radio. We’ve been able to continue to sell out shows. But it’s still very important to have radio on your side, too.

“There is such a frenzy in the audience now, even more so than the first time around,” he said. “And the first time around, I was coming off of big hit No. 1 songs. I haven’t had a hit song for two years, and that’s the crazy part about it. It’s even crazier inside now because they’re just really responding to the artistry of it.”

This story was originally published January 28, 2016 at 2:14 PM with the headline "Kip Moore digs deeper with ‘Wild Ones’."