Hardy counts Morgan Wallen one of his closest friends. They’ve written hits together, shared a stage many times, including at Wallen’s stadium shows in Knoxville, Tennessee, last year, and were even FaceTiming with each other at the very moment Hardy was involved in a horrifying 2022 bus crash.
Needless to say, Hardy has some thoughts on the way his collaborator has been treated in the past for his various public missteps, including a chair-tossing incident at a Nashville bar in 2024 and the use of a racial slur in a 2021 video that, for a time, resulted in Wallen being banned from awards shows and even on radio.
“I think a lot of people…big companies were really hard on him early on. And a lot of it is that people feel like they owe him, because he made a mistake — especially the big one that we all know,” Hardy says, alluding to Wallen’s use of the slur, during a new episode of Rolling Stone’s Nashville Now podcast.
“I think, especially the gatekeepers, at radio and iHeart and people like that, they opened back up for him… because they banned him for a while, they literally banned him from the radio,” he continues. “I think people came to their senses and they were like, ‘We made a mistake and this guy’s really good and maybe we should give him a chance.’ And I think the floodgates just opened.”
Hardy — who dropped his new album Country! Country! last week — says that Wallen’s worldwide popularity now is difficult for him to grasp. “Him being one of my best friends, it’s hard for me to process how big he is sometimes. But his return, and how big that was… a lot of it was platforms and people that were like, ‘Man, we were too hard on this guy and we should show him some love.’”
He even credits Wallen’s crossover success with the surge of pop artists gravitating to Nashville and making country albums. “They listened to his records and it’s so good that they’re like, ‘OK, I wanna do this,’” he says. “He’s changed it. It’s insane to watch.”
Download and subscribe to Rolling Stone’s weekly country-music podcast, Nashville Now, hosted by senior music editor Joseph Hudak, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify (or wherever you get your podcasts). New episodes drop every Wednesday and feature interviews with artists and personalities like Charley Crockett, Gavin Adcock, Amanda Shires, Margo Price, Dusty Slay, Lukas Nelson, Ashley Monroe, Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor, and Clever.
