Don’t Judge Tyler Hubbard by His Florida Georgia Line Days

Ten years ago this week, Tyler Hubbard barreled into a Brazilian steakhouse inside the Hard Rock Hotel in Cancun, Mexico, dropped himself into a chair at a dinner table, and did his best to appear sober.

It didn’t work.

I was there to do an interview for Country Weekly magazine (RIP) with Hubbard and his Florida Georgia Line bandmate Brian Kelley, but a long day’s video shoot for what Hubbard says was FGL’s most expensive video ever, “Get Your Shine On,” and too many post-shoot drinks left the singer, then only 25, far from interview-ready. His handlers shooed him out of the room, forced him to eat something, and commanded he go for a walk around the property. Florida Georgia Line had a beachside show to play in a few hours for hotel VIPs and Hubbard had to deliver. Somehow, he did.

“We pulled off the show that night. Someone gave me a roll or bread and said take three laps around the resort and come back. I remember thinking, ‘Am I really that messed up right now?’” Hubbard says today. “I guess I liked to put myself to the challenge at the time.”

That Hubbard is far different from the one sitting across from me on this January morning in Nashville. Dressed in a blaze-orange Filson hat and a camo pullover, Hubbard is now 35, clear-eyed, and speaks with a measured thoughtfulness. He’s also a solo artist who dropped his self-titled debut album this week, putting a capstone on his time with Florida Georgia Line and introducing himself to country music fans under his own name.

Last August, Hubbard and Kelley played their final concert as Florida Georgia Line on the inauspicious stage of the Minnesota State Fair. The sleeveless kings of the “Bro Country” era, with monster radio hits like “Cruise,” “Round Here,” and “Sun Daze,” FGL spent the better part of the past two years denying they were breaking up while limping along to the inevitable. Rumors of discord between Hubbard and Kelley, a lot of it attributed to differing politics and social media squabbles shadowed the duo. Hubbard doesn’t fully dismiss those circumstances as a factor in the FGL split, but he ultimately blames the breakup on something that has vexed bands since time immemorial: solo aspirations.

“I’d be naïve to say it had nothing to do with differences of opinion and difference of geographic location and nothing to do with social media, but the decision would have been the same, regardless,” Hubbard says. “BK came to me and said this is what I’m doing. He initiated the solo thing and asked for my support. I told BK I want you to do what you need to do to make you happy, and I’ll figure out what I’m doing after that…. But I wasn’t willing to continue making FGL records and go sign another FGL deal if we were going to do solo stuff. I didn’t have the capacity for both.”

With Kelley committed to a solo career, the die had been cast: Florida Georgia Line would be dissolving, amicably. Hubbard thought he’d focus on songwriting and maybe “hop on a song” as a featured artist, like he did with “Undivided,” the ode to unity he wrote for Tim McGraw and performed during President Biden’s inauguration TV special. But the decision to keep the impending breakup of FGL a secret rubbed him wrong and helped feed the gossipy drama that consumed the duo’s final act.

“Here’s the bad part,” Hubbard says, shifting in his seat. “Because it was [Kelley] who initiated it and he didn’t want to be super direct with the fans about what was going on — because it would have meant [the breakup] was really happening — we chose to not overshare and really not disclose anything at all. I felt like it wasn’t my story to tell and so I didn’t, and I stayed silent, which is really hard for me. But that teed everyone up to create their own narratives. In the polarizing culture we were in, it was easy to throw it on politics, it was easy to throw it on ‘our wives aren’t getting along,’ or unfollows. But, dude, do you really think we’re going to let our whole organization crumble because of some Instagram post?”

Eventually, Hubbard says he felt the same call of a solo career as his former bandmate and set about reinventing himself. A little over a month after Florida Georgia Line’s last concert, he was onstage at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena opening Keith Urban’s The Speed of Now Tour. It was a far cry from the headlining shows that Hubbard played with Kelley: There were no catwalks, no pyro, no trampolines, no onstage Fireball shots. Instead, Hubbard and his band squeezed in around Urban’s draped-off gear, trying to make a connection with an audience who maybe kinda sorta recognized the guy onstage, even if they didn’t yet know solo cuts like “I’m the Only One” or “Everybody Needs a Bar.” Watching Hubbard work to win over the crowd was to witness an exercise in humility — something not often used to describe FGL at the height of their fame.

“When I came out onstage, it was humbling,” Hubbard says. “There were people at the Keith shows who were connecting the dots during the show. I’d watch it firsthand. The first three or four songs, I was seeing some people going, ‘Where do I know this guy from?’ It was a reminder that it may be a year or even longer until all the lights have turned on for everyone.”

But then he’d play “Cruise” and an arena-wide revelation occurred, followed quickly by his first solo Number One, “5 Foot 9,” a song Hubbard wrote about his wife of nearly eight years, Hayley, with Chase McGill and Jaren Johnston.

Johnston, a master of Music Row songwriting and the singer-guitarist of Nashville heroes the Cadillac Three, has known Hubbard since 2011 and toured with Florida Georgia Line during the duo’s humble van-and-trailer days. “It said ‘Tyler Hubbard Detailing’ on the trailer, with his cell phone number on it,” Johnston laughs. Since then, he’s watched Hubbard mature from “hillbilly rock star” living fame to the hilt to sage father and husband. “You talk to him in 2011 and you talk to him now and you’re like, ‘This must be the dude’s older brother.’”

“I had zero responsibilities and not much to lose,” Hubbard admits. “But I’ve done personal work, emotional work, mental work, spiritual work.”

When Johnston’s father passed last year, Hubbard — who, at just 20, watched his own father die in a helicopter crash in their backyard — was there to console him and keep him afloat.

“Tyler would leave me messages, saying he loved me and was thinking about me, and that shit goes a long way,” Johnston says. “Because most people, when they know a friend or acquaintance in the music business who is grieving, run away from that. That’s the last thing people want to get involved with.”

Sixteen years later, the loss of Hubbard’s father remains fresh, but he chooses to use the lingering grief as inspiration. “In a way, I am thankful for the perspective I’ve been given,” he says. He pays tribute to his dad in the new song “Miss My Daddy,” a shockingly vulnerable portrait of a man who, halfway into his thirties, still vividly mourns his father’s absence. (Hearing him sing, “I just miss my daddy, I just miss my dad,” will wreck you.) It’s the type of hyper-personal song that Hubbard might not have written while in Florida Georgia Line.

“They were writing ‘Cruise’ and ‘Round Here’ and all these hits, but there wasn’t as much heart as in what he’s writing these days,” Johnston, a frequent co-writer, says. “He’s thinking about it more and he cares more.”

The 18-track Tyler Hubbard doesn’t try to fully distance Hubbard from his Florida Georgia Line past however. Songs like “Out This Way” and “Small Town Me” give “Round Here” vibes, while “Everybody Needs a Bar” is a blow-off-steam party song. In other words, you can take the Georgia out of Florida Georgia Line but you can’t take the FGL out of Hubbard. “I am still half of FGL,” he says.

It’s worth pointing out too that, back in 2013, Hubbard made good on the Cancun interview, showing up bright and early to breakfast the next morning to answer questions about the pressure Florida Georgia Line felt to follow up the massive success of “Cruise.” He probably couldn’t have predicted that, a decade later, he’d be fielding questions about the larger ramifications of his band breaking up. Like what happens to FGL House, the duo’s Nashville bar?

“It’s still up and running and nothing has changed there,” Hubbard says. “I guess it’s a piece of history now. But I’m proud of it — and we still sell a lot of cheeseburgers.”