Brent Cobb’s story is, quite literally, poetry in motion. He’s been intensely self-aware of his life’s mysticism and how it catalyzed his career at 17 when he gave a demo record to his cousin, Grammy award-winning producer Dave Cobb. The move was a whim of coincidence and youthful ambition, rhyming into existence like most things in Brent’s life. When Brent got a call back from Dave two days later, with Shooter Jennings on the line, it was hard to tell if all of this was real or just a side effect of the joint he and his friends had smoked a few minutes prior. When Dave and Shooter asked Brent to come out to Los Angeles and record that demo in the studio, which would later become his first LP, No Place Left to Leave, the lines between fiction and reality began to blur.
“Up to that point, I had not ventured far outside the parameters of fantasy,” explained Cobb regarding where his career as a musician was at that age. “I knew that I could play music, that I could write songs, but I didn’t know how to do the rest. So, meeting Dave felt like something out of a story, or a movie or somethin’.”
Perception is arguably any writer’s greatest strength; for Cobb, that came with patience. He’s gone on to say that several instances throughout his career spoke to the larger ethos that would become the chronicle track “When Country Came Back to Town” off his Southern Star LP. Meeting Shooter Jennings 18 years prior was undoubtedly that initial spark.
“If it got no further than that moment, I knew it was a cool moment to witness in the history of country music,” Cobb said. “And as I would go out to LA, I would actively try to write about it. And actively thought, ‘I haven’t experienced enough yet, but I know someday I’ll write about all this that’s happening right now.’”
Fast-forward twenty years, and Cobb’s career now boasts six solo albums, with dozens of credits across the country-sphere. As a performer and songwriter, the Georgia native always contorts country music’s common law into his design creations, balancing wit and wisdom with an unwaveringly matter-of-fact identity. He’s constantly breathing fresh air into his own music and writers’ rooms around Nashville. There’s a uniformity to his process that comes as a side effect of humility and authenticity, constantly reckoning with reality and its many blessings.
His newest single, “Loose Strings,” only reinforces that idea. Originally unveiled on Amazon Music back in 2021, it’s gotten some recent renditions by both Gavin Adcock and Hailey Whitters in recent weeks. It’s again a highlight of the clear versatility that comes with a Cobb cut. Like many of the outlaw staples of the 70s and 80s that were and continue to be covered tenfold, his mutterings and musings seem to speak to an attitude far older than him and one that will remain in vogue long after he’s gone. To Cobb, a good song is a good song. No caveats or asterisks are involved.
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“I always have faith that if a song is good, then anybody can record it,” Cobb said. “I always loved back in the day, ‘Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down’ or ‘Tennessee Whiskey,’ and there being multiple versions, and people recording their versions of it. I just feel like if a song is great, a song is great. It doesn’t matter. Anybody could record it, and I always hope that anybody will.”
That notion has led to an eclectic resume over the years. Aside from his personal catalog, Cobb’s credits on Music Row include acts like Kenny Chesney, Miranda Lambert, Luke Bryan, and the Texas cult-favorite Whiskey Myers track, “Bar, Guitar, and a Honky Tonk Crowd,” which originally appeared on his debut LP in 2006. Amidst and sometimes even in spite of the form-fitting demands of country music, he’s never really been keen on trying to be anything he’s not. His shaggy brown hair is always let down, physically and metaphorically.
Nashville has changed drastically in the last twenty years, though Cobb has some pride in staying the same. From souped-up trucks, Silverado Blues, and the hyper-polished sounds of mainstream radio back to the grit and grime of the new outlaw movement, the genre has been to hell and back and left trends scattered on the road along the way. Cobb tells me that popularity and authenticity can sometimes be adversaries. When I asked him about his thoughts on the new “real” country and if listeners had finally lifted the veil, his answer was optimistic, though not naive.
“I hope so,” Cobb laughs. “But see, when something becomes popular, then it gets hard to tell, doesn’t it? I can remember first moving to Nashville; if you would go down to Broadway or whatever on a Friday night, everybody was straightening their hair and wearing Affliction shirts, trying to be a mix of Keith Urban and Cody Canada from Ragweed. And I can remember going into Capitol Records with Luke Bryan in 2007, and the A&R guys openly talking about me like, ‘People don’t buy the good ole boy, dumb country, it doesn’t sell.’ And I was like, what the fuck are you talking about? I’m not pretending to be ‘dumb country;’ I’m just being regular old me.”
It’s good he shrugged off the stuffy suits and their comments at Capitol that day. Two decades later, being regular old, Brent has paid off pretty handsomely.
