New music from Brett Young has arrived as the Southern California native celebrates the release of his fourth studio album, Across The Sheets, available now. The singer-songwriter recently joined Audacy’s Katie Neal at the Hard Rock Hotel in New York for a special album release party featuring an intimate chat about the project and exclusive performance of his favorite tracks.
“I think we’ve stretched what I’ve done as a songwriter in the past very much for this one in a way that I’m very proud of,” he said of the album as a whole. “I can’t wait for people to hear it.”
While listening to the album, Brett says fans will notice the lyrics don’t exactly line up with his current stage of life as a happily married man with two beautiful daughters. He reassures us it’s something he did by design.
“Now, it’s like life is perfect. I got the girl, the beautiful babies — if I only wrote those songs, you guys would hate my record,” he said before sharing the album centers a lot around a broken heart he experienced when he and his now wife, Taylor Mills Young, took a break from their relationship years ago while they were dating.
“For the first time, I had to write outside of what was happening in my life currently and kind of say something that everybody can relate to, which caused me to go years and years back into my past to connect to other stories and heartbreak — which I’m not currently experiencing.”
While the majority of the project centers around intense heartbreak and searching for “the one,” Young managed to include a couple love songs. One of those songs is "Uncomfortable," which he says came to be because of his “disagreement” with a popular John Mayer song.
“John Mayer had the song ‘Comfortable,’ one of my favorites when he did Any Given Thursday, which was this live performance where he did like an extended version of ‘Comfortable,’” Young shared. “I was always in love with it, but I listened to it a couple years ago — it’s perfect, it’s absolutely right, everything he is saying — but the concept of getting comfortable in a relationship as you get older, you realize that’s actually the death of a relationship.”
He continued, “Being uncomfortable, being nervous around somebody 30 years, 40 years after you’ve been together — that’s the magic sauce… So I was like, ‘I think that’s wrong,’ I want to write, ‘Uncomfortable.’”
The tune ended up presenting him with the album title, Across The Sheets, which is a lyric that ended up in multiple places across the project. “Across the Sheets is in ‘Uncomfortable,’ it’s also in a song on the record called, ‘Let Go Too Soon,’” he shared. “I didn’t realize I put those lyrics in both songs until we were putting the record together.”
