When you’ve done something regrettable and you feel like there’s no fixing it, you might be inspired to take a minute to recollect your thoughts. If you have experience in poetry, you might be prompted to get your feelings out on paper, putting the emotions into prose, and eventually, if you’re a musician, you’ll want to put pen to paper, and paper to music — that’s the genesis of this latest song from the great Ricky Forest, titled “Honey Please Come Home.” From the title, it’s clearly a song about past regrets and immense weight to bear emotionally, but the song isn’t as dour as one might expect. Forest’s charm comes out in the edit, and his knack for songwriting and the little details allows the single to tackle mature themes while still feeling like a genuine, upbeat country song.
“Honey Please Come Home” sees Ricky Forest delivering some of the year’s catchiest music in a way that only he could, his voice gliding across the single like a warm, defined blanket as the deep instrumental helps him bear his heart. The song comes across as a fairly traditional country piece, its instrumentation comprised of strings, guitar, piano, and drums, but the simplicity of the setup only adds to the single. Here’s a song trying to be itself first and foremost, with no dancing around what it actually is with a million bells and whistles. Ricky Forest is giving listeners him, upfront, no shenanigans, and that alone makes the song’s lyrics and message feel a hundred times more genuine than you might expect.
Ricky Forest’s anonymity makes investigating the future of his career pretty difficult, but after hearing the great “Honey Please Come Home,” I simply want more! There’s no official word on what’s next from the phenomenal indie country artist, but as of now this single is enough to scratch that throwback country music itch. It’s a real stab at the country music of twenty years ago, and it never feels like an attempt — it just is. There’s an understated bravado to the entire track and the fact that Forest never musically reaches a pinnacle breakdown, that the song ultimately just focuses on him hammering his point home with the fantastic chorus, is a fantastic touch from a songwriting perspective.
There’s plenty left on the record from Forest regarding his regrets and desires for change, but all in all, the single still feels like a catchy, remarkable piece of 2022 music history. It’s fresh but feels like a song we all loved when we were growing up, and it feels old-fashioned but keeps things sonically crisp and new in a way no other artists in the country music genre are doing today. The balance is all in the songwriting, and thankfully Ricky Forest is a master of prose. “Honey Please Come Home” has arrived just in time to take things home, giving listeners one last knockout country music hit for the New Year, and giving 2022 one more jewel in its musical crown.
Chadwick Easton
The music of Ricky Forest has been heard all over the world in partnership with the radio plugging services offered by Musik and Film Radio Promotions Division. Learn more https://musikandfilm.com