“Now, it’s totally morphed into what everybody is doing,” Cobb said. “Dressing in regular old Levi jeans and a flannel shirt and a trucker hat now. At that time in 2007, you couldn’t do that cause nobody believed it. Now everybody believes it.”
“Regular old dude” seems to be the philosophy in both process and personage. If he sits down to write, there’s never any one artist in mind for a cut, and he knows the good ones are good by how easily they seem to fall out of his subconscious and onto the page. He said the song can get lost in the weeds if he writes with too much intentionality. Like most things in his life, Cobb writes for himself first. It’s a skill he’s mastered in solace and collaboration, attacking Nashville proper with his own boots on rather than trying to wear somebody else’s.
His approach is mulled over once before it becomes the standard. Despite a string of radio-friendly hits, he still attacks the co-write the same way every time. Bring in a verse and a chorus if there’s a clear path the song is headed in, and let his gut take him the rest of the way. He says he sometimes has trouble wrapping his head around another person’s creative process.
“I was always, and still really am, intimidated by co-writing with people,” Cobb said. “Because my process has always been more personal. It’s crazy because I’ll remove myself from the song, but at the same time, I can only write it if I’m thinking it’s for me and my own experiences. I never sit down and go, ‘I’m gonna write this for someone else.’ And those are the ones that seem to get cut for some reason, those magic songs.”
As has been hinted at by the success of Brent and his cousin Dave, music is a second language in the Cobb family, one they all seem to be fluent in. He vividly remembers the first time he put pen to paper and set it to chords at eight years old, when he wrote a tune called “Millions and Billions and Jillions of Rocks.”
“Me and my sister, she was probably three, and I was probably eight, we were just walking over my nana’s yard,” said Cobb. “We were walking around the prickly pears and collecting rocks, so I just gave us a little theme song in the background. Just singing ‘millions and billions and jillions of rocks, time after time after time after time.’”
Cobb says he still believes in the song and even considers cutting it himself. He’s also willing to have it covered if it inspires the right artist.
His father, Patrick, still plays in a band on the weekends, as well as a gospel quartet. Cobb’s attitude toward musicianship comes from a place of humility, seemingly knowing it would be a part of his life regardless of who was listening. Whether it floated radio waves or permeated dusty barrooms on a humid Georgia summer night, the audience always came second to the man on stage.
“Growing up seeing my dad, it instilled in me to just do it because you love it,” Cobb said. “If you just love it, then you’ll love it forever, and you won’t go crazy. And to see him still doing and loving it, he’s damn sure not doing it for any money.”
Trips to Nashville for writing were a nice add-on twenty years ago, and they still seem to be an afterthought for him today. Cobb spends most of his time in Georgia now with his wife and kids, back in the place that molded him and just a stone’s throw away from the people who instilled that budding love for the pen-wielding he showed from such a young age. As a teenager, Cobb worked at a tree service company and for his dad’s appliance repair business. If Dave and Shooter never gave him a call, there’s a good chance he’d still be there on the weekdays and at the local beer joint playing shows with Pops on the weekends.
“I don’t know that I’m real good at anything else,” said Cobb when I asked what he’d be doing if music wasn’t in the picture. “But I also didn’t have a lot of time to figure out if I was any good at anything else.”
Knowing that the music wasn’t going anywhere has given him a keen, almost jarringly refreshing sense of self with now two decades spent as a professional songwriter and musician. He’s seen trends come and go, and artists transform from cover band frontmen to stadium fillers overnight, all from the comfort of his front porch. While others weave in and out of that traffic to chase trends, Cobb is content to stay in his lane. It’s not a coincidence that he’s yet to take an exit. To him, the journey is the destination.
“This isn’t me being bitter or jaded or anything; I’m happy with where I am,” said Cobb. “With that said, I have had so many people over the years open for me and just explode to become this crazy level of success, which is great, and I’m happy for them, but sometimes it gets exhausting. But when I get exhausted, it is nice to have my dad’s life and career as an anchor to go, ‘Well, you know what? Even if it doesn’t reach that level, it’s okay cause I do love it.’ I don’t have to rely on anybody else’s definition of success.”
Passion and providence have been dancing around Cobb his whole life, and from the outside looking in, he hasn’t missed a move or stepped on their toes yet. While country music constantly changes, Cobb remains, and his musings of truths stand the test of time. Regular is all he knows how to be, and it’s all he asks of those he shares his life set to chords with.
“If anyone is going to record anything that I wrote, I want them to believe it,” Cobb said. “Whoever it is. I like being the dude that says to artists on both sides of the tracks, ‘All y’all can record these songs. I love all of y’all.’”
