Jon Pardi has made his bones on straight-down-the-middle, old-school country. With his brawny twang, clever (but not afraid to be corny) wordplay, and fiddle-forward arrangements, he’s had six number-one country hits across the past decade—including back-to-back singles, “Head Over Boots” and “Dirt on My Boots,” that were both certified six times platinum. And yet, pop fans have probably never heard his name.
His success helped clear the path for classic-sounding Nashville stars like Luke Combs and Midland. But like pretty much everybody, he’s trying to make sense of the current, rapidly evolving state of country music.
“In all honesty, I don’t know what country music is anymore,” says Pardi. “We got Hardy heavy-metal country, we’ve got Beyoncé country, Morgan Wallen country, Jelly Roll. Everybody’s bringing in the stuff they grew up listening to, and it’s awesome. If it’s a good song and it’s moving the soul and it has some semblance of country, we’re stamping it country music.”
Pardi, 39, is a traditionalist by nature. “Of all the new guys I’ve heard, I like that Jon is closer to country than most of the others,” said Country Music Hall of Famer Alan Jackson when he took Pardi out on tour in 2015, “and I thought his songwriting was better than what I’ve heard in a while.”
Still, Pardi couldn’t help but wonder if the genre’s expanding definitions offered him some new possibilities. “I was like, ‘Well, hell, let me do some stuff,’ ” he says. “Maybe it’s time when I can step out a little.”
And then he got a message from somewhere in the Great Wide Open. He was watching the 2021 documentary Somewhere You Feel Free, about the making of Tom Petty’s Wildflowers album, in which Petty talks about working with different producers every few albums just to challenge himself. “He said that it helped him grow as a songwriter and a musician working with somebody new,” says Pardi. “It was kind of like a sign—‘You should do it and see what happens.’ ”
He chased down Grammy-winning producer Jay Joyce, who’s known as something of a Nashville renegade and has worked with everyone from Eric Church and Lainey Wilson to Cage the Elephant and the Black Crowes. The result is Pardi’s fifth studio album, Honkytonk Hollywood, which features the most rocked-up and adventurous sound of his career.
Now, the truth is that Pardi’s always been a rock fan—“I love the Rolling Stones, even Rage Against the Machine, Audioslave; all that stuff is badass”—and 2016’s “Dirt on My Boots” already featured a screaming guitar solo and big drums. More than different instrumentation, though, the big change this time around was how he (with Joyce’s guidance) approached the process.
“When I say, ‘rock ’n’ roll,’ I’m talking about how we made it,” says Pardi. “We didn’t tour, we didn’t move studios. We hunkered down. We drank whiskey after the sessions. It was like how you imagine the records on every poster on your wall.”
From spending nearly a full month making the album to recording with his touring band (rather than session players) to letting Joyce disappear into the “Jay Lab” to layer in some ’80s drum loops, this is very much not the way albums are usually made in Music City, U. S. A. “It wasn’t anti-Nashville,” says Pardi, “but it wasn’t a part of the machine that we’ve been in. It had that feeling of, Wow, this is so fun and new. Looking back, everything Tom was talking about was so true.”
As the title indicates, Honkytonk Hollywood adds a West Coast vibe—the snaky groove of “Love the Lights Out”; the atmospheric, almost yacht-rock-y “Hey California”—without surrendering his more traditional country base. The duality is appropriate since Pardi (incredibly) is the first member of the Grand Ole Opry who was born in the Golden State.
Though he relocated to Nashville in 2008, he still feels like he has a foot planted in both places. “The Nashville piece of me is more of the business side, even though we’re basically in the honky-tonk business,” he says. “I learned way more than I would in my small town in California—when I moved to Nashville, if you would have asked me my favorite restaurant, I would have said Olive Garden. But so much of my family, and especially my wife Summer’s family, is in California, and when we go back, you get that feeling of being raised there, that feeling in your heart and your emotions, and then that’s what you sing about.
“My friend from Dixon, California, where I went to high school, was just visiting us here in Nashville,” he adds. “And every time he leaves, he goes, ‘Two days of your life are the two best days of my life.’ ”
But as a husband and a father of two who’s about to turn 40, there’s no getting around certain responsibilities. He got on the phone a few minutes late for this interview because the Pardis are having some work done on their house and he had just discovered that the new flooring wasn’t level. (“I’m not a contractor,” he says with some resignation, “but I’m a contractor now.”)
Previously, Pardi had played up the drinking and partying side of his personality. He created a good-time alter ego called “Juan Fiesta,” and his previous album was titled Mr. Saturday Night. (In 2023, he said that he “retired” from drinking but added that it “doesn’t mean I can’t come out of retirement.”) He knew that for the new album, it was time to sing about some things that were a little more grown-up.
A few months before the studio time was booked, he got on a Zoom call with Sony Music Publishing, which represents many of the biggest songwriters in Nashville. “There must have been 150 writers on the screen,” says Pardi, “and I told them, ‘Don’t worry about writing hits. Write something that means something to you.’ ”
Among the songs that made the cut are “He Went to Work,” a tribute to hard-laboring parents, and “She Drives Away,” told from the perspective of two generations of fathers watching their daughters grow up. As for Pardi’s own compositions on the album (he wrote about half of the 17 tracks), he says they’re mostly about “making babies with Summer—I’m a dad, but I didn’t want to be too dad.” (Meantime, the album’s opener is “Boots Off,” so he hasn’t abandoned the theme of his biggest hits.)
Pardi’s not worried about the willingness of his fans (known, of course, as the “Pardi Animals”) to follow him in these new directions. “We’re poets, we’re writers—we make you hear what we’re feeling,” he says. “I loved being a ’90s throwback in 2015, because that’s what I loved, but then you grow and you make more records. If we do the same thing over and over again, we’re not artists.”
Besides, the day before our call, he debuted some of the Honkytonk Hollywood material at Nashville’s Country Radio Seminar convention, and it was the best experience he’s ever had launching new music to an audience. “There was no ‘I wonder if they like it,’ ” he says. “We started playing and it was like, ‘Fuck yeah!’ ”
It’s enough to make Tom Petty proud.
