When Courtney Patton stepped onstage for an afternoon set at Key West’s Mile 0 Fest in late January to release her newest record, Carry You With Me, it was less about sharing the music and more about the pains and triumphs she’d been through over the past two years.
“For the ones that pulled me through,” reads the dedication on Carry You With Me.
“We all have our tribe of people,” Patton says. “There was a core group of people that knew what I was going through at this time of my life, and they truly helped carry me on the days I couldn’t do it myself. They reminded me that I wasn’t alone. They gave me space to grieve, and they gave me space to create. They were there when I needed them.”
Patton is alluding to her 2024 divorce, from fellow artist Jason Eady, after 12 years of marriage, during which time they came to be viewed as a power couple in Texas Music, often playing and recording together. The two announced their divorce last May, in the process acknowledging they had been separated a year by then, and emphasizing that they remain friends. (One of the songs on Carry You With Me, “Now or Never,” was co-written with Eady.)
That means that nearly the entire writing and production cycle of Carry You With Me took place during a public split. This is where those friends came in, many of whom lent their creativity to the record. Brent Cobb — who name-dropped Patton and Eady on his 2023 single “When Country Came Back to Town” — contributed a co-write. Adam Hood did the same. Fellow Texan Kelley Mickwee sang background harmonies and co-wrote a song. And two members of the Band of Heathens produced the project.
“I’m usually on a two-year ‘try-to-get-a-record-out’ plan, and my last record came out in October of ’22” Patton says. “I pushed it to January, just so I could release it in Key West. I thought it would be fun.”
That 2022 record, Electrostatic, was produced by Gordy Quist of the Band of Heathens (with Eady co-producing) and recorded in Austin at the Finishing School. Patton says it was a “no-brainer” to return to the same studio for Carry You With Me, but she opted for a different Heathen — keyboardist Trevor Nealon — to produce, a first for Nealon. Quist acted as co-producer.
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The result is an eclectic project that ranges in tone from traditional country to Austin folk to blues. The horn-laced title track has a hint of Latino influence to its backbeat. But Patton’s voice is what binds the songs together. Her default harmonies are lower than most of her contemporaries, but she pushes the boundaries of her vocal range on the album, not bothering to mask her emotions on any of the 10 tracks. If Patton is working through pain in a song, the listener feels it. If she’s buoyed by defiance or dark humor, the listener feels that, too.
“I went into it wanting to write more soulfully,” Patton says. “I still have a country voice, but I just love music, and I try to be genre-less these days, and just say that I’m a singer-songwriter. That way I can do what I want to do.”
Patton, from Stephenville, Texas, has been a part of a songwriting group since 2020 that involves writing based on prompts (once a week, someone will text a theme to use as a jumping-off point). Like with her previous record, those prompts formed the basis for most of the songs on Carry You With Me. But the backdrop of her split with Eady is impossible to overlook, and she says she knew from the start she would be confronting her feelings on this record.
“I was going through a big transition in my life,” she says, “going through a divorce that I wasn’t expecting. That’s definitely heard in the writing, and probably the production. It’s about growing up, and putting a different lens on things.”
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The record wastes little time in laying Patton’s emotions bare. The opening track, “What Is Done Will Be Repeated,” is heavy on keys and a layered backbeat — somewhere between Band of Heathens and classic Anne Murray, but with Patton still front and center in the chorus of “Beauty from the ashes means that we cannot outlast this/we were only ever dust after all.” She’s not referencing her own life in the song. Rather, she’s assessing the heated, tense social climate that has been unavoidable for most of the past decade.
“I wrote that song on a day where there was a very politically tense climate, and there were some changes being made that affected a big mass of people,” Patton says. “I’m not a very political person, but this just felt yucky. My happy place is on my porch, and I just took my guitar out to the porch, and I thought about how in the last eight or so years, we have all just progressively gotten more bitchy with one another.
“I wanted to say, ‘Look, this has been going on forever. History truly repeats itself in one way or another. If you just take a deep breath, what is done will be repeated.’ So, I just keep holding out hope that it’s going to settle down and get back to the good days for a little bit.”
The co-write with Cobb, “Let It Rise,” takes a more introspective approach to the same environment of processing feelings, this time while watching an angry exchange of opinions on cable news and realizing her inner circle is getting smaller. It sounded like something Cobb would write, so Patton hit him up and they finished it together over Zoom.
“I am a huge fan,” Patton says of Cobb. “I found out about him through Adam Hood, and I listened to his first record, Shine on Rainy Day, and I wore it out. When I got to meet him, I walked up and started singing one of the songs from that record to him, and he started singing it back. And I went, ‘Did we just become best friends?’”
Earlier this month, Patton celebrated the record’s release with the Heathens acting as her backing band and the three-piece Waxahachie Horns at Austin’s 04 Center, but she is largely staying lowkey with this release. Her daughter is in her last semester of high school and Patton has been accompanying her to stock shows across Texas this year; the spring will be a busy season of track meets. Patton says a proper tour is on hold until after the school year.
“She’s being scouted for college in the high jump, and I’m not missing her track meets,” Patton says. “So, this is a little unconventional album release. I’m sticking closer to home. After she graduates, then I can hit the road and stay gone.”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose third book, Red Dirt Unplugged, was released on December 13, 2024, via Back Lounge Publishing.