Brett Young noticed a big shift in his songwriting process when he went in to create his third album, Weekends Look a Little Different These Days, in 2021: Instead of writing songs about what he was going through at that moment, he started drawing from the past.
“This album was all about learning to go back and draw from past experiences,” Young explains, pointing out that if he’d only written about his current life stage -- as a happily married father -- the songs might’ve gotten a little repetitive.
“So that there was something for everybody, and you didn’t get a lullaby record about my babies and my happy marriage. You got a little bit of everything,” he continues.
That’s not to say the songs weren’t personal: For example, “You Didn’t” was written about a time in his life when he and his now-wife Taylor called it quits for a while.
“We didn’t fight. Nobody cheated. It was none of that. We just broke up,” Brett remembers. “I was in a different place than she was."
And even though this breakup happened years before he wrote a song about it, the singer says he was still able to tap into that pain. “I went through that. I felt that,” he notes.
What started with the dilemma of needing to write more than his current life stage became an important process of growth and learning, Brett goes on to say.
“This whole album has been a challenge for me,” he explains. “In a good way. It’s really grown and stretched me as a writer, because up until album number three, I’d written what I was going through in the moment.”
Weekends Look a Little Different These Days came out in June 2021.