Fancy Hagood has traveled a long, winding road to the release of his debut album. A fixture in both Nashville and Los Angeles, the singer-songwriter first came to prominence in 2015 with the pop hits “Goodbye” and “Boys Like You” (featuring Ariana Grande and Meghan Trainor), quickly finding that a genre-obsessed music industry didn’t know what to do with him and his boundary-blurring music. “I could probably burst into tears talking about this,” Hagood tells Apple Music. “I moved to Nashville in 2009 with a vision and this idea for myself, and pretty much every year since then, I've been telling people, ‘Music's coming. I have an album.’ But I was never able to create what I felt like is fully a representation of who I am as a person and who I am as a creator.” Over a decade later, Hagood can finally make good on that promise. Southern Curiosity is a journey into Hagood’s Technicolor world, centering his identity as a Southern queer man and bringing all of his influences—country, Top 40, classic Southern rock, and more—together in endlessly listenable fashion. Below, Hagood walks Apple Music through several of Southern Curiosity’s key tracks. “Love Again” “When I'm creating, I love to pretend I'm in a music video, and I know that's probably so cheesy, but I was just seeing this video happening of someone literally being in a storm and comparing it to love. I had been at breakfast with a friend and she was like in the middle of telling me something and all of a sudden, next thing I knew, she was like, ‘Hello, Fancy?’ And I realized that I had been staring at a guy from across the room for like probably three minutes. And I was like, ‘I'm so sorry. I was over there getting married.’ So ‘Love Again’ is just that journey of finding love every day, over and over again.” “Mr. Atlanta” “I had just met this guy in Atlanta and it was this weird situation where I just completely spoke it into existence. I was literally at a bar with a friend and we were talking about different names and she said a guy's name, and I was like, ‘Oh, that sounds so country, I like that. I want to get a country guy like that, that drives a truck, and like, I don't know, maybe he's from Alabama.’ We were joking about that, and then literally weeks later, I was in Atlanta at a Troye Sivan concert with some friends and met this guy through a friend. He had that name, and then we ended up going to a party together and I was walking to his car and he walked up to this big truck and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I've spoken you into existence.’ Even though things with Mr. Atlanta did not pan out, I feel like each of these moments from past dating experiences led me to that moment to be prepared and to be ready for that chapter of my story and chapter of love. And all of those stories are true.” “Forest” “‘Forest’ is honestly about a friend of mine who is married to a woman. It's just a story that, here in the South, I hear all the time and run into a lot with men who are just not able to accept themselves or be themselves. That song is just an anthem for self-acceptance and self-love, and showing up for yourself and being able to love yourself and love others and be kind. I know when I was closeted in high school, I just wanted someone to tell me it was okay, and that I'm okay.” “Good Man” “It's one of the songs on the album that's just completely, 100 percent me. And I wrote it because—and I don't know if this is reflected on Southern Curiosity as an album—but it's really easy for me to write a sad song. I started becoming paranoid that if I was writing all these heartbreaking songs and all of these songs were coming from a place of experience, was I just manifesting this heartbreak? So I wanted to write a song that spoke to what I actually wanted to manifest, something I'm actually looking for. ‘Good Man,’ for me, is just my outward manifestation into this world of the kind of man not only I want to find, but the kind of man I want to be.” “Southern Curiosity” “I don't think people think of me and immediately think Southern rock, but I grew up on that. I grew up in Arkansas, and my journey in this industry has always been people telling me I don't know who I am. Because in Los Angeles I'm too twangy: ‘You sound country. Oh, you're a Nashville songwriter.’ And then in Nashville, because I was gay, it's always been confusing for people, because how could a gay man be a country star? I know exactly who I am. I know exactly where I'm from. So I wanted to write a song that personified both aspects of me and celebrated both aspects of who I am, because I know that being Southern and being queer isn't mutually exclusive.”