MAX ALAN - "Hundred Thousand Sunsets" - Sony Music Nashville

Every family has a kitchen table where the good stories get told. There's usually a deck of cards on it, a pitcher of sweet tea and somebody older talking about how things used to be. You don't really appreciate those afternoons until the chairs start emptying out. Max Alan's "Hundred Thousand Sunsets" is about exactly that feeling, and it's one of the best country ballads of the year. By the last chorus, you'll probably want to call your grandmother.

Alan didn't have to make any of it up. His fiancée's grandmother, Grammy to the family, is 90 and has severe Alzheimer's. "It's been very difficult for her family seeing their grandmother recognize them less and less each day," he says. For decades, Grammy and her three best friends, all of them named Pat, were simply "The Pats." They played cards and called each other to catch up well into their 90s. Then one of them died in the rocking chair she'd sat in her whole life. A minute before she went, she told her son, "I see my parents."

Plenty of writers would have built the whole song around that last line. Alan and co-writer Delaney Ramsdell are smarter than that. There's no diagnosis, no hospital room, not even a name. They give you three pictures of one woman and let the years in between do the talking.

First she's five-foot-five with raven-black hair, laughing in a rocking chair through an Appalachian August, sweet tea in the kitchen and dancing in the street. Fifteen years later she's looking in the mirror at a wife and a mama, lighting a candle and wiping the nostalgia from her eyes, apron strings tied tight. Then comes the sunset: ninety years of memories in that same chair, and the last thing she sees is herself as a girl again. It's a gentle rewrite of "I see my parents," and it might hit even harder than the real words, because by then you've watched her whole life go by.

"Growing up was like a hundred thousand sunsets run together."

Then there's that chorus. When you're young, Alan sings, Sundays last forever, and growing up was like "a hundred thousand sunsets run together." The line that really gets you is the next one: "You're everything you'll ever be all at once." If you've ever sat with someone who's losing their memory, you know exactly what that means. She's still the girl, the mama and the friend at the card table. She just can't get to all of them anymore. The song never spells it out, and it doesn't have to. The chorus comes around three times, and on the last pass it drops a word ("for worse or better") and circles back to "when you're young," like a family story you've heard a hundred times and still want to hear again.

Producers Ryan Levine and Brian Stanley, who also recorded and mixed the track at Mirrorwall Sound, had the good sense to leave it alone. An echoing acoustic guitar carries the song. Levine and Jon Solorzanzo split piano, Solorzanzo adds pedal steel, and Macahila Hinnenkamp's fiddle keeps the whole thing rooted in the mountains. The best part might be Ramsdell's harmony. She helped write these words, and you can hear that she knows exactly who they're about. Sam Moses mastered it at Moses Mastering, and it sounds warm and close, like it's playing in the next room.

Alan comes by this honestly. He grew up in southwest Pennsylvania's coal country and started writing poems in high school to win scholarships for college. His 2024 debut, Appalachian Lullaby, was recorded with his cousin in his childhood bedroom and took off online because of its lyrics and raw delivery. Since his recent track "Love When We Were Young," he's toured with Max McNown and Noah Rinker, played direct support on Dylan Gossett and Charles Wesley Godwin's co-headlining run, and spent the summer on the road with Josiah and the Bonnevilles, whom he'll rejoin later this year. Expect the rooms to get very quiet when he plays this one.

"Hundred Thousand Sunsets" is a small song about a long life, and it gets every detail right. It's the kind of song that ends up in a family group text with "this made me think of Grandma." Play it for someone you've known forever. Then go find your own Pats while there's still time for one more hand of cards.

(Review Written By: Dave Pierce)