Dylan — one of The Boot’s 10 New Country Artists to Watch in 2017 — has penned songs for Kip Moore, Eric Paslay, Justin Moore, the Eli Young Band and more. In October, he released an album of his own, Heart of a Flatland Boy, a nod to his Kansas roots.
“[In Nashville,] you don’t have to necessarily wear a certain hat,” Dylan notes of the divide (or lack thereof) between songwriter and artist. “I’ve always considered myself an artist even when I wasn’t releasing music … We’re in the age of the singer-songwriter in Nashville, where it’s almost expected that an artist is a songwriter and cutting some of the songs that they’ve co-written or have written.”
Dylan describes Heart of a Flatland Boy as “flatland country punk.” He finds both beauty and nostalgia in thinking back on his younger years and the area in which he grew up; love gets brought up plenty in country music, he says, “but we don’t really hear about what happens after that” — the rest of what life has to offer.
“I just thought, maybe, my ultimate goal was to have people I grew up with listen to that record and be proud of it and know that I was telling our story,” Dylan says.
Listen to Eric