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Riker Brothers
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Riker Brothers
Brett Young’s life didn’t turn out the way he expected.
In fact, if he could tell his 21-year-old self that one day he’d be capping a day of wedding plans with his fourth, record label-hosted Number One party, the Fresno State baseball player might think he had gone crazy. But the music business often favors people who are able to change the way they see themselves, and for a young athlete suffering a career-altering elbow injury in 2003, change didn’t seem like a bad idea.
“It was nothing that you can plan for,” Young says, referring to his latest accomplishments, which include the early 2018 single “Mercy” topping the Country Airplay Chart—and proposing to his longtime love, Taylor Mills. “I can’t take credit for it, and it’s not easy to say it until it happens, but God’s timing is just a little better than ours,” he says.
Timing has been a crucial aspect of Young’s musical career, which was set in motion after his college injury prevented him from continuing to focus on sports. He was inspired to pick up the guitar by pop rock artist Gavin DeGraw by way of The WB’s TV show One Tree Hill (DeGraw wrote the theme song), and since then, Young’s songwriting talent, paired with a series of smart business decisions, have led him down a fruitful walk of life—one he almost didn’t take. Now, 15 years later, Young readies for the release of his sophomore album Ticket to L.A. on December 7 via Big Machine Records.
As co-writer on 10 of the 13 tracks on Ticket to L.A., Young took it upon himself to make sure the album was a decisive second step after his eponymous debut in 2017, which has since achieved platinum status. According to him, that meant avoiding the notorious “sophomore slump” at all costs, even taking a step away from the happiness he had found in success to remember the harder times.
“One of the challenging things for me with this record was to write the sad song when I wasn’t sad, you know?” the Anaheim, California-born singer says. “And if you’ve got two great co-writers in the room, and neither of them are sad either, you gotta go back to a time when you were sad and really draw from that.”
When Young moved from Los Angeles to Nashville in 2012 after an investor financed his first release, he and his girlfriend (now wife) broke up. The first few years in Music City were made up of writing and pitching songs, and trying to get his name out there. It was an uphill battle, and much of the heartache in his ballad-heavy debut LP reflects the experience of being in a new place without the person he loved. But things took a turn when he inked a deal with Big Machine Records in May 2015—the contracted album featured his most famous songs, “In Case You Didn’t Know,” which has gone three-times platinum, and “Sleep Without You,” and “Mercy,” both of which are platinum. His girlfriend came back into his life, they became engaged in February 2018, and married just last month.
The Dan Huff-produced Ticket to L.A. is noticeably more upbeat than Brett Young, with less silky balladry but more of the California-rooted smooth rock groove that Young and his team once penned “Caliville.”
“There are elements of my upbringing in Southern California all over the songwriting and production,” Young says. “I think it’s possible for me to make that work because of where country music is as a genre now. I was in the L.A. singer-songwriter scene for so long before I moved here, and it was just 10 years of it being drilled into me. Now, it’s subtle, but I think that’s what makes what I do its own thing.”