Since he skyrocketed to stardom with his 2016 debut full-length, Kane Brown’s strength has been his versatility—a vision of mainstream country broad enough to accommodate the sounds of R&B, hip-hop and pop. But as the 31-year-old singer from Chattanooga, Tennessee, tells Apple Music’s Kelleigh Bannen, his fourth album is the first one where he could really be meticulous. “I got thrown into all this,” he said. “This album I’m really excited about, because I actually took my time. I actually got to rewrite some lyrics. I feel like everything’s placed.” On The High Road, the follow-up to 2022’s Different Man, Brown remains steadfast in his conviction that being a country star does not require a strict adherence to the old notions of genre. “I’m like a burnt CD from ’03 in a Mustang/You never knew what was coming,” he crows on “Fiddle in the Band”, a bluegrass barnstormer that’s as country as it gets for a manifesto about genre defiance. But country’s strict borders have loosened in the nine years since his breakthrough, and these days it’s Brown’s vulnerability that stands out—outlining a laundry list of fears on the arena-ready “I Am”, or documenting the wide-eyed questions he hears as a girl dad on the sweet ballad “Backseat Driver”. Brown takes a page from Jelly Roll’s book on “Haunted”, a duet with the fellow Tennessean that shows Brown at his most fearless, admitting that success isn’t enough to silence his demons. Penned at a writer’s retreat in London in what appeared to be a haunted hotel, Brown connected the bleak environs to his mental state. “What if we write a song called ‘Haunted’?” he remembers thinking, then took it one step further: “Then I was like, ‘It could just be about our depression.’ I always try to get dark with my writers, and sometimes they’re like, ‘Well, that’s too dark.’ I’m like, ‘Is it, though?’” Luckily, in Brown’s world, the only rule is that there are no rules.