Drew Gregory pays tribute to country life with One for the Road​on February 13, 2025 at 1:16 pm

On the video for Drew Gregory’s song One for the Road, the action takes place on a dirt road by his family farm near Standard.

Filmed in late August, it has him driving his pickup truck down the road surrounded by golden farmers’ fields as the sun sets. At one point, the sign welcoming people to Standard, Alta., flashes on screen.

Gregory’s paternal grandparents initially owned the farm. They passed it down to his father and, last year, Gregory and his family took it over. In the nostalgia-fuelled song, Gregory bemoans the march of progress that will soon see the road paved. It has some stock small-town and rural  imagery – the dust on the tailgates, the bullet holes in the stop signs – and the singer says, “They’re about to change the things that make it country.”

All in all, it sounds like it sprang directly from Gregory’s life. On the phone from the farm, Gregory doesn’t deny it has autobiographical elements. But it’s also the only song on the new EP, also called One for the Road, that he had no part in writing.

Gregory found the song in 2019 on one of his many trips to Nashville. As with many tunes up for grabs in Music City, it was penned by professional songsmiths who may or may not have any experience barrelling down rural roads in pickup trucks. Matt Alderman, Brian Bunn and Jacob Powell wrote the song years ago and Gregory said it seemed to “fall through the cracks.”

“None of the big guys had ever cut it and we were very fortunate for that,” Gregory says.

It was one of the first songs that Gregory pitched to Bobby Wills after singing with the Calgarian’s label, Willing Records, in 2023.

It is just the way that mainstream country works. While Gregory has been writing tunes since he was a teenager, he says he will also pore over between 100 to 150 of the thousands of radio-ready songs the Nashville machine spits out whenever he is set to make a record. This one not only spoke to him, it seemed custom-made for him.

“I always had the song in the back of my head because every line of it is a lot about how I grew up,” Gregory says. “There’s a road that is about three miles to town and I could drive that road blindfolded just about because so much of life happens on that road when you grow up in the country. It really struck me.”

The six-song EP, which will come out Feb. 21 alongside the video for the title track, is the result of Wills and Gregory’s desire to make a record with true honky-tonk leanings. Certainly, all six of the songs sound like they could easily find a place on mainstream country radio. The opening track, This Side of the Dirt is full of countryfied seize-the-day philosophizing but grounded by some serious twang. Neon Time, an obligatory drinking song, is a stately mid-tempo country-rock ballad. A bonus track, Stuck, is an invigorating two-stepping, hand-clapping ode to home and the “hayseed life” that is powered by banjo and some serious hard-rock shredding.