Hunter Flynn’s latest single, “You, Not Me,” released this month on Big Machine Records, opens with the kind of swamp-bottom blues that sounds like it was recorded somewhere south of anywhere in particular — cottonmouth imagery, murky water, an antagonist with a concealed knife. Flynn, a Pulaski County, Kentucky singer-songwriter who calls his work “Appalachian Soul,” put it plainly: “They can’t all be love songs. It felt good to take a bad situation I’d found myself in and turn it into this funky tune.” He brings the Back to My Roots Tour to Empire Underground in Albany on Thursday, October 22, at 8 p.m.
About the Show
The Back to My Roots Tour is a 36-date run from October through December, crossing the South, Northeast, and Midwest. Flynn has described it as a celebration of his Appalachian heritage: the stories, people, and places at the root of his music. It comes at a genuine hinge point. Flynn performed his first gig in February 2022, following a 2021 car accident that redirected him out of a biomedical sciences track and into art and then music. He came to it as a visual artist first, drawing charcoal portraits, before the songs arrived. By 2023, he had released a debut EP, Appalachian Soul, and was named Featured Artist at the Master Musicians Festival in Somerset, Kentucky. In 2025, the Kentucky Music Hall of Fame named him Artist in Residence. This year brought a deal with Big Machine Records and Nashville Harbor Records & Entertainment, a set at AMERICANAFEST 2026 in Nashville, and select opening slots for the Turnpike Troubadours.
The pre-album singles — “Wasted Day,” “Robbing A Bank,” “Dreams Keep Dying,” and the new “You, Not Me” — map the range of what Flynn is working toward, from a hungover-morning country vignette to swampy Southern blues. “Wasted Day,” the first of them, was produced by David Ferguson, whose credits include John Prine, Sturgill Simpson, and Tyler Childers, and features Sierra Hull on mandolin and Stuart Duncan on fiddle. A debut album is expected later in 2026. Flynn has shared stages with Zach Top, Wyatt Flores, and Megan Moroney, among others; the Albany show is his own headlining night, with no support acts listed for this date.
Venue & Logistics
Empire Underground, on North Pearl Street in Albany, is a 500-capacity club in the Capital Region: close enough for the fiddle and pedal steel to carry, small enough that the Appalachian specificity in Flynn’s songwriting has somewhere to land. Show time is 8 p.m.
Tickets
No ticket price was available from sources at the time of publication. Tickets are on sale now. Buy tickets