Austin Snell Gets Candid on Mental Health and New Project ‘Colors’ [Exclusive]

Georgia-born country artist Austin Snell is expanding on his creativity and emotional songwriting with his new EP Colors, which finds him leaning into more honesty than ever before in his career.

The seven-song collection fittingly arrives at the start of Mental Health Awareness Month, an intentional detail that Snell says aligned naturally with the themes of mental health, family struggles, love, and personal growth that appear throughout the project. He previously tested the waters of sharing a deeper look into life with 2025’s Home Sweet Hell project and after seeing how well fans resonated with those vulnerable stories, he gained the confidence to dive even deeper.

Co-written entirely by Snell, Colors reflects the rising singer/songwriter’s more laid-back approach to his artistry, as he focuses on making the kind of music that matters most to him and letting the rawness of his stories truly connect with listeners before immediately jumping to find what’s next.

“I’ve reached this new place in life of just like, I’m going to write what I think is cool and I think sounds cool and I think is different and I’m excited about it,” he told Country Now. “If I’m excited about it, then I think that that’s all. I should be really focused on, as a creative or an artist, just making something that I resonate with, that I’m excited about and the rest will kind of just take care of itself.”

Snell has faced his fair share of ups and downs in his life, including the struggles he faced at home growing up and having to navigate his more recent chapter as a U.S. Air Force Veteran, now on a mission to bring his musical dreams to life. With Colors, Snell is turning that perspective into his most personal work yet, by opening the door to the stories and experiences that shaped him.

Ahead of the EP’s release, Snell broke down the inspiration behind the project, tapping into his vulnerable side and more.

What pushed you to open up so much with this project? 

I think that it’s kind of based around the idea of mental health and the struggle of that. And I think that’s kind of just always been the through line for my music, it’s been what I wanted to do for a long time. And I think last year’s project, the Home Sweet Hell project just really made it seem okay for me to do that. It was probably the scariest time in my career so far, just putting this story out that I’ve never told before and I mean, never even spoke to anybody about really. And here I am putting this entire song out to the world to listen to it and judge it and hopefully resonate with it. So last year was the most difficult time and this year was just it being okay to do that. And I’ve really just been able to dive into not having any fearful thoughts of what I’m writing about and more so just writing it and knowing that people are going to listen and hear what I’m saying and resonate with it. So that’s always the goal is to have people relate to what you’re saying. 

Was it intentional to align the release of this project with the start of Mental Health Awareness month?

Yeah, it was definitely intentional. It was kind of timing itself out to where it was going to be around this time period and it was just one of those God things of just like, Hey, we have these songs. Let’s make this project. Not only is this project already about mental health, but it’s timing itself out to be dropped during Mental Health Month. So I’m super huge in my faith and I think that things happen for a reason. And I think that this just is a God thing that presented itself. And I’m a believer in that when God tells you to do something, you do it. And I think that that’s kind of just why this has all happened. I’m not some huge mastermind and planned it all out like this, but it’s just kind of happened this way and I think it’s meant to be that way.

Talk about the song “Colors” and why that was the right title to use to sum up this collection. 

Earlier this year is when we decided that this was going to be the entire essence of the project. And I wrote “Colors” last year with some good friends of mine, and it was really just essentially a love story. It’s a love song, and love songs are not something that I’ve done a lot of. And I feel like I do a lot of writing in the past versus the future and all this and that. And so I’m in love, I have a beautiful girlfriend, and we’ve been together for a while now, and she was starting to ask questions about not having any love songs. So I had to make something happen. And one of the things that we’ve grown closer to each other with is just the struggle of some of our upbringing. And both of us grew up in a household that wasn’t the healthiest and I think that can either drive people apart or make somebody closer to another person, and it’s done that for us. So that’s kind of just the whole idea of that song, it’s just a song for her. And it’s the being okay with sharing all the parts of you, because it’s a scary thing. It’s especially scary in a relationship and being scared to show this person that you spend a lot of your time with, parts of you that you are not the most proud of. And it’s a super just heavy idea in a relationship. And I think it’s a healthy thing to do. So that’s kind of what it’s about. 

The topic of family is something you really open up about, especially in “Daddy’s Eyes.” Talk about your intentions behind putting this song out into the world.

