In June, Michael Hardy, the 34-year-old musician who has already penned 15 country radio number ones, launched a highly anticipated 15-date arena tour focusing on his solo work. As a writer for musicians, including crossover success story Morgan Wallen and generational stars like Kenny Chesney and Blake Shelton, his work tends toward the mythic, laden with clever Southernisms and unique twists on traditional country subjects like hometown pride and thwarted love affairs. But in his own music, he draws more from his real life, spinning tales about a self-aware country boy turned Nashville man, something he delves deeper into on Quit!!, his new rock record out July 12.
“I didn’t move to Nashville with stars in my eyes. It wasn’t like, I’m going to be a big star. I just kind of wanted to write songs,” he told Vanity Fair over lunch at Keens Steakhouse last month in between tour dates.
Since he began performing as Hardy in 2018, country audiences have fallen hard for his live performances, and songs like “One Beer” and “Wait in the Truck” eventually became era-defining hits. The positive response to his turn as an artist came as a surprise. “When I started my career journey, I was so blind. I never thought to myself, Don’t have a plan B, I just didn’t have a plan B,” he said. “You just have to be so dumb that you’re going to believe that you’re going to make it, that eventually you will manifest it.”
Last year, he took a risk with a half-country half-rock concept album The Mockingbird & The Crow, adding in a few songs with power chords and metalhead-worthy screams. He got a welcoming response from hard rock radio, which sent a few of his songs to number one, and on Quit!!, Hardy is committing fully to the genre. His success as an arena rocker led a few of his heroes, like Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit to get in contact, and both wound up contributing to songs on Quit!!.
Getting a call from Durst was especially emotional for Hardy, who was a superfan during his childhood in small-town Philadelphia, Mississippi. “I was wearing a Limp Bizkit hat when he called me for the first time! It said ‘Live Laugh Limp Bizkit,’” Hardy said. Later, he asked Durst to write a verse on a new song pondering the nature of selling out artistically called “Soul4Sale,” and Durst obliged, quickly sending a finished product after hearing the track. “It was just so raw, and I don’t know—I giggled like a middle school kid when I heard it. I was just like, Holy shit.”
For the sake of his audience and his “very, very Christian” mother, Hardy was quick to caution that he isn’t really considering selling his soul to the devil for a 13-car garage. “Of course, I use this example all the time, but Johnny Cash didn’t really shoot a man in Reno. This is all just my art, first and foremost,” he said. “But when Fred committed, when he was like, Yeah, I’m in, I talked to him on the phone. The first thing I said was, I want [your verse] to be an angel on my shoulder. Let me be the one on the hook arguing with you, with you being a voice of reason.”
The decision to cast Durst as his moral conscience helps explain why Hardy wanted to make an album so indebted to Limp Bizkit’s brand of nu metal and rap rock in the first place. In his previous songwriting, Hardy has displayed a skill for sublimating those genres’ expressions of frustration and pain into lyrics that might initially come across as light-hearted country odes to women or to partying. On the new record, he consistently packs hard rock’s long-standing mix of masculine bravado, deep vulnerability, and committed derangement into a scant few lines—and it’s a romp. This might be most obvious in the chorus to album standout “Psycho”: “If you ever leave, girl, I’m gonna get a face tattoo / crash my truck, end up on the six o’clock news.”
As with Johnny Cash in Reno, Hardy isn’t actually the type to be a terrible ex. Still, there is a germ of truth in the song. In the stories behind Hardy’s lyrics, his wife, Caleigh Hardy, often acts as both muse and comedic straight woman, and the main line in “Psycho” came from a real difference of opinions. “Dude, it’s halfway a joke, but it’s really not,” Hardy said of the face tattoo line. “The only reason I’m not covered in tattoos is because, respectfully, Caleigh’s like, ‘Please don’t,’ and I’m, like, ‘Fair.’”
The couple, who married in 2022 about five years after Hardy first slid into her DMs, have a humorous rapport that plays out on their Instagram accounts, like a May video of Caleigh’s playfully stoic response to a “lullaby” Hardy sang in a guttural deathcore growl. She accompanied him on the tour bus for a chunk of this summer’s Quit!! tour, documenting his onstage fits—lots and lots of jerseys—and early moments with the couple’s new cat, which they named Dude.