*Ne-Yo is making his mark in Music City — and the welcome has been warmer than he ever anticipated.
The R&B veteran sat down for the April 22 episode of Rolling Stone’s “Nashville Now” podcast to discuss the country-influenced project he has been quietly building. When Ne-Yo first floated the idea of heading to Nashville, the response from those around him was rooted in skepticism.
“It came with all these warnings and all this fear that people were trying to put on me. ‘They’re not real accepting of anything outside of what they do over there. It’s cliquey, and if you don’t know this person or haven’t done this…’ I hate to admit it, but I came out here kind of expecting something like that,” Ne-Yo said, per PEOPLE.
What he encountered instead caught him off guard. “Every single person I’ve worked with out here has embraced what I’m trying to do with open arms,” Ne-Yo said, adding that collaborators have been genuinely curious about how his R&B sensibility will intersect with country.
“Everybody’s interested and intrigued about how I’m going to take what I do and what country music is and fuse them together. And everybody’s just been real receptive. So I’m waiting to meet whoever the hell it is that is going to be the bane of my Nashville experience,” he explained
His appreciation for country music runs deep — rooted in artists like Dolly Parton, Reba McEntire, Garth Brooks, and Clint Black. “I just fell in love with the storytelling elements of it. I fell in love with the cleverness of the lyric. The vulnerability of the lyric, like Dolly Parton’s ‘Jolene,’” he said. “She’s literally begging another woman not to steal her man,” he explained, adding that artists are now “too cool for a song like that nowadays.”
This is not Ne-Yo’s first connection to the genre. He previously collaborated with Tim McGraw on the 2012 track “She Is” and attended the CMA Awards last year.
Despite his enthusiasm, Ne-Yo is careful about how he frames his new direction. Speaking to The Tennessean in September 2025, he made his position clear: “I’m not a country artist. Given that this is my first official attempt at trying to naturally transition into creating something in the country lane, it’s disrespectful to call myself a country artist. My music, more than anything, is country-inspired.”
MORE NEWS ON EURWEB.COM: NE-YO Explains Why He Won’t Call His New Project a Country Album
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