Following the success of his 2018 debut album Home State and subsequent 2020 self-titled EP, Jordan Davis digs deeper into his country roots with Buy Dirt. The collection opens with “Blow Up Your TV,” a reverent interpolation of the beloved John Prine song “Spanish Pipedream” that leads seamlessly into the EP’s title track, which features Luke Bryan and grapples with leading a meaningful life in a chaotic world. “To me, the song ‘Buy Dirt,’ and the whole EP, is about so much more than the actual ground that you're talking about purchasing,” Davis tells Apple Music. “It just kind of dabs more into faith, family, and happiness.” Elsewhere, Davis navigates breakups (“Need to Not”) and beers with the bros (“Drink Had Me”), with the closing track “Trying” and its message of working to be a better person ending the EP on a grounded note. Below, Davis walks through each track on Buy Dirt. “Blow Up Your TV” “In my opinion, John Prine is the best songwriter to ever put pen to paper. I feel like he was put on Earth to write songs. And obviously, we lost him during the pandemic. I always have listened to John Prine songs, obviously, but I've found myself listening to him more than I ever did. ‘Spanish Pipedream’ is one of my favorite songs from him, and I don't think there was ever a point in my life where I've wanted to blow up my TV and throw away the newspaper more than the past couple years of news and whatever else is going on. It was really the catalyst to ‘Buy Dirt,’ which is why I used this to open the EP.” “Buy Dirt” (feat. Luke Bryan) “I wanted a song on there that discussed those things that are all very important to us, which was our family, our faith, and our friends. And we all talked about how we can get caught up in a lot of things, whether it be in the music business or just in life in general, and we kind of lose sight of what's truly important. And I think that was one of the best things that came out of the pandemic, for me, was to be able to slow down and really focus on, ‘You know what? My whole world's been flipped upside down, and I don't know when I'm going back on the road, I don't know when I'm going to release music again, but I still have my piece of dirt, my home, my wife, my daughter. I still have my friends, I still have my faith, and the world's still spinning.’ Re-prioritizing what's truly important in my world—to me, that's what ‘Buy Dirt’ is.” “Need to Not” “That one, my brother brought the idea in. I knew it was going to be fun for the band, fun for me to sing, and a topic, too, that I think a lot of people can relate to. I feel like we've always been in that situation where we're staring something that we shouldn't do right in the face, but we ignore that thing that's telling us no and just go ahead and do it anyway.” “Drink Had Me” “I feel like we've always done a really good job, on all of our projects we've released, of having that song that you can just turn your thoughts off, turn your ears on to it, and just listen and have fun with it. I always think back on how many times I've texted a buddy of mine that first verse, where I say, ‘About to turn my phone off,’ and I get a text from one of my boys like, ‘Hey man, meet us at the bar, we're going to have some beers.’ And I'm like, ‘All right, I'm doing one beer. I'll meet you out for one beer, and then I got to get home. I got to get up early.’ And you show up, the next thing you know, it's midnight, 1 am. One beer becomes eight beers, and you're like, ‘Goodness gracious, how'd this happen?’” “Lose You” “I wrote this one with Paul DiGiovanni, Josh Kerr, and Josh Dorr, three really good buddies. What's crazy about this one is, we had been writing for two, three days, and we didn't have a song. We didn't even have an idea, nothing. We had three hours left before another group of cowriters were coming in to write, and Josh Kerr goes, ‘Guys, we've got to write something.’ And literally, he says, ‘A song called “Lose You” about not wanting to lose the person you love.’ And for me, all of us in that group are married, and we were able to just pull from that and say, ‘What would our life look like without our wives?’” “Almost Maybes” “We've all had relationships where it wasn't bad, but it wasn't right. And I feel like sometimes you can kind of try to force the wrong person and make it the right situation, but that usually almost always ends really bad. Fortunately, it worked out in the sense that one day I met the one that I was supposed to be with. And we've been married now for four years, and got a little 18-month-old. And that all happened because of the almost maybes in my past that got me one step closer to the one that stuck around.” “I Still Smoked” “I thought it was so cool that we were able to timestamp something with a period where you smoke cigarettes. And for me, I smoked all through college, unfortunately. It deals with the kind of relationship that’s able to almost see the growth in two people that go from the first night they met to that young love when it's tough to forget about those first couple months, or the honeymoon phase, I guess you can say. At some point, that burns out, but that song is really just about two people that try to timestamp and remember a point in their life where they were just crazy about each other.” “Trying” “Unfortunately, me and my wife got in a massive fight right around Christmas. I think a lot of it was that we were a year into a pandemic, we had a newborn running around the house, and we were just on edge. But we got in a big argument the night before my last write of the year, right before I shut it down for Christmas, and I woke up the next morning and just felt terrible about the way I handled it, about some of the things I'd said. I walked into the writing room and told my cowriters, Emily Weisband, Ashley Gorley, and Paul DiGiovanni, about it. And that's how ‘Trying’ was written, basically as an apology, and a promise to my wife that I'm not perfect but I'm going to try to fix every mistake I make. So hang in there with me.”