Billy Currington’s Good Direction
He’s back.
This past Friday, October 24th, Billy Currington released a new record. It was a quiet affair. There was no clap of thunder, no angel choirs sweetly singing nor trumpets blaring. A couple of lead-off singles were released to streaming services, but they did not receive any radio play. This is unsurprising. Billy Currington is an artist who is well into his veteran period, and the only radio play he receives is for his old hits. That’s fine. It is the year 2025. Billy Currington first emerged onto the scene over 20 years ago in the early 2000s. It is unnecessary for us to continually expect chart success from artists of that vintage. I don’t mean this in an ageist way, but plain and simple, tastes change, and it is far easier for young audiences to gravitate toward artists who share similar life experiences. It’s also unsurprising that radio would chase after that younger audience. Currington and his quiet entrance is to be expected. But unlike most of his fellow veteran acts, Currington releasing an album could be very momentous.
Billy Currington released records pretty consistently from his self-titled debut in 2002 until 2015’s Summer Forever. The decade since that release has been marked by two albums total, including the one just released a week ago. This decade has been marked by inactivity at best. At worst was the only record actually put out in this period: Intuition, quite likely to be considered one of the worst records of the entire 2020s. Intuition was an aborted attempt at pop country. It was southern pop at its most obnoxiously disjointed and discordant. The motivations behind the record were very unclear. There was no marketing, no pre-release singles, no radio play. One day there was no album; the next day there was an entire album. Why? It’s hard to know. Some have speculated that it was an obligation to his label or an attempt to get out of his record deal. I’m not aware of how the business works intimately enough to say, but it does seem that this album released this past week was on the same record label as Intuition and his previous material, so I don’t know how valid that theory is. Regardless, it was very apparent that Currington was throwing in the towel. The less said about Intuition the better, but briefly my biggest complaint was its top-to-bottom mishmash. The production was dominated by these massive synthetic, electronic pop elements that clashed jarringly with Currington’s naturally organic vocals. Putting aside preconceived conceptions about what “real country music” is, this was plainly apples and oranges, a fundamental mismatch of artist and production that served neither particularly well.
Unlike his contemporaries, most notably Brad Paisley, who still appears to have some desire to maintain commercial viability—with every single in the past decade being pushed to radio, struggling, and then delaying or outright canceling the upcoming album that the single was supposed to be attached to (R.I.P. to Son of the Mountains, which looked like it had serious potential)—Currington seems to have no problem fading into the background. Hence the last decade. And honestly, that choice makes the arrival of this new record all the more surprising.
But country music without Billy Currington is a sadder, more lonely place. Currington is an immensely listenable artist. There are some artists who are indistinguishable from one another. Country radio excels at finding these people, putting them into a basic framework, and pushing them out to see if anything catches fire. It might be Jameson Rodgers one year, Heath Sanders the next, someone else the following year. Once in a while, one of these relatively anonymous figures catches fire, like Nate Smith appears to have, and builds up some traction. But it doesn’t take away from the essential fact that not much is being done to differentiate one artist from another.
Currington, in spite of generally following trends, doesn’t seem to have that issue. When you listen to a Billy Currington song, it is immediately apparent that it is, in fact, a Billy Currington song, even if the main beats are not incredibly dissimilar from other hit songs. Billy Currington’s most famous song may be Good Directions, his farmer fantasy about giving a girl directions and somehow finding himself in a lasting long-term relationship. It could have come from an episode of Hee Haw, and yet it carves out a distinctive sensibility, even if similar ideas appeared in songs like “Play It Again.”
What sets Currington apart has always been his voice, and this new album puts that front and center. Currington’s voice is quite good. Now, he’s no Chris Stapleton. There are no notable vocal moments that transfix you when you hear them. Billy doesn’t hold notes for excessive periods of time. He doesn’t excite you with a powerful belt or a deeply emotive yodel. He is doing what Billy Currington has always done, which is fundamentally balanced. It’s relatively mellow, clean, polished, and smooth—but not too much. There’s always been a little bit of graininess to Currington’s vocal, which gives just enough character that it moves away from what could have been an overly smooth and polished vocal. Slickness works on paper, but ultimately is ignorable, sliding out of your head like a melting ice cream cone onto the floor. Instead, the distinctive characteristics allow the voice to stick in your head, and then the smooth polish and control operate as enhancements, crafting a professional performance around the heart of grit and emotion.