I think that that song was probably one of the first songs off this project that I wrote, and that’s just what really sent me down the route of what this project was going to mean. Growing up, I didn’t grow up seeing my dad be the healthiest husband to my mom, and that’s just kind of the way it was. And I think I’ve taken a lot of that with me, and I was experiencing that as a super young child, around the age of nine, I think. I don’t think people, sometimes parents especially, understand that kids are like sponges, especially at that age. They’re processing everything and those are the first things that they experience is the way that their parents act towards each other. I remember just growing up, I’ve always had that thought in my mind and I didn’t ever know if it was going to be a song, but I would always grow up and people would mean it as a compliment and they would say, “You have your daddy’s eyes” or “you’re just like your dad,” or whatever, this and that. And I’ve always just viewed that as more of an insult than a compliment. 

Taking that idea into the room with Tucker Beathard and Jimi Bell, it was two guys that loved to write stuff like that. And so they really helped me bring that to life and that thought to life. And I don’t think there’s anybody else in Nashville that could have wrote that song with me than those two. artist, you put out a song that you feel led to do for yourself, and that’s kind of one of those songs on the project. 

Have you already started to see that honesty start to resonate with fans through what they’ve head across social media?

Absolutely, yeah. And that’s one of the coolest parts about being an artist is hearing other people’s stories. And it’s been, I mean, life-changing to play these shows even off the last project and hear people’s stories just based off of Home Sweet Hell and even songs in the past like “Excuse The Mess” and “Pray All The Way Home.” That’s one of the coolest things that artists can experience is to meet somebody and them tell you that a song that you wrote and put out is helping them through a season in life. And that’s what music always was for me, it was a way to escape where I was and what I was dealing with. So I’m super blessed and honored to be in that position. It’s definitely a weight to carry, but it’s a weight that I’m proud to try and carry. 

Was there anything that you learned about yourself in the process of making this project? 

I think I learned that there’s a lot more there than I thought there was. I’ve never been through therapy. I’ve never had a therapist, probably need one, but I’ve learned that there’s a lot of stuff that doesn’t come up unless you force it to. And I think that just goes to anybody that has been through anything. Your mind helps you forget about it or helps you push it down. I guess not forget about it, but push it down. And I just learned there’s a lot of things that I need to get out for myself, not only just for anybody else going through something, but there’s a lot of things that I need to say to help me get past a certain situation that I was going through. So that’s kind of been the biggest learning curve is just writing the things that you’re kind of scared to write about and you’ve pushed it down for so long that you don’t know how to write about it, I think has been the biggest thing that I’ve learned through all of it, for sure. 

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Thinking back to your debut album to now, how do you feel like your music has grown and changed in that time? 

I think I’ve grown a lot. I think I’ve really dialed in on just being excited. I started my career in 2022, and at the time, I wrote “Excuse the Mess” and put it out, and that’s kind of what led to my publishing deal and my record deal and stuff like that. Up to that point, I’d only been in town writing songs for six months, and so I didn’t have a lot of time to really dial in on what I wanted to do. And once that all started, it was hard to be excited about a certain thing or always focused on what’s next or what the next project is going to sound like, or what show is coming up next, or what meeting or whatever it is…And I think this project has just really been a result of me just sitting in the moment and really just being excited about a piece of work and really just letting it live how it’s going to live regardless of, if it does really well, it does really well. I would be blessed for it too, and it would be awesome. But even if it, for whatever reason, doesn’t do well and people don’t, I did this because I think it’s cool and I think that’s a new headspace that I’ve been in and I’m super glad that I’ve reached that point. Not that anything in the past has been bad. I’m super proud of everything that I’ve done so far. It’s just sometimes really hard to be in the moment when releasing music because there’s always the thought of what’s coming after that. So that’s just been where it’s changed a lot for me.

You recently wrapped up the Home Sweet Hell Tour. How did that run go for you?

It started last year around October is when we started that tour after the project, and that was a chapter in my life and the shows were great. And so I’m really just excited to dive deeper into what that brought to the people and just continue to put out more music and continue to try and be creative and do something different. And I think that we’ll see. We’re definitely playing a lot more shows and planning on playing a bunch more in the fall and doing a headline thing in the fall. So I’m just always excited to see these songs take a new life in a live setting. 

Fans can keep up with Austin Snell on Instagram.