Behind The Wheel: A Q&A With Kip Moore
It’s pretty much guaranteed that a country singer born at the dawn of the ‘80s will have a musical back story that includes exposure to mom and dad’s record collection—and we’re talking LPs of a much more recent vintage than Roy Acuff. For Kip Moore, that meant the giants of heartland rock: Springsteen, Seeger and Petty. The fact that he grew up with that music around, and that his story has a thoroughly contemporary quality — small town Georgia boy went off to college and lived a surfer’s fantasy of bumming around Hawaii before moving to Nashville to get serious about music — is what makes the songs on his debut album, Up All Night,feel so familiar.
I know you’ve identified particular singer-songwriters like Bruce Springsteen as artists that really made an impression on you growing up. You’ve pointed out that if they were just getting started today, they would be considered country. What, to you ear, has shifted?
I just think that’s the way music goes. I think music is always expanding. I just think that it touches a much more broad spectrum nowadays. There’s a lot more that’s accepted, whereas in the old days it was more of one kind of thing. You take Webb Pierce from the ‘40s. When Johnny Cash and Waylon and them came through, I’m sure they were looked at as, ‘This isn’t country.’ Then there’s the next wave, and people say, ‘Well, that’s not country.’ Music is always progressing. I think those people I grew up loving, the Bob Segers, they’re storytellers, which is what this music is.
For the full Q&A, check out AmericanSongwiter.Com
6/15/2012