Some may characterize his voice as a bleat. I don’t know what the technical term is, but this combination of smooth polish with grainy character does seem to be the successful formula for Currington. In a world where professional singers are in far higher supply than demand—after all, everyone shows up to karaoke, and there are singing competitions aplenty on television, including a new country-focused one featuring favorite of the blog Cody Hibbard. You will notice that in the early rounds, say on The Voice‘s blind auditions, there will be plenty of people with controlled, elegant, and clear vocals. These are people who have undergone training and have sung in bars and at family events and are, in fact, quite talented, and they rarely make it past the first couple of rounds, losing in favor of someone who is more distinctive. But there’s also an archetype who has an incredible rasp or something very unique about their voice who also fails to make it out of the early rounds. Sure, some of this is just due to the vagaries of the system, but ultimately a lot of these people with super distinctive voices struggle to extend beyond the very narrow range in which they’re able to emote. Currington seems to have the distinctly modern vocal in that he takes both of these aspects, fuses them together, and creates something that is very pleasant to listen to but also very distinctive.
This new album, thankfully, chooses to ignore that the entire period of Intuition even happened. Instead, it chooses to execute smartly a bit of a throwback to Currington’s early 2000s material. Now, what do I mean by early 2000s country? I’m not talking about the twin pillars of that era—the super slick pop country romance anthems on one side and the aggressive patriotic fare on the other. I’m talking about the album cuts, the real meat and potatoes of what the industry was churning out. That stuff was fundamentally nineties-influenced: traditional instrumentation, organic arrangements, no egregious effects or production gimmicks, maybe just some extra juice on the electric guitars. But it had updated production quality that made it palatable to mass audiences. It was digitally produced country that still sounded mostly like country, just cleaner, richer, and more polished than the analog eras that came before. That’s the sweet spot Currington is mining here.
This album is lush and organic and puts Billy Currington’s voice in the forefront. This, I think, is the key. To be clear, this isn’t some sort of vocal showcase record. Currington isn’t doing runs or holding notes for thirty seconds or trying to prove anything. It’s just Currington being Currington, consistently, throughout the entire album. That quality vocal—approachable, communicative, distinctive, professional—is pervasive throughout in the best possible way. The mellow mellifluousness with which The Brent Cobb penned Southern Star is handled is a lovely example. You want to just ooze up the homey vibes. Excellent cover choice.
As for the record, it is a throwback in all ways, shapes, and forms. It is the consummate mainstream record. It doesn’t seem that Currington is mining his personal life for deep thoughts. There is a lot of love found and love lost on this record, as one would expect from a relatively standard country record in 2025, but there is a nice traditional accompaniment. There is an excellent sense of timbre and richness in the vocals and the instrumentation.
Something I’ve always appreciated about Currington is that, in spite of his deserved reputation as a thoroughly modern singer—he put out bro country, he put out sickly sweet, smooth, romantic pop country early on in the 2000s, and he’s by no means a traditionalist—he still understands what country music is. I’m reminded of his track “Lucille” on his 2004 Doin’ Somethin’ Right, which could easily have been a bloated modern take on the 1977 Kenny Rogers classic. But instead, it was respectfully done, using modern production techniques to replicate and enhance the vibe of that original track.
This album does much the same, with a throwback sound and a little bit of an older style at play. The Dean Dillon written Bourbon Sunset is the most apparent example of this older sensibility, but it’s evident all throughout.
He’s aware of what country music should sound like. He’s also aware of what the modern trends are, and on this record he seems to have hit that well-produced, rich, semi-traditional sound that is gaining steam. For an artist whose peak was in the 2000s, this is really him just working in his wheelhouse.
This era we find ourselves in, where many artists (Cody Johnson, Randall King, Drake Milligan, William Beckmann and many more) take the 90s country formula and update it with cleaner, fuller production, ends up squarely landing within that 2000s country sound. The 90s revival mixing with modern recording tech basically is what took place within much of Nashville as the 2000’s developed! There’s a reason why artists that cut their teeth in the 2000s that have still hung around are experiencing a mild revival. Blake Shelton released his best album in years in large part because he stopped chasing the trends of the 2010s and reverted back to the sound that he cut his teeth on and that fans first discovered him with. Currington just happens to be particularly well-suited to this moment. It may pay big dividends.
In other words, a select aspect of what defined 2000s country is back, and Currington is perfectly positioned. Whatever the motivations were behind Intuition, they’re gone now. Billy Currington just decided to make a classic Billy Currington record, the kind he’s always been good at making. The industry came back to him. The cyclical nature of popular music means that sometimes you get lapped, and if you’re lucky, you’re still standing there making the same quality work when the trends circle back around. That’s what happened here. Billy Currington is back, and we’re all the happier for it.
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-Joe