Wyatt Flores has a lot going for him as of right now.
In addition to making his late night debut this week, the 23-year-old also just released his debut album, Welcome To The Plains. Though it’s his first full-length studio project, the Oklahoma native has been on a meteoric rise in country music for quite some time. Flores has previously released Life Lessons and Half Life, and those were both phenomenal displays of the young singer-songwriter’s talent.
That trend continued with the release of Welcome To The Plains, which he described in detail as a project that defines him both as an artist and a person:
“It’s an album about home and a search for happiness. It’s the stories of my life, my family, and the people and places in my life who have defined who I am today. It feels like these last three years have been building up to this music.
We worked really hard to make a classic and I’m so excited for you to hear these 14 songs. This album is happy on one side and heartbreak on the other. Whether you’re from the east, west, north or south I hope you find something you love in here.”
Flores gave a sneak peak of the project with singles “Don’t Want To Say Goodnight,” “Little Town,” and the title track “Welcome To The Plains.” He also released the studio version of “Oh Susannah” ahead of the record’s official release, though it had already seen the light of day in some of his live performances.
When Wyatt stopped by the Grand Ole Opry back in July, the song was unreleased and hadn’t been played but maybe a handful of times. It was there standing in the historic circle that he revealed the meaning and message of the song, which was dedicated to a fan of his named Aubreigh Wyatt who took her own life:
“I had to step away from music earlier on this year, right after I had played the Opry because of a lot of different reasons, and one of those was feeling the weight of the world of trying to help people and not feeling like I was. As cool as it is that I get to do this, this is my job, and the music I portray… it gets to save lives.
But there’s also the dark side of it, where you don’t know if that song just kept them on Earth just a couple of days longer. I didn’t write that song, ‘Please Don’t Go,’ for everybody out there in the world. I wrote it because of the situation I was in with the girl that I loved. But this song is for y’all, ‘Oh Susannah’ is you. I wrote this for you… and I’m sorry.”
So clearly, “Oh Susannah” means a lot to Flores, which is probably why he chose to sing it during his late night debut on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. If you think about it, a lot of people probably heard the young country artist for the very first time last night, and he chose “Oh Susannah” as his official introduction.
If you ask me, it was a commendable choice, and he shined as always: