It’s been 10 years since Kane Brown signed with RCA and transitioned from a YouTube performer who posted covers of 1980s and ‘90s country songs into an arena-level headliner.
Hot off the heels of re-signing with the label, the singer’s new single – “Woman,” released to country radio on March 13 – marks what he referred to in an official statement as “a new era of music for me.”
“It’s the new KB 2.0,” he reiterates in a phone call. “I’m excited about music again.”
That implies that he’d lost his passion, an interpretation that Brown confirms, though he avoids the details behind his previous downturn. Somewhere along the line, he laced up the boxing gloves and got his blood pumping.
“The last three years, I wasn’t excited, but I got lucky with some songs like ‘Backseat Driver’ and ‘Miles on It,’” he says. “It was just something that I was battling with and I [started] going back to boxing, getting my competitiveness and excitement back, and just getting off my butt, not being lazy anymore. I’m excited to be back in the studio, writing songs and [getting] back on the road.”
When he returned to the road this year on Feb. 27 at Harrah’s Casino in Laughlin, Nev., the set list included “Woman” for the first time. He’d known since the day he wrote it that he would be singing it for years to come. It was new to the audience, but his fans didn’t seem to mind its unfamiliarity.
“The crowd loved it,” he says. “Everybody was moving around. I didn’t know the words yet, but they were jamming.”
That’s understandable. The track has the energy of a Bryan Adams classic, a comparison that Brown hadn’t made. But it doesn’t surprise him either. “I feel like you could listen to this song and play Shania Twain’s [Man!] I Feel Like a Woman!’ and then [Cyndi Lauper’s] ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’ and [Whitney Houston’s] ‘I Want to Dance with Somebody’,” he says. “I feel like it fits in with that.”
“Woman” arrived during a 2025 songwriting retreat at a rented house in Mt. Juliet, Tenn., a suburb on the eastern edge of Nashville. Brown had already written several songs on that particular day with four comrades: Taylor Phillips (“Favorite Country Song,” “Hurricane”), John Byron (“Last Night,” “Ain’t a Bad Life”), Ashley Gorley (“I Am Not Okay,” “You Should Probably Leave”) and Ben Johnson (“Bulletproof,” “Truck Bed”). As they finished one of those songs, Brown hunted down some grub in the kitchen, and he ended up recalling a previous moment when a friend had asked him to go for drinks.
“I just remembered being with my boy on the back porch, and he was trying to get me to go out to a bar,” Brown says. “I was just looking at my wife through the window, and I was like, ‘Why would I go out and be y’all’s wing man, when my wife’s right here? I’d rather spend time with her.’ It just gave me that idea.”
It translated into a key hook – “They talkin’ ‘bout girls/ But I got a woman” – and his co-writers were enthusiastic right away. They wrote a repetitive chorus around that idea, threading six occurrences of “I got a woman” (four by the lead singer, two call-and-answers from a background vocalist), but shifting at the end of that refrain to a self-assessment: “She got a man.” The implication, of course, is that his wife is a full-grown adult, but so is the male singer.
“To be able to pull off the multiple statements in a song that’s as ear-wormish and as hooky as that one, man, it’s the hardest song to write,” Phillips says.
It was not, however, that difficult on that day. “It happened so fast,” Phillips notes. “It was like an hour, we were done. It was just a story that was real as could be.”
Pulling the verses together was easy, too. Brown’s experience of turning down a night on the town provided the opening scene – they just needed to make it rhyme. After that, the second verse’s focus was obvious: if the woman was that great, they needed to put the spotlight on her. “Sometimes one woman’s better than all the girls in the world,” Phillips says. “We had to put the significance of her in that second verse.”
Before it was over, they inserted a three-line bridge that summarized the theme, then shifted into one last run-through of the chorus. Johnson oversaw the demo, creating a sing-along instrumental riff that ended with two cheery, ascending triplets, and it cemented their belief in the song. “We knew immediately that this one was going to be the next single,” Brown says. “We were fired up about it.”
Brown recorded it on Dec. 11 at Blackbird in Nashville with an A-list team assembled by producer Dann Huff (Keith Urban, Riley Green), using Johnson’s work as the template. Brown was insistent that it needed a fiddle, so Huff hired Stuart Duncan to layer on top of the signature lick Johnson had created. Huff also piled roughly 10 guitar tracks onto “Woman,” though he did it in a way that respected the basic words and melody.
“I felt good about this record because I didn’t put too much s–t on it,” Huff says. “Normally, it’s so easy to put so much stuff on it, [but] there’s a lot of space. Even where the fills come in, there’s a lot of space.”
In post-production, Huff played a soaring, arena-rock solo after the second chorus, and kept the line going all the way through Brown’s vocal performance on the bridge.
“That’s the rock, ‘80s-style stuff,” Huff says. “If you get something that elevates, you don’t just drop off. But you have to play around the vocal lick. In rock ‘n’ roll, nobody cares, you know. But for me, as long as it supports the melody – probably the hardest part, is getting something that keeps that energy going without distracting from Kane.”
Brown and his team had some concerns about the signature lick – the triplets at the end were so hooky that he feared it might feel too much like a 1980s TV theme. Huff and mixing engineer Jeff Braun gave them a version without that lick, but they ultimately decided not to fight its sing-along quality.
“It’s a lick that’s been played 100 times in pop music,” Huff says, “but it’s public domain and it’s hooky as hell.”
Brown’s performance with the band during the tracking session had all the energy they needed for the final recording, and that’s the vocal that appears on “Woman,” logged at No. 18 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs dated March 28 and at No. 30 on the parallel Country Airplay list. Its chart performance confirms the decision to make it a single, and feeds Brown’s reinvigoration.
“This,” he says, “is a no brainer.”
