Justin Moore would never crash Nashville – he just could never live there.
“It was never my intention when I moved to Nashville to live there forever,” Moore, 39, tells PEOPLE about his time in Music City early in his career. “I’ve always looked at it as a necessary part of my journey while trying to achieve my dreams.”
Of course, many of these dreams did they eventually came true, but they came true in the multi-platinum country hitmaker’s home state of Arkansas.
“I was always pushing and looking for an opportunity where the timing made sense for us to come home,” recalls Moore, who recently scored his 12th No. 1 with “You, Me, and Whiskey” (feat. Priscilla Block). “One day I came home from a trip with my wife [Kate] says, ‘Hey, are you ready to move home? I asked her for years and just had to wait for her to be ready. A week later we already found a house and returned home.”
And for Moore, that return to his hometown ultimately saved his career. “I wouldn’t still be making a living at this if I didn’t live here,” Moore says from his office in Arkansas. “I just wasn’t happy. I don’t think you can do your best in your craft if you’re not happy. It was the right move for us, and it was wonderful.”
Justin Moore.
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Today, Moore coaches his children in their sports and attends the church where he was baptized. “It sounds like a country song cliché,” Moore admits with a laugh. “But it’s true.”
Make no mistake – Moore has never been one to release anything even remotely like a clichéd country song. Instead, the hitmaker of painfully honest songs like “We Didn’t Have Much” and “The Ones That Didn’t Make It Back Home” found a way to deliver a musical tapestry of connected stories that hit the heart in places. which most try to hide from the world.
And he does it again with his new single “This Is My Dirt,” a heartfelt ode to his family’s legacy that Moore co-wrote with Paul DiGiovanni, Randy Montana and Jeremy Stover. The heartfelt song also serves as the first taste of Moore’s next album, which is due out later this year.
“My grandfather passed away a little over a year and a half ago,” says Moore of the circumstances that led to the song’s true lyrical backbone. “He grew up here. He got the land from his mother who died when he was born. This land has been in the family since the mid-1800s. It’s the land I grew up on. I ended up inheriting the land from him.”
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And it’s the land where Moore, his wife Kate and their four children now live, and the land Moore says he can’t imagine ever leaving. In fact, a line in “This Is My Dirt” refers to this very fact as Moore sings the words that he “would hate to be the first one to sell it.”
“Look, when my wife and I are gone for a long time, my children know that they are taken care of and that there will be things they can sell, but my [eldest] the daughter knows that [land] is never to be sold,” says Moore.
She takes a deep breath as she fidgets with the handmade bracelet wrapped around her left wrist. “My 12-year-old self made this for me,” says Moore, who will hit the road with Cody Johnson starting Jan. 19. “She and my oldest really got into making these. This one says, ‘Go Hogs.'” He laughs. “They know me and they know how much I love them and how much I love it here.”
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Source: HIS Education