When you find a pop-country band that’s named after a United States highway — in this case, U.S. Route 641 — there’s a good chance that you’ve found a group who are a prime slice of the genre’s spirit. In the case of the up-and-coming duo SixForty1, that’s certainly true.
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Since moving to Nashville in 2018, SixForty1 — which consists of Brooks Hoffman and Austin Gee — has been rising through the ranks of the country music industry. While they’ve yet to release a debut record, the singles and two EPs they’ve released thus far have demonstrated the duo’s innate ability to write catchy, pop-country tunes. Their first release of 2020 arrived on May 1 in the form of their new single, “Somebody’s Gonna.”
“We wrote this with our buddy Brandon Day about 2 years ago,” Gee told American Songwriter. “It was a fun and laid back write, we literally just shot off everything a guy would do for a girl.”
While the concept of the song may sound a bit anachronistic at first, the song does a good job of maintaining a playful tone — plus, you could easily reverse the roles in your head and imagine the song’s speaker as a girl singing to a guy or another girl. As far as ‘things someone would do for a partner’ go, they got a lot of the big tropes — everything from writing them a song to carving their name in a tree to taking them dancing to marrying them cleverly makes its way onto the track.
“It felt like a summer jam since we first got the demo,” Hoffman said. “Immediately we had it on repeat. Right now feels like the perfect opportunity to release this song as our first single of 2020 because it’s all about appreciating the little things and realizing how great your relationship is and not taking those things for granted.”
Listen to SixForty1’s new single “Somebody’s Gonna” below:
