“It’s like a time capsule,” Brad Cox tells Apple Music of his second album. “This is not a themed record, it’s a snapshot of my last three years. It’s experiences and stuff I’ve written that all fits together.” The Australian country artist writes relatable, melodic tracks that balance the good and the bad, the social and the internal, the partying and the heartbreak. My Mind’s Projection has plenty of fun, boozy sing-alongs, but there are just as many tender reflections on a relationship that didn’t work out. Below, Cox talks more about each track on the album. Hold Me Back “I wrote this with Joe Mungovan. Everyone fights the head noise and the inner demons, but some people are better at squashing it than others. It’s just acknowledging that everyone gets it and not letting it fuck with you.” Drinking Season “For me, the first day [of drinking season] is Christmas Eve. I used to work the harvest down in the Riverina before Christmas, and with Australia Day being 26th of January, I used to just find myself drunk for that entire time and set myself up for a hangover February.” Short Lived Love “I wrote it as a therapy session. For a few months after a breakup I was carrying on like an idiot, but after I wrote this, I realized it was dumb. I felt much better after writing it. For me, it reiterated that saying, ‘When one door closes, another one opens.’ I’m glad that door closed.” Remedy (feat. Adam Eckersley) “Working with Adam is such a pleasure. He’s a great friend of mine and such a talented guitar player and singer, so it was great to have him on there. The lyric ‘It’s hard to make money from singing, I’ll tell you that much for free’—I’m making money now, I’m not scraping the barrel, but for about ten years there I was rubbing cents together to make it happen, pulling into random farms and asking if I could do some work. That’s where that came from.” My Mind’s Projection “Basically, I wrote that song after I did a dumb thing and drove from Perth to Wagga without stopping, which was about 3700 kilometers. I hadn’t been to bed in a long time and I kind of started hallucinating and seeing some crazy things, and yeah. The song might not make sense, but it’s because I’m describing all the crazy things that I saw. It’s not safe at all. It was completely dumb and I’ll never do it again.” Wasted Time “I actually rewrote this with Jackson Besley, my bass player. He wrote this song about a different situation, but I really loved the concept so I went to him and said, ‘Man, I really wanna rejig that song and mold it into my own situation.’ When you’re heartbroken, you get sad for a while, then you start blaming different parties and people about why it all came to and end, and it’s just about all of that.” Thought I Knew Love “It’s a relatively new song. I wrote it in November [2019] in Nashville. It felt right to put the song on there after so many songs about that breakup. But when I found the right woman, it made it all clear and it turned out to be a great thing.” Give Me Tonight “It’s another Joe Mungovan cut. We were just talking about how we’ve all had nights on the booze and met the perfect woman, but you don’t really know if it’s going to go anywhere or whether you’ll ever see her again. We’ve all been there before.” I Keep Driving “This one, I wrote. The concept was that for so long, I scraped the barrel financially, living cover gig to cover gig, and spent so much time of my life driving a car by myself across the country. There were always days where you just wake up and go, ‘God, what am I doing?’ Always scraping the barrel, playing gigs for no money, driving into the next town, always making the decision to get back in the car and head to the next gig rather than throwing in the towel and going home.” Caught in a Noose by a Stranger “There’s not much to say about this one. It’s pretty self-explanatory. Someone said some horrible things about me, and I felt very betrayed.” I Still Want More “It’s about the same breakup. I was heaps more invested in the relationship than she was, and this song’s centered around questions like why she wouldn’t let me in on different aspects of her life, and everything that surrounded that.”