Charlie Worsham is one of Nashville’s most inventive country artists, with serious songwriting chops, virtuosic guitar skills, and a voice that can slide effortlessly between a croon and a twang. But because Nashville isn’t always a town that rewards talent, Worsham’s excellent releases Rubberband (2013) and Beginning of Things (2017) both flew beneath the radar upon release. On the six-song Sugarcane EP, Worsham makes peace with the frustration he experienced earlier in his career on the empowering “For the Love,” cathartic “Fist Through This Town,” and the title track. “I could put my anger down, which was also putting my fear down,” Worsham tells Apple Music. “But then I picked up the righteous indignation of people I love not getting a fair shake. If, say, something was going on in my wife's life or career or whatever that I didn't think was fair, I now could be angry for the people I love, and that's a whole different thing.” Below, Worsham walks Apple Music through each of Sugarcane’s tracks. “Sugarcane” “It was important to me to name the EP after that song, because I feel like the whole point of these six songs is to catch people up on where I've been since they last saw me. I found myself; I got married; now I'm a dad. But most importantly, I've let go of that clenched-fist mindset. And in that journey, there is the low point, the ‘fist through this town,’ which we'll get to, but the hero has slayed his dragon and he's chilling on the beach, and he has won the battle.” “For the Love” “It's actually a song that I wrote in 2017, in which I was right back where I was in 2014. It was April or May of that year, my album Beginning of Things was released, and it was pretty much, commercially speaking, a DOA album. The week the album was released, my day-to-day manager quit. My publisher fired me, but I owed my publisher 10 copyrights before I could even get out of my contract and try to get a new pub deal, which I was depending on to pay rent. I'm literally writing just so that I can get out of a pub deal and go get another pub deal. Jay [Joyce] turned it into a fist-pumper. And let me get some of that Skynyrd influence on my guitar. So, ‘For the Love’ is that touchdown for me, that memento, like reminding me why I do this.” “Half Drunk” “This was a song that was written over Zoom, and the hook of the song—the whole ‘half drunk, half joking, half crazy’ thing—is from my wife and I binge-watching Twin Peaks. The mechanic character in the older episodes, who's got the kind of crazy wife, he's explaining to one of the other characters, ‘I don't know, I was kind of half drunk and half joking, I told her I loved her and dah dah dah.’” “Fist Through This Town” “I don't ever want to sound like the guy who's going, ‘Oh, poor pitiful me, I have to play music for a living.’ Because I'm living my dream, but I can't tell my story without telling the story of my dad, and without telling the story of my wife, and without telling the story of so many people that I know, because I think pretty much everybody I know dreams of something bigger. And in order to pursue that, you have to risk seasons of frustration. Even though that song kind of marks the low point—the battle with the dragon in my story, if you will—there's actually a lot of beauty in it, for me.” “Believe in Love” “There's the present, which I'm in right now, which is in love with my wife. And we've got so much coming at us, between juggling the craziness of a music career and a pandemic and a new baby, and all of that, but we're crushing it. And when we work through something, we come out the other side of it even stronger. And so I'm living that second verse right now. And I can see already into the future, the third verse, which is the future, where we're going to end up. We'll be in a cemetery, but our story will live on.” “Hang On to That” “I'm sitting at that pizza bar Lockeland Table with my dad. This is early on dating Kristen, and up until this point, you have to understand any relationship I got into was merely one side of a tug of war, the other side of a tug of war being this career that for all of my life I'd given everything to. So I go to my dad for some advice. And he said, ‘Man, whatever you do, hang on to that girl. Hang on to that girl.’”