Cory Branan has never been interested in fitting into a genre. For him, the only constant has been the song itself — where it wants to go, what it needs, and how honestly its story can be told. His latest, You'll Live,  leans into that instinct.

"This is an orphanage," says the Memphis native, nodding to a record whose 10 songs were collected over nearly 20 years, each one initially tossed into the archives for not quite fitting whatever album he was making at the time. Taken together, they form a proudly unruly mosaic: fragments of different eras, different impulses, and different versions of the same songwriter. Instead of a singular tale, You'll Live unwinds like ten self-contained stories that sit side-by-side, recorded quickly in Nashville and pulled together by a musical lifer that Rolling Stone calls "a country boy with a punk-rock heart."

If there's a unifying thread to You'll Live, it's not sonic as much as philosophical. Branan's best releases have always circled around the same question: once the veneer wears off and reality reveals itself, what do you do with what's left? His answer: keep searching for something true in the fragments. Those fragments are the true stars of You'll Live, and they paint the picture of a journeyman who knows that songs don't need to belong anywhere except to themselves.