Thomas Rhett is releasing Country Again – Side A this Friday, April 30th.

When the Country Again project was announced that it would be a double album, but come out at different times, fans were wondering “why?”

Now we know that Thomas’ little brother had a hand in helping make the decision.

Thomas had a lot of songs ready to go, and was first considering making it one long album, until he had a conversation with his brother, “I thank my 15-year-old brother for this split of this album because…he’s 15, and he’s super hip and he’s on the Tik Tok trend and all that kind of stuff, and I asked him, ‘If I were to put out a record that had 26 songs on it, do you feel like that’s something you could listen to?’ And he said ‘Absolutely not’ (laugh), and I said ‘How far would you get before you just switched it to something else?’ And he said ‘Maybe…maybe 8 songs.’ And I was like, ‘OK, that’s good intel.”

At first Thomas was thinking of his own personal preference when it came to getting new music from his favorite artists — like the recent triple album, Heart & Soul from Eric Church, “You know, if I love an artist…the more the better for me. You know what I’m saying, like, the fact Eric Church is releasing a triple album is like Christmas to me. I get to live with  3 and half hours of brand new Eric Church music…but I’m also 30-years-old and I have time to sit and actually do that.”

But the more he thought about it, and following the advice of his brother, Thomas Rhett started to think that splitting up the Country Again album into 2 parts was the best thing for the music, “You know I think a lot of times, songs can get really left behind when there’s too many of them at the same time, you know especially in the way that they’re sequenced. If I were to put 26 songs on the same record and I save my favorite one for number 26, how many people are actually going to get there?”

He adds, “So, I wanted to do a double album because I had too much music that I loved, and I wasn’t ready to part ways with. But that’s the reason I split it up…it’s so people can have  a lot of time to digest these 11, and then when Side B comes out, they have time to digest those 12 to 15 songs…and then they can listen to it as a full project and understand why all these songs were recorded in the first place. So, if they were to listen to 26 songs straight down they’d probably just pick their favorite 4 and listen to those on repeat…rather than getting 11 and 12 to 15, they get to actually soak it in, and actually recognize each song for what it is.”

This Friday, April 30th, fans get the Side A of Country Again, with Side B coming later this year.

Check out the title track here…

Photo Courtesy of Valory Music Co