Provided he’s got enough of his voice left by the time he walks offstage, Hudson Westbrook will occasionally keep the night going after a gig by rolling to a nearby karaoke joint. He might do something by John Mayer; if he’s feeling brave, he might try “I Believe I Can Fly.”

“I like to sing Taylor Swift too,” says the up-and-coming country star. “I gotta be a little drunk, though.”

What’s his go-to Taylor jam?

“ ‘You Belong With Me’ — that’s my song, bro. I actually think it’s a dude song — like they’d be the one to come on strong like that.” He laughs. “I feel like a girl would be more chill about the approach.”

Westbrook, 22, knows all about the dudely come-on: In 2024, just a year into his undergraduate studies at Texas Tech University, his song “Take It Slow” went viral on TikTok; not long after that, he signed a major-label record deal and began sending singles up the country radio chart, including “House Again,” which went all the way to No. 1, and “Painted You Pretty,” which led to a nod for new male artist of the year at this past May’s ACM Awards.

By turns flirty and heartsick, Westbrook’s 2025 debut album, “Texas Forever,” established him as a clean-cut romantic in a ball cap and pearl-snap shirt — “lover boy vibes,” as he puts it today. Now he’s back with a sophomore LP, “Made You Look,” that goes for something slightly grittier: In “Hits Me” he’s “lonely with a side of misery” as he longs for an ex he compares to “a bullet from an old Colt 45”; in ”Nowhere Bound” he’s “out on the loose,” eager to “go the wrong way, get a little lost / Find a roadside bar, get tossed.”

Then there’s “Odds of Getting Even,” in which he deploys some classic country-music wordplay to describe the revenge he’s planned to exact on a cheater.

“As you get older, you start getting that soul of: I don’t care what y’all think,” he says of the somewhat rascally character he portrays in songs full of ringing honky-tonk guitars. It’s a recent afternoon at Warner Records’ headquarters in Los Angeles, and Westbrook is kicked back between lunch and a headlining concert at the Novo; he and his crew rode to town last night after a show in Modesto, where he admits he wasn’t sure what to expect in terms of turnout.

“I was worried they might not know me in California,” he says. “But we sold it out — like 4,300 people going crazy.”

Beyond the fact of growing up, Westbrook says “Made You Look” was shaped by the touring he did over the last year and a half as an opening act for Parker McCollum and for Morgan Wallen, both of whom have found success with songs in which the narrator isn’t necessarily the good guy (which only means of course that nobody understands his pain).

“What are you giving — perfect country singer?” Westbrook asks. “OK. But I want to show the imperfections. I want it to be: This kid messed up, and what’s he gonna do about that? Is he gonna be honest with us?” The tunes on his new album, he adds, “are the most vulnerable I’ve ever written” — something to be proud of, as far as McCollum is concerned.

“Hudson’s songwriting comes from the right place, which is numero ... uno,” says the fellow Texan, who brought Westbrook onstage last year at Colorado’s Red Rocks Amphitheatre for a duet on his song “Rest of My Life.” “He’s just being whatever he feels Hudson is, and I think that’s the purest way to make art.”

Westbrook grew up in Stephenville, a small ranching town about an hour from Fort Worth. In high school, he played football and baseball — “I was throwing 87 in ninth grade” — but picked up a guitar after he tore a rotator cuff. Music was never his life plan: Folks in Stephenville thought it was “weird,” he says; at college in Lubbock, he got involved in student government as a way to bolster his resume for an eventual career in oil and gas or commercial real estate.

“That’s what my brother does,” he says of the latter, “and he made a bag off that, so I was like, Yeah, that’s the move.”

Yet things changed after “Take It Slow” exploded overnight. “When I put out the song, I’d been planning on going to class all week,” Westbrook says. Instead, “we accepted a tour and just rolled.” His decision to drop out is hardly one that tortures him; this past April, he returned to the Texas Tech campus to play the university’s football stadium with George Strait and Miranda Lambert.

Though Westbrook understands the crucial role social media played in his ascent — he can tell you about the difference in impact of 4 million views on Snapchat versus 4 million uses on TikTok — he says he tries to stay off his phone these days as a way of contending with what he calls a “microwave society.”

“People my age, we can search up the answer to any question instantly, whereas my mom had to go look through a book,” he says. “I wish I grew up like that because y’all have so much more patience.”

For similar reasons, Westbrook opted to stay in Texas after he signed a deal rather than head to Nashville as most young country stars do. “Warner wanted me to move there, and management wanted me to move there,” he says. “They were like, ‘You could write and do interviews every day.’ But too much music is no bueno for me — it makes me overthink everything.”

Indeed, as delighted as he is to encounter enthusiastic fans like the ones who turned up in Modesto, Westbrook says he’s still getting used to playing music in front of an audience.

“When I’m onstage and I’m playing an acoustic set or something — playing any song, really — I close my eyes and I just kind of imagine being back in my dorm room with my guitar,” he says. “That’s when I sing the best.”

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