As Kane Brown‘s Mixtape Vol. 1 arrives today, it’s more than just the precursor to his full-length third album. 

With non-country guests like Swae Lee, Khalid, and John Legend, it’s his most diverse collection yet, and very likely the most accurate representation of his musical DNA. 

“When I was starting to get into the music business,” Kane recalls, “I always would tell my friends, I was like, ‘I want to be an artist that can do everything.'”

“I think rap would be the only thing that I would hold out [on doing]…” he adds. “I love music in general. Country music always has my heart. I’ll never leave country music. But it’s cool to be able to, you know, do all these things.”

In fact, Kane’s happy to take what some might consider a criticism and proudly own it. 

“When everybody’s like ‘Oh, this is pop-country,’ yeah, I’m a pop-country artist,” he declares. “And this EP’s kind of just showing everybody that.”

“It’s like, I have a song with Swae Lee and Khalid. My album’s gonna have a song with [R&B singer/songwriter] H.E.R. on it,” he teases. “There’s probably gonna be some other artists — like features — on there.”

But the Chattanooga, Tennessee native is equally proud of the countriest track on the new set.

“I like having ‘BFE’ on there,” he explains, “because it’s kind of like, ‘This is what I grew up on, the nineties sound of country music.’ But that’s why I called it the Mixtape is because it’s like all of my sounds into one.”

The set also features his current top ten hit, “Cool Again.”

It’s his first collection of new music since 2018’s chart-topping Experiment.

By Stephen Hubbard
Copyright © 2020, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.