HARDY Calls Tim McGraw Collaboration ‘A Bucket-List Moment’

For HARDY, checking off career milestones has been normal: chart-topping hits, sold-out tours, and winning major country music awards. But collaborating with Tim McGraw hits different. The hitmaker opened up to Billboard about working with the legendary artist on the new track, “McArthur.”

In case you missed it, country music fans went wild with theories after HARDY, McGraw, Morgan Wallen, and Eric Church all posted similar cryptic images on Instagram late last month.  

Come to find out, the posts were a hint at the musicians' collaborative song, “McArthur,” which dropped a few days later. The track follows four generations of farmers: McGraw as John McArthur, Church as Junior McArthur, HARDY as Jones McArthur, and Wallen as Hunter McArthur, the youngest. 

The verses paint a picture of generations of farmers working the land and how important it is to the family, and the tradition of passing it down to their sons: “My bloodline, it bled on this ground / Soon we all find that's where we're bound / And father time don’t leave anyone out / When you pass on, what you gonna pass down?”  

However, when it was Hunter’s turn to carry that legacy, he was faced with a tempting offer and considered selling the land instead: “I'm Hunter McArthur and the deal looks good / In eighteen months this’ll be a neighborhood / I got a million dollar line I could sign my name on.”  

In an interview with Billboard, HARDY shared how much it meant to him that McGraw said yes to the song after pitching to the country superstar many times over the years. “Tim, I just could not get him to bite on anything,” HARDY said. “And that’s what makes Tim Tim. He’s always had such amazing songs. He’s very picky, because he’s just got a career of phenomenal songs, and so I took that as like a challenge for me to get him to bite on something — and finally he did. So, it’s definitely a bucket-list moment for me.”  

Listen to the iconic song below.