Hudson Westbrook failed to mention to his mother that he dropped out of college last year to pursue a career in music. Instead, she heard the news when the 20-year-old country singer revealed it to his fans during a stage show in his home state of Texas.

And it didn’t go over very well.

“My mom comes backstage, and she said: ‘What big song do you have yet?’ And I was like, ‘Nothing.’ And she said, ‘Well, you better get to writing.’ That was August and I told her that day I’d have a bus by January. She laughed in my face, but we were in a bus by January. It’s been a crazy ride.”

That ride started during his time at Texas Tech, where he just started to write music for fun in his dorm room. His friends teased him about how he was wasting his time so he decided to put one of the songs out on TikTok — “Take It Slow” — at the same time he was starting to play bars in Lubbock to make some pocket change.

“I had no followers on TikTok — zero,” he said. “And the next thing you know, I wake up and I have 2 million views on it. And I’m like: ‘OK, this is something. But it’s probably just one video and I got lucky.’ I wasn’t about to drop out for one video. But then a trend started and everyone’s on the Hudson train.”

Today, Westbrook has 687,000 followers on TikTok, 337,000 on Instagram and 3.3 million monthly listeners on Spotify. He amassed more than 255 million global streams in his first 11 months as an artist and averages more than 16 million streams a week. Westbrook was named Billboard’s December 2024 Country Rookie of the Month and started 2025 off as Sirius XM’s The Highway’s newest Highway Find, one of SXM’s all-genre Five for 2025, and one of Spotify’s all-genre 2025 Artists to Watch.

Once he dropped out of college, Westbrook started out releasing music in Texas, where he brought “Take It Slow” to number one, before debuting his first single, “House Again,” to national radio at the end of March — accompanied by a melodramatic music video — that was the second most added song of that week. And at the end of April, he dropped “Sober,” a more upbeat tune, that immediately trended in the top 20 on TikTok’s music charts.

Despite his seemingly overnight success, Westbrook remains grounded. He attributes that to his family and “the constants in my life, like my brother, sister and mom. They don’t care that I’m going to Kansas City to play a show, or that I made X amount of dollars, or any of that. They’re just like, ‘How you doing? Is your mental health all right?’ The music could be gone tomorrow, but the constants in your life won’t go anywhere. If everything’s done, I could still fly back to my mom in Midland and hang out with her.”

With so much of his success attributable to social media, there’s also a risk of getting too dependent on the platforms. “I try to be as active as I can, but the mental health part is not the greatest because if you’re involved on your socials, you read everything, you see everything, you know everything, and there’s a beauty to that, but there’s also [a risk]. If your dream is working, there are going to be people that hate on it and are jealous of it — and that’s just negative. So I’ll stay involved, but I try to stay abstract on reading everything.”

Despite the risks, he knows that maintaining a strong social media presence goes with the territory. “There are four pillars of music that you’ve got to make sure you’re hitting on,” he said. “There’s writing, touring, marketing and press. The one thing that I wish I could pick to go would be social media. But it’s just a different world we live in today and there are benefits and negatives. I went from nothing to everything and I’m grateful. There are so many people who would kill to do these things, so I go write songs and that’s who I am now.”

Even though he’s just out of his teens, Westbrook has lived a lot in those years and it shows in his songwriting. Case in point is “House Again,” which is based on his parents’ divorce that happened when he was seven. “I’m 20 years old and I wrote a song that kind of embodies the whole meaning of what happens when you get a divorce. But I wouldn’t even limit it to that. The person you made a lover is just a person again. I think people can relate to that in so many different ways. But that one’s a gut puncher.”

Like much of country music, the song tackles topics that touch the heart, but a lot of his tunes are more lighthearted such as the love song “5 to 9” and “Dressed Down,” the latter of which tells of him trying to lure his girl out on a date by showing up with flowers, doves, an enormous stuffed bear and even a box full of puppies — none of which work.

Several of these songs are included on Westbrook’s EP, and the artist is putting the finishing touches on his debut full-length album, slated to be released this summer. He’ll also stay busy this year touring the country as the opening act for everyone from Parker McCollum, Midland, Cole Swindell and the Eli Young Band to Ian Munsick.

Because of their Texas roots, Westbrook has often been compared to McCollum, another star from the Lone Star state. “I grew up listening to Parker and Koe Wetzel,” Westbrook said. “I also listened to Tracy Lawrence and Vince Gill, but Parker is the main influence behind my ideas and my music. We’re both Texans, we’re both smalltown based, we’re both blond, blue eyes, higher voice, but our writing style, how we sound and the instruments we use are two totally different things.”

Ditto for their personal style.

Westbrook said he loves Wrangler jeans in a variety of colors including gray and tan — “They have to be starched, they can’t be soft.” — and dark brown or black boots from Lucchese, Tecovas or Ariat with pointed toes. For shirts, he’s partial to collared button-down pearl-snap shirts that he finds in vintage stores, and he generally opts for a ball cap rather than a cowboy hat. “I used to train cutting horses and I was told you don’t wear a cowboy hat unless you’re working outside,” he said.

And he is a big fan of jewelry including rings, bracelets and necklaces. “I hate spending $1,000 on one shirt that I’m wearing one time, but I’ll spend $1,000 on a ring or a chain that I can wear every single day.”

One constant in his wardrobe is a silver cross inlaid with turquoise that was a gift from his mother. Maybe that’ll help her forgive him for quitting college after all.