Set In Stone

In the early days of his career, Travis Tritt received an important piece of advice from Waylon Jennings: He needed to make music for his fans, not for his record label. “Waylon said, ‘The people you need to be worried about are the people that go out and work hard, 40, 50, 60 hours a week, to keep food on the table for their families and keep a roof over their heads,’” Tritt tells Apple Music. “As soon as he told me that, it just lifted a tremendous burden off of my shoulders, because I realised he was completely right.” After more than a decade-long break from studio albums, Travis Tritt returns with Set in Stone, an album that takes that advice from Jennings to heart. Produced by Dave Cobb, the 11-track collection finds Tritt doing what he does best: serving up rowdy, road-ready anthems and tugging at heartstrings with raw, vulnerable balladry. Cobb proves an ideal collaborator for Tritt, as both men have deep affinities for Southern rock à la Lynyrd Skynyrd and The Allman Brothers Band, influences that can especially be heard on tracks like opener “Stand Your Ground” and “Southern Man”. In addition to enlisting Cobb, Tritt tapped a handful of younger, acclaimed songwriters to co-write for the album, including Dillon Carmichael and Brent Cobb. Below, Tritt walks Apple Music through several of Set in Stone’s key tracks. “Stand Your Ground” “I was writing for the first time with Channing Wilson and Wyatt Durrette. And any time that you write with somebody for the first time, normally you spend about the first hour or so just getting to know each other. I was telling them about some of the struggles that I had to go through by trying to do music my own way and refusing to let record labels or people like that change me. I think it's a little bit of advice to new artists, or new people that're trying to maybe do things their own way in country music today, and they're a little bit afraid of it. Because it's always tough when you're swimming upstream.” “Set in Ston