All Hat

“This album is my pièce de resistance,” says Joshua Hedley of All Hat, his lively new collection of Western Swing tunes. “It’s all been building up to this moment. I feel like I’m making music I love more than any other style.” Produced by Ray Benson of Asleep at the Wheel—Hedley’s hero since childhood—the album brims with excitement, wit, and verve, as Hedley expertly navigates the tricky dance rhythms of this jazzy style of twang. It’s a sharp left turn in a career defined by sharp left turns, following close on the heels of his 2018 debut Mr. Jukebox, which explored ‘60s countrypolitan and established him as one of the finest old-school country crooners in all of Nashville. Released in 2022, Neon Blue jumped ahead a few decades as Hedley turned his attention to that much-maligned period in country music: the early ‘90s, when a new wave of singing cowboy took their twang into rock arenas.

All Hat doesn’t try to update the style, because Hedley understands that it doesn’t need any kind of modernizing. It can sound as immediate and urgent and just plain fun now as it ever did. And he hopes folks will get up and dance. “At its core Western Swing is just dance music. Bob Wills didn’t play theatres; he played dance halls. The music is for dancing, and that’s what I wanted to come through on these songs. I just want to show people how big a genre country music is and how deep it goes. There’s such a diversity of sounds in country music. It’s not just one little box that everything fits into.”