Corey Kent Says Spotify’s Homegrown Has “More Heart," Then He Proved It Live [EXCLUSIVE]
In an exclusive conversation with All Country News, Kent opens up about turning streams into real-world connection, quietly previewing new music and the first time “Wild As Her” stopped a show cold.
A playlist can introduce an artist. A live show can make a fan stay.
That is the idea behind Spotify’s Homegrown Live, a concert series taking the platform’s country discovery playlist out of listeners’ headphones and putting it directly in front of them. Earlier this month, the series landed on the rooftop of the Graduate Hotel in Bloomington, Indiana, where Corey Kent delivered an intimate acoustic set as college football season kicked into gear.
Presented by Hilton and developed by AUX, Spotify’s music and culture consultancy for brands, the event marked the first sponsored live extension of Homegrown, an editorial playlist dedicated to rising country artists and the sounds shaping the genre’s next chapter.
For Kent, however, the invitation meant more than another name on another playlist.
“I’ve always dug the playlist because I feel like it’s a little less formulaic in terms of the music put on there,” Kent told All Country News. “It’s got a little more heart, I would say—maybe some more grit—which is right up my alley in terms of what I like to listen to.”
Being asked to perform felt like an endorsement of the music that has always moved him.
“Somehow, somebody thought I fell into that same category of the stuff I like listening to,” he added.
From a Stream to a Singalong
Country music discovery has changed dramatically. The radio and record-store aisles that once introduced fans to new voices now share that job with playlists, social media, touring and word of mouth. But for Kent, the clearest proof that a song has truly connected still comes from the crowd.
He remembers the exact moment it happened for him.
Kent and his band were opening for Cody Johnson in Mankato, Minnesota, far outside the Oklahoma dive bars and Texas honky-tonks where they had built their earliest following. As the first of three acts, Kent prepared everyone for a room that might not know their music.
“I remember huddling up with the band and crew and being like, ‘Hey guys, we’re in no man’s land. Nobody knows us,’” he recalled. “Just be okay with people not knowing the songs. It’s not Texas, it’s not Oklahoma—we’re in a new place.”
Then came the first four notes of “Wild As Her.”
The reaction was so loud the band lost time and had to start the song again.
“I looked back at the band and I was like, ‘Maybe they do know this,’” Kent said. “From the first word, they were singing along with us. That was the first time I could just back off the mic and let somebody sing a song. That sticks with you forever.”
It is the kind of leap Homegrown Live is built to create: moving discovery beyond a save, stream or algorithmic recommendation and into a room where artist and audience can feel the connection in real time.
A Rooftop Surprise Before Heartland Rock and Roll
Bloomington also gave Kent room to take a risk.
With only a guitar in his hands and no full band arrangement to navigate, he surprised the crowd with a song that had been quietly added to his forthcoming album, Heartland Rock and Roll, arriving September 25.
“We kind of just snuck [it] onto the record last second,” he revealed. “Nobody at that point knew it was happening. We got to announce it there and say, ‘This is actually a song that’s going to be on the record that you don’t see on the track list. I’ve never played it live, but we’re going to play it right here.’”
Even alongside the songs fans already knew, the unreleased track became Kent’s personal highlight of the night.
“Of all the songs I played that night even the hits that one, in my opinion, sounded the best and went over really well,” he said.
That spontaneity is harder to find in a tightly choreographed full-band set. On the rooftop, Kent could follow the moment wherever it led.
“It was just me and my guitar,” he explained. “I didn’t have to worry about anybody else knowing where I was going musically. I could just do whatever I wanted, which was really fun and kind of took me back to the beginning—to how this whole music career started for me.”
The Song Gets Attention. The Meaning Makes It Last.
Homegrown may help listeners find Kent, but he is clear about what he hopes they hear once they arrive: something deeper than a hook.
“Hopefully they’re getting one layer deeper subject matter,” he said.
As a teenager driving a Jeep Wrangler, Kent kept Eric Church’s Chief in constant rotation.
What held his attention was not simply how the record sounded, but what it had to say.
“The stuff I really connected with personally was a little more introspective,” he explained. “We have our own unique sound, but really, the lyrics are, in my opinion, what sets it apart from everything else.”
That belief sits at the center of Kent’s music. Love, life and loss may be universal territory, but an artist’s perspective and the language used to frame it is what makes familiar subjects feel new.
“It’s the way that you put the words together,” he said. “It’s saying it in your own unique voice. Hopefully people dig the way that I see the world and how I think. It comes out in the music.”
For all the ways technology has reshaped discovery, Kent’s goal remains strikingly human: not just to make something that sounds good, but to make something that means enough for a listener to return.
“That’s what I hope people gravitate toward,” he said. “The meaning behind the songs—not just, ‘Oh, this sounds good and I can bob my head to it.’”
Spotify’s Homegrown can provide the first click. In Bloomington, Corey Kent showed exactly what can happen after it: a surprise song, a stripped-down performance and the kind of connection no playlist metric can fully measure.
Corey Kent’s new album, Heartland Rock and Roll, arrives September 25.
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