12 Tiny Things

With two decades of albums under his belt, the Nashville-based, warmly gruff singer-songwriter Will Hoge draws on a wealth of experience in the business. “When you're making records early on and you're working with big labels, the expectations are so big, because people start thinking about radio and formats and stardom and all of these things,” he tells Apple Music. “It's just like, ‘Well, you don't want to be too loud or too slow or too fast or too rocking or too quiet.’” Hoge applies that hard-earned perspective to his self-produced 11th studio LP Tiny Little Movies. “We can really just focus on what feels good,” he says. “There's some really, really quiet songs on this record, and I think that's how those songs should sound. There's also really loud, rocking songs, and that's how they should sound. I don't think you have to try to file down the edges of things to make them palatable for every single person. I think that's where you start to lose.”