“Yeah, it’s laid-back, but I really feel like it’s a driving song,” Brent Cobb tells Rolling Stone. “If I’m driving down the road, this would be the kind of song I’d want to have on in the background. It reminds me of old J.J. Cale albums that I like. To some people, it might be easy listening, but to me, it rocks.”
Cobb is discussing his duet with Adam Hood, “Four on the Floor,” and the accompanying video, which premieres today.
Cobb is a native to Georgia and Hood is from Alabama, and the two have been friends — and occasional collaborators — for the better part of two decades. They wrote “Four on the Floor” together in 2010, and Hood says it was the first time they co-wrote with one another.
Released as a single on February 14, the song puts into words the sort of observations that can come to someone looking through the windshield on a drive through the South. But turns of phrases like, “I’m a roly poly, rolling around/Lord, this ain’t nothing you’ve never heard before — four on the floor,” put a fresh spin on such a lament. The lyrics are complemented by a southern rock backbeat and swampy slide guitar that give the whole thing a chill vibe.
“If I could toot my own horn for a second, I’ll take the credit for that,” Hood says of the melody. “We wrote it at a time when I was really into Junior Kimbrough, and it felt to me like a real simple kind of 1-4-5 blues song. If you go listen to the demo now, I’m playing the slide, which is something I don’t ordinarily do, and that was the aim. We wanted something that felt like a North Mississippi hill country tune.”
The video gives tropical vibes to the song, as Hood and Cobb play it next to a pool lined with palm trees, surrounded by a dozen or so friends — including Courtney Patton, Josh Grider, Micky Braun of Micky and the Motorcars, and Taylor Hunnicutt and her band. It all came about by happenstance when Hood and Cobb were booked at Key West’s Mile 0 Fest in late January. “One of the few times that Brent and Adam are in the same place,” Hood explains.
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They reached out to Kim Brian, who oversees the production for Mile 0, and asked if the audio/video crew would be up for an impromptu video shoot, and told their friends to meet them by the pool. The only complicating factor turned out to be the weather, as Key West was on the southern edge of a deep freeze that had spread across most of the country. The result was a poolside video in which the partygoers are layered up for a cold, windy day.
“We just told our friend to put their jackets on and come hang out by the pool,” Hood says. “I thought it would be strange-looking, but it actually has a real cool vibe to it.”
Cobb goes further in his sentiment. “It almost feels like we’re hanging around a campfire,” he says. “But it’s a pool, and everybody’s bundled up, and for some reason, it almost fits the feel of the song better than if we had all been warm.”
For years, both artists have harbored plans of recording a full-length album together. They even have a title picked out: Cobb and Hood — to be said in the same cadence as “Robin Hood,” Cobb says. “We’re taking the songs of rural America and giving them to the rest of the world,” he says. So far, however, they’ve only had time to record a handful of songs, one of which is “Four on the Floor.”
“For a long time, Brent and I have almost jokingly talked about making a record like this,” Hood says. “But this single just sort of came about serendipitously, you know? And, I hope that it’s foreshadowing a whole album.”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose third book, Red Dirt Unplugged, was released on December 13, 2024, via Back Lounge Publishing.