ERNEST had his first big hit at country radio earlier this year, with his “Flower Shops” collaboration with Morgan Wallen. ERNEST wrote the song with Ben Burgess and Mark Holman, taking an idea from a country music legend to craft the clever song.
“I iterally pulled my truck up in Ben’s yard, told him to hop in, we’re gonna go write,” ERNEST tells Everything Nash. “We were listening to a George Jones essential playlist on the way and ‘A Good Year For The Roses’ came on. Ben was like, ‘We should write a song with a cool title like that.’ And then he was like, ‘It’s been a good year for flower shops.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, let’s start there.’ And we wrote the song while we were driving and when we got to Mark’s, we were like, ‘We have it. Turn it on. Let’s record this.'”
ERNEST recently had the chance to open for Wallen, at the Globe Life Field in Arlington, Texas, when HARDY had to cancel his appearance while he recovered from injuries sustained in a tour bus accident.
“It was a dream scenario to get to do direct support for the biggest artist in the world at a massive stadium,” ERNEST admits. “As a friend, a dream scenario is to get to watch your friend fill 55,000 seats, and they sing every word to every song. I get chills thinking about it. But standing side-stage watching it, everything that he’s gone through and all the growth that he’s gone through and the man that he’s become, getting to do that was amazing.”
ERNEST and Wallen might seem to be competing within the genre of country music, but he says that couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, there isn’t anyone he wants to see succeed more than Wallen, and he knows that the feeling is mutual.
“I think it’s cool because we are all each other’s biggest supporters,” Ernest previously told Entertainment Tonight. “In such a dog-eat-dog world, it’s cool to have guys who are competing for spots on the charts, but at the same time, rooting for those guys and writing each other’s songs, and all of that. It’s cool.”
Find all of ERNEST’s music and tour dates here.