Before he released music as a performer, Redferrin (whose real name is Blake Redferrin) was racing dirt bikes and, behind the scenes, writing songs for other artists. But a friendship formed around two wheels rather than six strings changed everything.
Redferrin was off-road motorcycle buddies with Tyler Hubbard of Florida Georgia Line. That friendship grew into a working relationship when he mentioned he could write songs. Hubbard and Brian Kelley began mentoring him, and he soon found himself performing the music that he had written.
“I guess I’d been writing for about five years at that time, probably written six or 700 songs and only had about 20 cuts,” Redferrin recalled in an interview with Music Mayhem, opening up about his journey to country music success. “So the Florida Georgia Line boys were like, ‘Hey man, we’re going to start a record label. You got five or 600 songs sitting, why don’t you sing a few and see how it works? If you have fun with it, do it. And if you don’t, keep writing for other people.’ And I guess I just ended up getting a little lucky and had a lot of fun and somehow or another that snowballed into this.”
By “this,” Redferrin is referring to the rapidly growing career he has enjoyed thus far as a singer/songwriter, culminating in his debut full-length album, Been There, Done That, released this past June via Warner Records Nashville. The project follows the momentum of his sophomore 2025 EP, Some City, Somewhere, as well as his debut 2024 EP, Old No. 7, which spawned viral hits “Just Like Johnny” and “Jack and Diet Coke,” which amassed 330 million streams and over 160 million streams, respectively.
Those two songs helped shift Redferrin’s perspective.
Reflecting on his success up to this point, he says, “I’ve always been pretty tough on myself, and I grew up racing dirt bikes, so in that world, it might be a 20-race series. So just because you win once doesn’t mean you win the whole thing. I feel like once I had a second song start performing well, that’s when I thought I might really have a fight and a chance to compete a little bit in this world because for a while it was really just for me and just expression.
“After ‘Jack and Diet Coke,’ it really gave me the confidence to keep pushing. And then when ‘Just Like Johnny’ finally broke, I felt like there must be something here because lightning doesn’t usually strike twice in the same spot,” he added. “So I felt pretty thankful to have two songs do that well. And I remember when I started, I was just like, ‘I can’t wait to see 100,000 streams one day. That’ll be cool to have six digits.’ And then once you get that, it’s like, ‘Well, maybe it’ll hit a million.’ And to hear a number like 500 million, half a billion is insane to me.”
With the momentum of his previous projects, Redferrin found his evolution in Been There, Done That, a project that he spent roughly 14 months shaping and reshaping, with no willingness to settle.
“I just wanted to make sure the next thing I put out after Old Number Seven was the best songwriting I thought I’d ever done,” he shared. “… I kept thinking I was done with it and then I would write something else and beat it. And I felt like the last few years have been a lot of growth just as a human, just figuring out who I am, had some wins, had some bigger losses and just kind of poured all that into it.”
Redferrin says the theme for Been There, Done That emerged as heartbreak, bad decisions, and the familiar temptation to return to something you already know isn’t good for you.
“The general theme of it was that rotating toxic love circle or heartbreak, triumph, repeat,” he says before sharing how the title of the project came about. “So we were just talking about it, and somebody said, ‘been there, done that’ in the room. I had the album named something totally different. And then we wrote that song and added it a week before it came out, and that ended up being our title track. So I feel like it’s one of those things you hear people say a lot and it’s super relatable, but I’d never heard a song like that yet. So pretty good summary for what that whole project was about, I’d say.”
One of the album’s most personal moments is “Heart of Break,” written alongside Jaxson Free and Jordan Schmidt. The track is a song born from a relationship Redferrin didn’t want to see end.
“I would say one of the more personal ones there,” Redferrin shared. “That was another one that came up in conversation. It’s at the end of a relationship that I hated to see fail. It was just not the right time for it.”
While talking about the breakup during a songwriting session, he casually said, “Yeah, I ought to give her heart a break. I mean, it’s hurting us both trying to make it work and not being able to.”
The songwriters in the room immediately recognized the potential in the phrase. About 30 minutes later, he said, they had turned his offhand comment into the foundation of a song. The finished track is intentionally stripped back, with the vocals carrying much of the emotion.
“And man, I don’t think I’ve sung one like I’m in it more in a long time,” Redferrin says.
Not every song on the album came from heartbreak. “If I Was California” grew out of Redferrin’s longstanding fascination with the West Coast — and one particular woman who wasn’t exactly sold on country music. “I’ve always had a West Coast problem,” he says with a laugh. “I don’t know what it is about California girls, but they got me wrapped around their fingers.”
He explained that the woman he was seeing at the time didn’t want to move to Nashville. She liked Redferrin, but she wasn’t particularly interested in the country lifestyle. “I was like, ‘Well, if I was California, you’d love me.’ And I wrote that down,” Redferrin says.
