Three years ago this week, Hardy was on his way back from a concert in Bristol, Tennessee, when his tour bus careened off the road and rolled down an embankment. The country singer, his photographer, his then-tour manager, and bus driver were all flung about the cabin and seriously injured.
Hardy has talked about the early morning hours of Oct. 2, 2022, in bits and pieces in the past, but on this week’s episode of Rolling Stone’s Nashville Now podcast, he recounts in terrifying detail what happened just a few miles outside of Nashville.
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According to Hardy, he and his photographer were listening to Kendrick Lamar and FaceTiming with Morgan Wallen, Hardy’s longtime friend, when his bus driver pulled over to use the bus’s bathroom. Something didn’t seem right to Hardy, so he asked his driver how he felt when he emerged.
“I said, ‘You good?’ And he said, ‘yep,’ and I said, ‘How much longer do we have?’ And he said, ‘Yep,’” Hardy recalls. “We got about two more miles down the road, and he had either an aneurysm or seizure while driving and we barreled off the side of the road. The bus flipped over three times.”
Hardy says all four were knocked unconscious and when he came to, he was on the ceiling of the bus, which was now upside-down. “It went from being a bus to a movie set, like a bomb went off,” he says. “I crawled out of the front windshield, which was busted open… The bus had gone so far down the hill that you couldn’t see it from the highway. So, all these trucks and cars were flying by and they couldn’t see us. I had a black hoodie with a big white circle on it and all I could think to do is take that hoodie off and try to wave people down. I did that for about 30 minutes and I could not get somebody to stop.”
Hardy, in shock, also lost his glasses and was unable to see. He says he was hesitant to return to the bus without first finding help. “Part of me was really scared to go back in there ‘cause I thought Tanner was dead,” he says.
While all four men survived the accident, each was severely injured. Hardy fractured his back and gashed open his head, but it was nearly even worse. “When I woke up, the bus windows are long like this, and my head was underneath the top of the panel,” he recalls. “If we would have slid another foot, it’d have cut my head off.”
Hardy, who just released his new album Country! Country! talks about the bus accident and how it affected his mental health on Nashville Now, along with his thoughts on how his friend and collaborator Morgan Wallen was treated for his missteps, and why he loves Sleep Token. Check out the complete episode below.
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.
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