Just like he was bound to get into music, Jordan Davis was pretty much destined to be a sportsman. All his life, he’s been surrounded by people who put a real high value on those things.
Down in Louisiana, where he’s from, his father played guitar and sang in his spare time, and his mom played piano in church on Sundays. An uncle of his was an established songwriter in country music, too, so it doesn’t seem like a big surprise that Davis and his older brother, Jacob, would eventually set out for Nashville.
The same goes for his love of the outdoors, which started with regular family trips to a hunting camp a couple hours’ drive from his hometown of Shreveport. Unlike Middle Tennessee, where he’s lived for the past 13 years, northern Louisiana wasn’t the most bountiful area for whitetails.
Those early experiences could be frustrating, but they led him directly to what is absolutely his favorite kind of hunting.
Louisiana Roots
“One morning when we were deer hunting, we weren’t seeing any deer, but we did see probably a hundred wood ducks come and land on this little slough that was nearby,” Davis recalls. “My dad said, ‘You know what? We might want to figure out how to shoot some of these wood ducks.’”
They soon bought some decoys and duck calls, and before long, they had some success. Things got real for Davis on a trip farther south around Lake Charles.
“I had a buddy of mine take me down to a place in south Louisiana called Mallard Memories,” he says. “That’s where I killed my first mallard, and I think I was in the seventh grade. To get a big-bodied duck after years of shooting mergansers, teal and wood ducks was pretty special, and that’s still what I go after today.”
Lessons Along the Way
The 37-year-old Davis seems like a guy who learns from his experiences and builds on them. In fact, his new collection of songs, which is his third album, is titled Learn the Hard Way. It could easily be a reference to the several years of rejection he faced on his tough path to becoming a multi-platinum recording artist.
Those early years in Nashville were some lean ones. For a time, he watched others hit the big time as he scuffled along as a bartender, busboy and ran a weed trimmer with a landscaping crew.
Davis says he didn’t always set out to be a performing artist, though in retrospect it seems like an obvious career choice given his family history. He says that playing guitar and singing were such an everyday part of his life growing up that he just never looked at it as something he could do for a living.
Out of high school, he went off to Louisiana State University, studying environmental science.
“It made my mom happy, that’s about the extent of it,” he said years later in a TV interview. “But erosion control and saltwater contamination don’t find their way into country music songwriting a lot.”
Instead, Davis, as a lyricist, tends to draw from his own life and the emotions he feels, not just as a lover of the outdoors but also as a devoted husband and father of four young children.
Fans respond warmly to the relatable, heartfelt messages in songs like “What My World Spins Around,” “Next Thing You Know,” “Buy Dirt,” “Take it from Me” and “Slow Dance in a Parking Lot.”
From the new album, his gentle duet with Carly Pearce, “Mess with Missing You,” goes down smoothly, while the edginess of “Good Gone Bad” might surprise some listeners. His fiery but playful pairing with standout guitarist and vocalist Marcus King is a swampy ode to his home state called “Louisiana Stick.”
Davis says he worked hard this time around to give his fans something that sounds fresh and clearly shows off his musical roots and influences.
“I didn’t want to just talk about who I grew up listening to,” he says, “but I actually wanted to show it through the songwriting and the production. When you’re coming up on your third full-length album, there’s a choice you can make: You can follow the patterns set out on the first two, or you can try to do something different.
"I wanted to make sure that somebody who’s been with us since the first song we ever released isn’t going to be able to say, ‘Oh, it sounds like the last record.’ That’s my biggest fear when it comes to making albums.”
A Season for Touring — and Waterfowl
Now that fall is here, Davis will surely want to be in the woods with the waterfowl, but his duties as a touring artist call for the time being.
He and his band will be doing shows in the United States through the end of October, and their schedule includes performances at famous venues like the Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado, Radio City Music Hall in New York City and the Greek Theater in Los Angeles.
They’ll then have some downtime before heading overseas in February for a European tour that includes stops in Belfast, Glasgow, Zurich and Manchester, as well as London’s OVO Wembley Arena, which is adjacent to Wembley Stadium.
It won’t be his first time performing outside the United States—he also toured the United Kingdom in 2024 and was the opener on Luke Combs’ stadium tour in New Zealand and Australia.
Along with the excitement of the big live shows, Davis also finds it rewarding to interact with fans. He considers it a privilege and a blessing when they approach him or reach out to him with an online message to tell him how much a particular song means to them.
And it’s not always one of his big smash-hit songs, he says. Sometimes it’s a lesser-known album cut or maybe a song that reached them in a roundabout way. (Often, he says, it’s “Fishin’ Hole,” which was inspired by the many days he spent fishing with his grandfather on Toledo Bend Reservoir in Texas.)
“It’s why you write songs,” he says. “There’s no better honor than to get to do that and hopefully have a positive impact on the people who are listening to these songs.”
During that break for the holidays before going across the Atlantic for the next run of shows, Davis will have time to spend with his wife, Kristen, and their kids: Eloise, Locklan, Elijah and Sadie. It’s also the time of year to indulge in his number-one passion outside of music.
“I think shooting mallards in flooded timber will always be my favorite style of hunting,” he says. “We hunt a lot in Arkansas, and we also have a place in west Tennessee that has a couple of timber holes.
There’s just something really special about being outside with the beauty of what God created with people you love. There’s just nothing better.”
For more on Jordan Davis’ latest album, tour dates and more, visit jordandavisofficial.com and check out our special Digital Cover Exclusive.
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