“I wrote it on the way down to Nashville in the van. That whole song is about a rambling kind of dude coming out of a factory who has no idea where this money is coming from, or what he’s heading for,” says Elkins, who was discovered by an A&R exec while opening for Marcus King in Nashville. “It paints this image where I was seeing Nashville as this huge [music center] but the money is really all pumped out from New York.
“He reminds me of a lot of people where I grew up: you have this music in you, but you never think about trying to make a career out of it,” Cobb says of Elkins’ unlikely gambit to go from the factory to the studio. “You got your job, which is your livelihood, but your music is a dream thing. When we called him on the phone to tell him we were going to make an album, he had to take his welders mask off to talk.
, onstage at the Kalamazoo State Theatre. Elkins was hooked. “I watched him and his tenacity in playing really shook me. I was like, ‘I gotta figure this thing out.’”