Colby Acuff didn’t know where to go next. Arriving in the waning summer days of 2024, American Son was sprawling, stylistically expansive, and wracked with dark and heavy ideas about life in the USA. It marked the end of a major label deal that had first brought Acuff to Nashville, where he’d quickly realized he’d always be something of an outsider to Music City’s well-oiled mainstream machine. Just before release, Acuff lost his father. Never one to shy away from difficult emotions in his music, Acuff had nevertheless reached a sort of impasse. Whatever came next had to be a reset, had to readjust the lens.
Enjoy The Ride, Acuff’s sixth album in as many years, may initially seem an aggressively optimistic rejoinder to where we heard him last. Yet staying on the furiously prolific clip he’s maintained is a form of therapy for Acuff, and Enjoy The Ride sought to strike a balance. Acuff sat down with his right-hand man, producer Eddie Spear, and they puzzled over a new approach to the next album. They decided to go out and talk to people, take the temperature, see what listeners wanted to hear. The resulting album still boasts the thoughtful reflections on American life that Acuff has made his name on, but refuses to simply stare into the void. Instead, the throughlines of Enjoy The Ride became resilience and optimism even in the bleakest times.
This is in Acuff’s DNA as a songwriter. A fifth-generation Idahoan, he grew up watching his hometown Coeur d’Alene transform before his eyes. One by one, the lumber mills closed down as a blue-collar town turned into a ritzy resort escape for elites from around the country. Acuff’s childhood was full of music — Willie Nelson, Hank Williams, bluegrass — that situated all the changes he witnessed in a long lineage of working-class American struggle, and soundtracked the nostalgia felt by watching a way of life become bygone. By the time Acuff released his 2020 debut Life Of A Rolling Stone, his perspective and concerns as an artist were already fully-formed. He’d make two more albums while living in Idaho, 2021’s If I Were The Devil and 2022’s Honky Tonk Heaven.
After some online buzz around his early records, Acuff realized he had to give Nashville a shot to pursue his career fully. Once there, he signed a deal with Sony, and kept churning out vital, of-the-moment material for 2023’s Western White Pines and American Son. Sometimes he just kept writing to challenge himself, but it wasn’t hard to imagine why it all poured out of him. He was devoted to capturing a certain kind of American life, one that seemed more impossible to achieve in a tumultuous chapter of history.
So Spear’s prompt for Enjoy The Ride made complete sense: “We should write a whole record that’s about people, for people.” Spear and Acuff drove east from Nashville and visited Asheville, Johnson City, and Knoxville to interview complete strangers. Acuff asked people everything from “What would you do if you won the lottery?” to “What’s your perfect day?” Going in, he’d expected people would tell him wild life stories that would be transposed directly
into song. Instead, he found that everyone they talked to — of all walks of life and demographics — had essentially the same hopes and worries, regardless of their specific experience.
“What it all boiled down to is it’s really hard to be an American,” Acuff explains. An unexpected challenge presented itself. Rather than walking away with a bundle of short stories, he’d stumbled onto an abstract, connective theme of people living with great fear of their future and how their life would turn out.
From there, Enjoy The Ride came to life rapidly. In a burst of winter writing, Acuff composed 40 songs in 30 days, culling them down to the 11 that he and Spear recorded for the album. That process, too, was no-nonsense. They remained intent on crafting an album that felt lighter and sprightlier than American Son, eschewing much production and going for a raw, pure distillation of the rollicking-then-reflective sound that has run through Acuff’s work since the beginning. They stopped caring about what was cool or popular. They worked fast and focused, determined to tell a story, and tell it well.
Acuff has always been an observational writer. “I’ve spent my whole life feeling like I’m outside the fishbowl looking in,” he reflects. “No matter how hard I try, there’s no way for me to get in.” The interview format ended up being perfect. All the conversations cohered into two composite characters. Enjoy The Ride follows them, the album structured cinematically. After “Trail Less Travelled” provides a cold open intro to one of our main characters, “Enjoy The Ride” is both title track and title card, setting up the album’s stakes. What follows is a series of vignettes tracing the man and woman central to the story as they navigate arcs both romantic and existential against the backdrop of America in the 2020s.
Though Enjoy The Ride is intended to be looser and more fun musically, it’s no less carefully crafted than any of Acuff’s other work. Perspectives shift, exploring the inner turmoil of both the man and the woman. Acuff wrote a pair of tracks, “Her Song” and “His Song,” to give them each their motif — the former looks back to Sheryl Crow’s self-produced 1996 self-titled album for inspiration, while the latter wrangles with identity crises. One night scrolling through social media, Acuff came across a performance of a song that spoke to him. After some tweaks, it became “Average American,” the album’s centerpiece and, in some ways, mission statement. It’s the first time Acuff has recorded an outside cut, underlining the poignance of the album’s drive to highlight other people’s voices and experience.
Enjoy The Ride functions as a reintroduction to Colby Acuff. After his brief foray with major label life, he came to a different kind of acceptance of his status as a forever maverick and misfit. “I think a lot of country music has lost the plot,” he asserts. “It feels paid for, AI-generated. When it’s this popular, it loses this thing — American poetry, working man’s struggle.” Enjoy The Ride finds Acuff stripping it down, going simpler, newly exploring the core ethos of his
songwriting. Though often saddled with the “outlaw country” moniker, Acuff deems his work “western mountain country music.” Rooted in Appalachia and bluegrass, but filtered through old frontier ruggedness — banjos rippling like clear rivers, wide-open melodies, an easy propulsion built for driving winding forest roads. Enjoy The Ride threads a needle — empathetic enough to be relatable to Americans around the country, specific enough that it could have only come from Acuff’s idiosyncratic, incisive eye.
“Learned Along The Way,” Enjoy The Ride’s closing track, zooms out again. As end credits, it puts weathered hope on these characters’ stories: no matter how convoluted and messy the journey becomes, life has a way of working itself out. It may also be a moment where Acuff lets himself mingle with his characters. Now, on his sixth album, he’s fully embraced his own lane within Nashville’s ecosystem, and returned with an album that is the most unabashed, triumphant distillation of him as an artist yet.
“We are a people’s artist, a working man’s artist,” Acuff concludes. “People show up to hear the songs they listen to Monday through Friday. ‘Learned Along The Way’ ends the album with one of its big ideas: There is always somebody going through the same thing as you, and there are only so many ways it can play out. In the end, it’s going to be OK.”
