New Artist Kevin Powers Makes His First ‘Move’ With a Shaboozey Assist: ‘It Stuck With Me Right Away’
Categoria: Musica
Billboard's Makin' Tracks looks at the writing and recording behind the Kevin Powers and Shaboozey collab "Move On."
Por Billboard | 07/05/2026
One of the longest-running themes in country music features a guy who’s left behind as his girlfriend heads off for the big city in search of a star-quality life. That separation story played out in George Jones & Tammy Wynette’s “Southern California,” David Frizzell & Shelly West’s “You’re the Reason God Made Oklahoma,” Dan Seals’ “Everything That Glitters (Is Not Gold)” and Randy Travis’ remake of “It’s Just a Matter of Time.” More recently, Morgan Wallen threaded a version of that tale into “More Than My Hometown.” Newcomer Kevin Powers’ fresh take on the idea – “Move On,” featuring Shaboozey – casts it in a modern, folk-country package: brisk, catchy, mostly acoustic. But it still connects to country’s past as the woman in the text glitzes up her life by renting a high-rise in some unspecified West Coast town. “I don’t think I necessarily had a specific [city] in my mind,” Powers says, “but I did want to kind of put my twist on that classic story of, you know, guy’s-back-home-and-girl-chases-the-big-dreams-in-the-city kind of thing.” Most moves involve some level of long-term planning, and “Move On” appropriately required several setup periods. The first came in June 2025 as Powers, Alex Cabrera and David Ray (“Son of a Sinner,” “Save Me”) met up at the Nashville home of Serg Sanchez for a co-writing session. They searched for an idea for quite a while – “probably three hours,” Powers says – before he landed on “Who taught you how to move on,” a phrase loaded with heartbreak and rejection. “The title really hit me,” Ray recalls. “I thought it was just such a cool, relatable concept for a song. It super-inspired me from the jump.” Sanchez and Cabrera established a repeating four-chord pattern, and Powers matched the hook to a descending melody that bookended the chorus. Half-way through that stanza, they tossed in a winding top line with different phrasing that changed things up. “We just wanted a cool B-section for that hook to make it feel fresh and new,” Powers says. “Anything,” Ray adds, “to keep the listener listening.” As much time as they’d needed to find inspiration, the chorus came quickly, and the opening verse – which they wrote next – came together “in eight minutes, maybe,” Powers says. The song’s protagonist acknowledges the woman’s “West Coast move,” her new style and his own depression. They’d chewed up plenty of time getting started, so once they’d connected the initial verse and chorus, they decided to break and let it marinate for a bit. “You don’t just throw anything in the background of a Mona Lisa,” Ray suggests. “If you feel like you’ve got something good, you know, it’s like, ‘Hey, let’s really dig into this thing and settle out the way it needs to be. Let’s not rush through this thing and feel like we left with something mediocre.’” That led to several weeks of contemplation before “Move On” got finished, though Powers was the only member of the original team who was in the r