Justin Moore Interview: Hitmaker Spills on Life at Home With Two Daughters and Trying His Hand at Love Songs
Justin Moore has a standing position as one of country music’s most-loved crooners, which is partially in thanks to his charming personality, but mostly due to the fact that he dishes out the kind of country music that people seem to gravitate toward. After a wild ride over the past couple of years with the release of big albums and No. 1 singles, plus opening up for some of country music’s biggest names, Moore still has his eye on the prize.
The singer just kicked off a road run with Eric Church, but still took time to chat with Taste of Country about his romantic new single and his future plans, plus what life off the road is like with two little girls under the age of three.
ToC: Talk a little bit about your current single, ”Til My Last Day.’ It’s a bit of a departure for you, single wise, compared to your previous hits, as it’s kind of your first “love song.”
Justin Moore: I thought that, too. I was playing a show a few months back, and we had just put it out as a single. This younger couple came up to me and said, ‘We just want to thank you so much for your song that you had out.’ I was thinking, ‘Alright, man! My first love song and it’s already working!’ She said, ‘We were married and we got a divorce. We have a couple of kids. We got back together and got married again…; I’m thinking, ‘This is perfect! This is a good story!’ She said, ‘He called me when we were apart and said you have to listen to this song … this is exactly us.’ Long story short, they were talking about ‘Bait a Hook.’ I said, ‘Man, if that ain’t redneck, I don’t know what is.’ But ‘Bait a Hook’ brought them back together.
”Til My Last Day’ was my idea of my first love song, but I guess some people consider ‘Bait a Hook’ a love song [laughs]! But this is our first traditional love song. It’s been a little slower than most of my records, which is a little surprising to me. I thought it might be the fastest, but I think it took a while for people to go, ‘Oh, that’s Justin?!’ It is a little different for us, but hopefully it will end up doing really well for us, like the other ones have.
And you recently released a second video for the song…
We kind of did that with ‘Heaven,’ I don’t know if you remember that. We did a behind-the-scenes kind of video. We called it a studio version. We released it early, right when we put the song out, then we went back in and cut a full production video. We thought it might be cool to do it with this one. The first video we went and shot some stuff from a show we played in Wichita, Kansas, which was a really cool room we got to play. It was a great crowd, and we got a lot of great shots of them. Then a couple of camera guys came to my house in Arkansas and just kind of filmed me and the girls, just what we do on a daily basis when we’re not on the road. That was a really cool video for me. I don’t know how many people saw it, but it was really cool. Then here recently, we went back in and shot a full production video with Peter Zavadil. Thankfully I didn’t have to act in it [laughs]! I didn’t have to do a whole lot but go play. I think it turned out great. It’s pretty different for us. It’s a sweet video.
Do you think there will be more love songs to come in the future?
I don’t know. It’s going over really well at shows, which I was a little bit surprised by. I didn’t really know how it would do. I thought that it would do well good at radio, but I didn’t know as far as out on the road how it would do. It seems like everybody’s reacting to it like they would anything else we put out. I’m always going to do what got me to the point where I’m at, but you always have to continue to grow as an artist and do different stuff. I don’t want people getting bored, so I can see us doing some other stuff in this vein.
Is there talk about going another single deep on your current album, ‘Outlaws Like Me’?
This is the third single. I think that we will go one more deep on this one. If this thing dies next week, then we probably will think about something else. All the indicators are pointing toward going one more deep on this album. I have no idea what it’s going to be, honestly. As you know, I am really proud of this album, and I told them they could put out whatever they wanted off this album. Hopefully we get at least one more out there from this record.
When will you begin working on the next album?
We’re already working on the new stuff. I’m listening to a lot of stuff, and I’m still writing a lot of stuff. I’m excited to get new music out there, but at the same time, I hate to leave anything on the table that might help us sell some records or gain some more new fans if we’ve got it.