Will Hoge Preps Anchors For August Release- Features Sheryl Crow Duet

Artist: Will Hoge
Album: Anchors
Label: Edlo Records
Release date: August 11, 2017

After a truly brilliant album release in 2015 with Small Town Dreams, Will Hoge is back with another anticipated album entitled Anchors. Will Hoge stands as a shining star example about how you can carve out a career in music doing it independently. Despite a year-and-a-half stint with Atlantic Records, Hoge has developed a significant following of fans and produced ten albums over the course of the last two decades. An extremely prolific songwriter, Hoge has written a small catalog of songs for others and even received a Grammy nomination for Eli Young Band’s number one hit, “Even If It Breaks Your Heart.”

There's a little background on the new project in a feature for Rolling Stone:

Anchors is about that duality – an anchor itself both weighs things down and keeps them grounded, and Hoge explores the comfort and crush of small towns, the freedom and limits of love, the knowledge that comes from aging at the expense of vital years. The one thing that he does not address, however, is anything political. Hoge is openly anti-Trump on his social media accounts, and Modern American Protest Songs included biting tracks like "Ballad of Trayvon Martin." It's not that he hasn't been thinking about it all, or writing even more modern protest songs. He has. 

"There are a bunch of those brewing constantly," he says, "but after the election – and still – every day you turn on the news it's something else further beyond the pale. I'm too mad to sing those songs at this point. I don't want to put those songs out in anger. I needed to see if I could still feel human."

Songs like the acoustic-led country weeper "Angels Wings" and the Tom Petty-esque closer "Young As We Will Ever Be," that contemplates the constant drip of time, are all dedicated to that which makes us human. Good with bad, pain with pleasure, the glory of some at the price of many. If writing music about that makes him an eternal square peg, then so be it.

"I don't want to have to go and try to write a hit song for what is popular on the charts," says Hoge. "I do want to wake up and try to write great songs. Full stop."