Matt Stell

Matt Stell fuses modern country with Americana while also exploring rock, blues, and time-honored singer-songwriter material. Self-taught on guitar during his college years, he began issuing recordings in the early 2010s. His breakthrough arrived via the 2018 streaming success “Prayed for You,” which reached number one on the Country Airplay chart in 2019—the same summit attained that year by “Everywhere But On.” After a stretch of lower visibility, he returned with the One of Us EP in February 2023 and followed it with Built by Broken Hearts in 2024.

Growing up primarily in Center Ridge, Arkansas, and briefly in Central Florida, Matt Stell absorbed classic country, country-rock, blues-rock, and rap while earning recognition on the basketball court; his high school AAU squad once defeated a team featuring LeBron James. He later competed in college basketball at Drury University in Springfield, Missouri, where he first picked up the guitar amid academic and athletic demands. Once he mastered barre chords, he started composing songs and playing them at a neighborhood bar. Although music soon became central to his life, he completed a master’s degree in communications at the University of Arkansas, undertook missionary work in Haiti, and weighed medical school before committing to a music career.

In 2013 he released the album A River Through It on 124 Records, then issued the single “Country Love Song” in 2015. During this period he supported tours by Luke Bryan and Eric Church. A deal with Wide Open Music in Nashville, Tennessee, paved the way for the single “Prayed for You” and the EP Everywhere But On in 2019. The track went viral, accumulating more than ten million streams across platforms by year’s end and topping Billboard’s Country Airplay chart, a position duplicated by the title song from the EP. October 2020 brought another EP, Better Than That, which featured “Look at Me Now.” The standalone single “That Ain’t Me No More” appeared in 2021, while 2022’s “Man Made” previewed the early-2023 arrival of One of Us. Later that year “Breakin’ in Boots” became another Top 40 Country Airplay entry and served as the centerpiece of his 2024 EP Built by Broken Hearts.