While Elle King’s earlier work, like her 2018 sophomore album, Shake the Spirit, was squarely entrenched within a roots-pop brand of rock, there were always hints of country beneath the brash guitars and brassy vocals. On its follow-up, Come Get Your Wife, King fully embraces that country undercurrent with an album that sounds right at home alongside contemporaries like Ashley McBryde and Miranda Lambert (who famously joins King on the LP’s hit single “Drunk [And I Don’t Wanna Go Home]”). As it turns out, making a country album proved to be far more than just a creative experiment. “Sometimes, you don’t always know what you want or need that will better your life,” she tells Apple Music. “I didn’t know that country was going to be my everything and that I was going to find this amazing joy and new, wonderful chapter, all through country.” Highlights on Come Get Your Wife include opener “Ohio”, which functions both as an origin story for King and a bulletproof rebuke to hardcore genre gatekeepers. “Try Jesus” is at turns hilarious and honest, with a massive chorus sure to please at live shows. And “Lucky”, which shares a name with King’s first child, pays tribute to the winding, sometimes difficult road that led King to where she is now: one of country’s best new stars. Below, she shares insight into several key tracks on Come Get Your Wife. “Ohio” “I miss my grandmother a lot. She really was, I don’t know, just the biggest part of our family. It’s hard to say that my family’s not great without her; that’s not true. We just miss her. And so, I think of her, and it’s like a love letter to her and my family, and I feel her when I’m down there. That was just a really beautiful song, and it was also more of me opening myself up ’cause I never really talked about Ohio or my childhood. I was always really protective over it. And now I feel so much more comfortable to share. And if anybody is wondering why I’m in country now, or what country is to me, they can listen to the first song on the record and hear about my family and where I come from. And I thought it was just a good introduction to the story I was telling on the record.” “Try Jesus” “‘Try Jesus’ is the perfect example of where, if you just take it at face value, it’s funny. Because ultimately, I think that we are magnets, and every relationship is a mirror. And so, I look back at my relationships, whether they were toxic for me or are toxic for them—what was it in my life that made me vulnerable or open or think that that’s what I needed to be happy or feel loved?” “Lucky” “I think I knew I was having a boy. Everybody was like, ‘It’s a girl, it’s a girl, it’s a girl.’ And then we just knew that if it was a boy, his name was going to be Lucky. And I don’t know, it just clicked. And it makes sense because we got lucky when he came into our lives and when we had him. This whole last year, I felt a lot of gratitude, and I felt people really rally around me and the baby and our family. Touring people, who tour with kids, they reached out and were just so loving. And I just felt like it was such a year of gratitude. So, it was nice to sum that up in a song. And Lucky knows that that song’s about him.” “Tulsa” “Ella Langley, she’s this 22-year-old girl, and she has more confidence in one strand of hair than I could not even dream of having, even by the time I’m 80. And she is such a joy. And she helped me write most of the record. Her, Bobby Hamrick and Matt McKinney, they wrote ‘Out Yonder’ and that was one of the first songs that I put out after ‘Drunk’. I felt like that song was written for me, about me. And we all got together, and we wrote a majority of the record. On day two, I got on the bus because they came out on the road with me, and she had to explain it to me multiple times. And the same day, we wrote ‘Lucky’ right after that.” “Jersey Giant” “I got the call asking if I would do it the day we announced the record. So, it kind of seems fitting and perfect now that I’m looking back. I was listening, laying on the rug in our new, cute little house where we listen to records, and I just put headphones on, and I listen to that song and it’s just so beautiful. And I had never really accepted or even been open to outside writers because I’ve always felt like I had to control everything. But now I understand that I love doing covers. And so, it’s interesting that I could receive a song and be given the gift of an experience of making it my own. And that’s what Tyler Childers did with me. He was like, ‘Have it. You’re the only one that I will let have it.’ And it was beautiful.”