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Kevin Powers and Shaboozey Turn a Classic Country Tale Into “Move On”
Kevin Powers teams with Shaboozey on "Move On," a folk-country single written across Nashville and California, now at No. 49 on Country Airplay.
Kevin Powers released “Move On,” a folk-leaning country single featuring Shaboozey, on American Dogwood in tandem with Empire in September. The song was sent to country radio via PlayMPE on March 31 and sits at No. 49 on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart dated May 9 in its third week.
The song revisits a long-running country archetype: the man left behind while a woman chases a bigger life in a coastal city. That storyline has shown up in recordings by George Jones & Tammy Wynette (“Southern California”), David Frizzell & Shelly West (“You’re the Reason God Made Oklahoma”), Dan Seals (“Everything That Glitters (Is Not Gold)”) and Randy Travis (“It’s Just a Matter of Time”). More recently, Morgan Wallen folded a similar thread into “More Than My Hometown.”
Writing and recording
The first phase of “Move On” began in June 2025. Powers, Alex Cabrera and David Ray gathered at songwriter-producer Serg Sanchez’s Nashville home to chase ideas. After roughly three hours, Powers landed on the hook: “Who taught you how to move on.” Ray called the title “such a cool, relatable concept for a song.”
Sanchez and Cabrera built a repeating four-chord pattern. Powers matched the hook to a descending melody that framed the chorus and added a winding top line mid-chorus to shift the phrasing. “We just wanted a cool B-section for that hook to make it feel fresh and new,” Powers says. “Anything,” Ray adds, “to keep the listener listening.”
The chorus arrived quickly and the opening verse came together “in eight minutes, maybe,” Powers says.
After that initial burst the writers paused to let the song marinate. “You don’t just throw anything in the background of a Mona Lisa,” Ray says. “If you feel like you’ve got something good, you know, it’s like, ‘Hey, let’s really dig into this thing and settle out the way it needs to be. Let’s not rush through this thing and feel like we left with something mediocre.’”
Weeks later Powers was in California at the studio of writer-producer Sean Cook to write with Whit Kane. The hook stayed, but the underlying chords needed work. An earlier jazzy guitar bed was replaced when Jake Torrey suggested a simpler four-chord passage that leaned toward California country-rock. Cook had invited Shaboozey to the session; he arrived, heard the demo and asked to jump in. “It stuck with me right away,” Shaboozey says.
Shaboozey freestyled the second verse in the studio, writing lines about the protagonist’s loneliness—”sleeping on a mattress as cold as you.” “I freestyled that verse,” Shaboozey says. “I had Sean just loop the production and I went line by line ’til the right words showed up. Honestly, it all came together real naturally and that’s usually how the best records get made.” Kane estimates that verse took “probably written in the span of, I’d say, 30 minutes. Maybe an hour, if you counted us going outside and getting some sun.”
Powers wrote an atypical bridge that dips lower than the rest of the tune before rising again. He framed it with the question “Who do you see when you close your eyes?” Powers calls the bridge his favorite part. “Wasn’t too much second guessing on that song, until that bridge,” he says. “I was like, ‘Is this too simple and plain?’ But they’re like, ‘No, it works.’”
The group added gang vocals to give the track a sunnier, communal feel that offsets the narrator’s sadness. “The contrast of a timeless song is either you got a really sad track and somebody saying something really happy, or you got a really happy track and somebody saying something pretty depressing,” Kane says. “Even though what we’re saying is extremely sad and we’re kind of lost, we’re making really fun music about it, which can be a light for someone that’s going through that same thing.”
Cook played bass and several stringed instruments on the record. He brought in steel guitarist Smith Curry and fiddler Clayton Penrose-Whitmore for country color, and hired his brother Ryan Cook for drums. Powers heard a subtle Mick Fleetwood touch in the drum fills. “I remember being like, ‘That sounds like ‘Dreams,’ by Fleetwood Mac,’” he says. “Sean’s like, ‘Yeah, I think that’s the point.’”
Shaboozey subsequently signed Powers to his American Dogwood label. The label released “Move On” with Empire in September, and servied the single to country radio on March 31 via PlayMPE. The track is listed at No. 49 on the Country Airplay chart dated May 9 in its third week.
On Powers, Shaboozey says: “He’s got an undeniable tone to him — real edge in the way he comes across sonically, something you don’t hear every day. He’s one of the most talented writers I’ve been around, no question. So when it came time to build this thing out, there wasn’t a better first artist to bring into the fold.”