The idea eventually became the song.
Redferrin shares his long-admired love for Alan Jackson’s “Chattahoochee,” explaining that he wanted to create his own version of that kind of song with a Redferrin twist.
“I felt like I needed a ‘Chattahoochee’ of my own. That’s what we turned up with,” he says of “If I Was California.”
For Redferrin, country has never meant rejecting everything outside of it. His own interests have always been broader — from dirt bikes to rap music to city life.
“Even my redneck friends love to go to a city and have a nice dinner or go do something fun,” he says. “It ain’t like we’re anti-city.”
That willingness to cross boundaries also explains “Palm Trees,” his collaboration with rapper Wiz Khalifa. An odd pairing, perhaps. But for Redferrin, the connection made perfect sense. In fact, he had once imagined becoming a rapper himself, although there was one problem.
“I was just too country to have my accent,” he jokes. “Everything sounded like a country song.”
Wiz had been one of the artists he admired from the rap world, alongside the late Mac Miller.
Redferrin and Wiz had been friends for several years and had exchanged songs back and forth without quite finding the right collaboration. Then, while Redferrin was in Calabasas filming the “If I Was California” video, Wiz reached out.
They finally got into a room together, and the chemistry clicked. However, there was just one surprise waiting for him in the studio.
“Wiz walks into the session, and he’s like, ‘We’re live streaming for 30,000 people on Twitch right now,’” Redferrin recalls.
Normally private in the writing room, Redferrin suddenly found himself writing in front of thousands of people.
“I can’t say anything whack today,” he remembers thinking. “I got to show my best.”
Instead, the pressure seemed to break the ice.
“It kind of cracked the shell right away and just got us straight to writing a good song because we knew if we didn’t, there were plenty of people to watch us write a bad one,” he says. “That was a bucket list cut for me.”
If there is one thing Redferrin has learned since becoming an artist, it’s that sometimes the best stories happen when you say yes to something that sounds completely ridiculous. That was certainly the case with the music video for “Crazy,” the only song on Been There, Done That that he didn’t write.
“I wish I wrote that song,” he admits.
But the music video presented a different challenge.
“What if I learned how to ride a bull for this video?” he suggested.
The joke quickly became a plan.
With help from Monster Energy, Redferrin connected with professional bull rider JB Mooney and traveled to Texas, where he spent about a week learning how to work around and ride bulls. By the day before the rodeo, Mooney had given him all the instruction he could.
And the first attempts weren’t exactly graceful. “I got bucked off a couple times,” he shared, adding, “They were telling me, ‘Go back to Nashville, you’re a different kind of country, you ain’t a cowboy.’”
But Redferrin kept getting back on. “By the end of it, they were all throwing their hats out there and hollering for me,” he says. “And they said I earned my cowboy stripes, so I was pretty proud about that.”
The experience didn’t end with the video. Redferrin has since become increasingly immersed in the rodeo world, even buying his first bull for PBR. His newfound connection to the rodeo world is already finding its way into his songwriting.
Redferrin’s next release, arriving on October 30, “Don’t Slow Down,” he explains, will show another side of him, one that he says fans have been asking to hear again, the rock-and-roll side of his musical personality.
Of the unreleased track, he shares, “I wrote it when we were on the road. It was the day Ozzy Osbourne passed away, and it was kind of a weird day for me. Long story short, my dad used to work at Gibson Guitar for about 20 years, so I grew up playing, but we sold all our guitars to race dirt bikes. The day before Ozzy passed, one of our old family friends actually gifted me an electric guitar that my dad painted before he passed. The first time I ever played it was the night that we found out Ozzy had passed away.”
“So the album was really traditional, and I wrote this during the time we were writing the album, and it didn’t make it, but I felt like after I put it out, the only negative comment I got from anybody, which wasn’t negative, was, ‘Album sounds great, but I really want to hear that rocking Redferrin. I hope he ain’t gone forever,’” he added. “It comes out October 30th, so I at least got one more coming this year. I’m excited about that, and got a bunch more in the can, and if I don’t put them out this year, they’ll be coming top of ’27 for sure.”
For now, Redferrin is taking that music on the road with his Been There, Done That Tour, which has already included plenty of rodeo stops.
“Been There, Done That Tour. This has been a fun one. We started it, I guess, last week, and we’ve been playing a lot of rodeos,” he says. “It’s kind of funny, once you ride a bull and people know you love that world, they start inviting you into it more…. There are so many fun ones… mostly I’m really looking forward to the rodeos because it’s such a fun world, and once I learn how to ride, I’m pretty ate up with it now. And yeah, anytime you can be around it, I just sit and watch the rodeo all day and try to learn something about it.”
For more information on Redferrin’s upcoming tour dates and new music visit his official website.
