A lot has changed for Brett Young since he released his self-titled label debut in 2017. The country star married his girlfriend, had his first child and saw his profile rise drastically. Accordingly, Young’s third studio project tackles weightier subjects, like parenthood (“Lady”), the realities of maintaining a long-term relationship (“This”) and reflecting on youthful difficulties through the lens of hard-earned wisdom (“Dear Me”). “I wanted the whole project to feel very indicative of the chapter of my life that I'm in right now,” Young tells Apple Music, though he does add that some of the album’s tracks, like the moving-on-and-getting-over-it anthem “Leave Me Alone” and the emotional breakup ballad “You Didn’t”, were inspired by experiences from his past and meant to offer a well-rounded experience to listeners of all ages. “We stretched a little bit and made sure that we had something for everybody on the record,” he adds. “There are sad songs and there are things that aren't specifically where I'm at in my life.” Below, Young walks Apple Music through each of the EP’s tracks. “Weekends Look a Little Different These Days” “Our first daughter Presley had been born and there was one Saturday where I was watching college football and I just realised that I had my daughter in a diaper in my lap drinking a bottle while I was watching. And I immediately realised that's not what college football Saturday used to look like. And a big part of that was because of the pandemic, as I also wasn't touring. So weekends were completely, drastically different, and I felt like that was a cool idea for a song.” “Lady” “I don't think that I've ever been so down-the-middle honest in a song, or had a song be that meaningful or vulnerable for me. A lot of times when you write a song, you're drawing from everybody in the room. It was not ‘Let's make the song better’; it was always ‘Let's be more honest.’ And so for me, having that go from something I was writing for my wife and daughter to Dann Huff wanting to record it as a gift for the baby, to it being the lead single on the third record, and watching people connect that to their first child or the birth of their child or whatever it may be, has been really, really special to me.” “This” “I wanted to not handcuff myself to ‘This is exactly where I'm at in my life.’ I felt like it was fair to say, ‘This is where I've been.’ And so you can be just as honest with past experience. It's not inauthentic just because that's not where you are right now, as long as you've been there. And I think with my wife and my relationship, we've been really public about the fact that we've had a handful of breakups before we figured it out. And we would both agree that we needed those to become the people that we were when we came back together and we were finally ready. A lot of people like to glorify a perfect relationship when the reality is, that doesn't exist.” “Dear Me” “I think it's going to be obvious to people that this is a nod to Brad Paisley’s ‘Letter to Me’. It's my version of that, in terms of the type of storytelling. But also, like I said, I gave myself creative license to tell old stories on this record, and that was nice. But the reality is, in this story, it's true for me: I did end up with the girl that I was sad about. And so the concept in the story is that if I could have told you when you were younger, 'You don't need to be sad, just be patient, because you do get the girl back.'” “Leave Me Alone” “This one is really close to a song on my first record called ‘Like I Loved You’ that ended up being a single for me. The idea behind this—and I love a play on words, I can't get away from it, I actually have to sometimes fight to not do it—is how happy it sounds and how angry it really is.” “Not Yet” “I wrote ‘Not Yet’ with Justin Ebach and Kelly Archer, and we haven't had a single together since my first single, which was ‘Sleep Without You’. And I think also sonically, it's the closest thing I've done to ‘Sleep Without You’. Sometimes it's fun as a songwriter to get away from the wordplay and the heady side of songwriting when you've decided to write a concept that you know is so universal, and that's what this was. It was very intentional to do that so that anybody felt like they could go back in their memory and connect a moment to this.” “You Got Away With It” “I had that title, and obviously ‘you've got a way with it’ and ‘you got away with it’, those two things play back and forth. We spent a little while trying to figure out how those would work together, and once we found it, I think it turned into this really vibey, uptempo, sweet love song. And those are weird things to combine, but I think it turned into this really sexy, sweet love song.” “You Didn’t” “I always joke at my live show, but it's true: I say, ‘I always want to have one song on the record that, if you've had the worst day in your life at work and then there was traffic getting home and all you want to do is get home and put on your sweats and sit in front of the TV, and then a sad song comes on as you pull in the driveway, you still got to stop and cry in your driveway and finish the song before you go inside.’ And this song doesn't seem to fit the stage that I'm at in my life, but I feel like I owe it to the fans that found ‘Mercy’ on the first record to always have a song like this on the record. And it makes me feel bad in the best way.”