Hailey Whitters Digs into Her Iowa Roots on New Album 'Raised' : 'My Head Was Just Back Home'

There is a magic that seems to spin around Hailey Whitters.

When one catches the country songstress in the right light, it's almost as if the Iowa native was created in the heavens above for this very moment, a time when the guardrails of country music aren't nearly as rigid as they once were.

"I mean, just look at the ACM Awards," Whitters, 32, enthusiastically says of the award show that had taken place just the night before her interview with PEOPLE. "You've got Lainey [Wilson] up there and [Chris] Stapleton and Brothers Osborne and Brittney Spencer up there. It just seemed like there were so many diverse musical influences happening up there on that stage. To me, it was a big testament to how far our country has come in the last…"

She pauses for a moment, as her dog Bo can be heard barking in the background.

"He's freaking out because my fiancé just left for work," Whitters says of her 3-year-old blue tick beagle's love for a certain Mr. Jake Gear, a music publishing executive who Whitters will make her husband this fall on her father's sprawling farm. "I don't know what his problem is. He's old enough not to be a total nuisance."

She laughs, as the sweetness of her current home life in Nashville comes into further focus. But on her highly anticipated third album Raised, she revisits life before dogs and engagement rings on seventeen endearing tracks that sound like home, no matter where that might be.

"I think the true mustard seed for this album probably started with [the song] 'Heartland' off The Dream," the former Nashville waitress says of the track included on her previous album that included her breakout song "Ten Year Town." "When I was writing, I was just feeling very nostalgic and very homesick. There was a point during that time that I was considering leaving Nashville entirely and moving home." She pauses. "My head was just back home. But then I realized — I didn't come this far to only go this far."

Nevertheless, for Whitters, 'home' will most certainly always be Shueyville, Iowa, a town of just over 700 people and a somewhat idyllic place in which Whitters grew up and gained the confidence needed to move 581 miles away to make her music dreams come true in Nashville.

And it's Shueyville that one can see and feel on Raised.

"I started writing some of this record all the way back in 2019," she remembers of the album which includes her current single "Everything She Ain't." "I started thinking that it would be a record that would pay tribute to where I grew up and where I came from. Raised is the record that goes back to see who and what and where kept that girl determined to hang on to her dream."

Granted, Whitters' dreams don't look much like the rest of the world, and even look vastly different from many of her female country music counterparts. Take for example the opening track of the album, "Ad Astra Per Alas Porci," an instrumental ode created to delicately bring listeners into Whitter's dreamy world.

"I wanted it to feel like the setting scene of a movie or something, where it feels like we're about to transport somewhere," says the Grammy-nominated songwriter, who is currently out on her debut headlining tour and will soon head out as an opener for Jon Pardi this spring.

"I hope when people get to hear it, it feels like an experience. But I also hope that no matter where you come from, you can find something in here to resonate with. We're all in country music. We all grew up in a small town. We all came from the same place, although the scenery might have been different."