Joshua Hedley is “a singing professor of country & western,” he declares on his raucousand witty new album, Neon Blue. It might sound like a punchline, but it’s not. An acefiddle player, a sharp guitarist, and a singer with a granite twang, he’s devoted his entirelife to the study of this genre. Ask him about it and he’ll explain: “When all my friendswent off to college, I went to Nashville. I was 19 years old playing honkytonks andgetting an education.” His 2018 debut, Mr. Jukebox, showcased his deep knowledge ofcountry’s history, in particular the beery ballads of the 1950s and ‘60s. His mentors wereGeorge Jones, Ray Price, and Glen Campbell, but his most remarkable accomplishmentwas putting his own spin on their style.

Neon Blue, on the other hand, examines a very different, often forsaken era: the early1990s. “The last bastion of country music,” says the professor, “was the early 1990s,roughly 1989 and 1996. You could turn on the radio and immediately know you’rehearing a country song. You could still hear steel guitar and fiddle. But there was a hardfork around 1996 or ’97, when country veered off into pop territory. Neon Blue asks,What if that fork had never happened? What if country kept on sounding like country?”Opener “Broke Again,” with its stuttering hook and bouncy riff, would’ve sounded rightat home on a playlist between Garth Brooks’ “Friends in Low Places” and Alan Jackson’s“Chattahoochie, and the majestic “River in the Rain” sounds like a thousand lightersheld high during an encore. That era may have been dismissed by traditionalists at thetime as slick or overproduced, but Hedley finds something exciting in that old hat-actsound, and Neon Blue plays up the excitement of bigger-than-life choruses, the relatableemotions of those sad-eyed ballads, and the inventiveness of the lively production. “Thesound is modern,” he says, “but it’s still discernibly country.”

Hedley has been a presence in Nashville for nearly twenty years, although you have toknow where to find him. You have to brave the tourists on Broadway, bypass thethree-story bars blasting Journey, and make your way to Robert’s Western World, atime-capsule honkytonk from a different era, an oasis in a town where twang isconstantly being run down by pedal pubs. “It’s the last holdout. It’s exactly the samenow as it was when I started playing there seventeen years ago. It never doesn’t feel likehome because it never doesn’t feel familiar.” He’s got tenure at Robert’s, playing hourslong sets full of his own songs and country classics, and he hates to miss a show. In2018, when he opened for Jack White at the Bridgestone Arena (the largest venue intown), the next night he was back at Robert’s playing to a boot-scooting audience. “Idon’t plan on ever, ever leaving that place! They’re going to either have to fire me or I’mgonna have to die. I don’t see either of those things happening anytime soon.”

That place informed the sound and style of Mr. Jukebox, which introduced him to awider audience beyond the city limits and established him as one of Nashville’s mostknowledgeable and exciting artists. But soon after its release, “I fell off the wagon andstarted drinking pretty heavily again. I’m always more creative when I’m sober, and allof that creativity just went out the window. I had nothing going on.” Hedley workedhard to sober up and get his life back together, eventually landing a new record deal withNew West. But the songs weren’t coming as easily as they once had. Actually, theyweren’t coming at all.

But he had an idea for an album—a direction he wanted to take, an era in countryhistory he wanted to explore—and he sought out some local songwriters to help himbring it to life. “If I was gonna make this happen, I knew I had to do some co-writing.”First up was Carson Chamberlain, a Nashville legend who played steel guitar for KeithWhitley, tour-managed for Clint Black, and wrote hits for Alan Jackson and GeorgeStrait. “When I was growing up, I didn’t know who he was, but I definitely knew hissongs! Carson brought in Wyatt McCubbin and Zach Top, and pretty soon the ideaswere bouncing off each other like molecules in an atom.”

One of their first efforts was “Neon Blue,” whose livewire energy and rowdy sing-alongbarely disguise its bruised heart. “For whatever reason that title just popped into myhead, and I was obsessed with it. You’ve got the neon lights of a honkytonk, but you’vealso got that sadness. It was amazing to see how they can turn a loose idea into a reallytight song. It was a crazy learning experience, and I came out feeling like a bettersongwriter. We got the vibe for the album from ‘Neon Blue,’ and every other song wasbuilt around it.”

After making Mr. Jukebox with a loose group of hell-raising friends, Hedley decided torecord his follow-up with professional session players—a Nashville tradition. ProducersSkylar Wilson (Justin Townes Earle, Lindi Ortega) and Jordan Lehning (RodneyCrowell) corralled an all-star crew featuring some of the city’s best players, who madeHedley step up his game. “All the players on this record are the people who are playingon Top 40 hits. They’re the professionals playing two or three sessions a day, and it wascrazy to see them work. All I had was solo work tapes—just guitar and vocals. Theylistened to those tapes, made charts, and cut the tracks. It’s like I came in with skeletonsand they put flesh on them. They made them into human beings.”

During the process of co-writing and recording Neon Blue, the singing professor becamethe student, learning lessons he’ll apply to everything he does next. “I learned so muchmaking this record. It really changed me. I’ve always been a song guy, but I’ve becomemore interested in exploring a singular idea for an album. I feel much more confident inhaving a specific vision of what an entire record can be. Call it a concept album orwhatever you want, but I think it’s more about just having that focus and direction. It’sdefinitely opened up another layer of the creative process, and I don’t want to lose that.”