Sam Hunt Shares Home Movies, Revisits Bucolic Childhood with Brothers in New Music Video 'Start Nowhere'

The music video for "Start Nowhere" showcases the country singer’s parents and brothers, whom he’s taking his infant daughter to visit this Thanksgiving

When Sam Hunt was a kid growing up in Georgia, he put his younger brother Van on a goat and smacked the animal's hind quarters sending it running into a paddock. As it bolted into the fence, Van inadvertently slid sideways on the goat, and his body slammed into the wooden gate, knocking him to the ground. Hunt lifted him off the ground, cheering while the little boy screamed, "Get out of my way."

"I couldn't believe we caught that on camera because we were always into things like that," Hunt, 37, tells PEOPLE. "That was back before cell phone cameras, and for whatever reason, that day, my brother Ben grabbed my dad's VHS camera that you had to throw over your shoulder and took it out there with us."

The barnyard scene is the opening footage for Hunt's video for his new song "Start Nowhere," which was released Wednesday. The country singer co-wrote the track about longing for life's simpler times with Zach Crowell, Shane McAnally and Josh Osborne.

Lyrics include "Life caught up the way that it does / Don't even know who I was / Before my world got so unsteady / Man, I'm ready to feel alright."

Start Nowhere - Sam Hunt
Sam Hunt's "Start Nowhere". Universal Music Group

"Start Nowhere" is from Hunt's forthcoming project. He wrote the nostalgic mid-tempo in 2021 before discovering he would be a dad. His wife, Hannah Lee, gave birth to their daughter Lucy Louise in May. The now 6-month-old baby girl recently started smiling at him every time he walks in the room, and family has been on his mind now more than ever.

When it came time to conceive a video idea for "Start Nowhere," Hunt remembered the hours of home movies he and his brothers shot growing up. A few Christmases ago, someone in Hunt's family pulled out the videos, and they started watching the memories. The experience prompted Hunt's dad Allen to get the clips digitized. The singer says he always hoped he'd be able to use the footage somewhere, and "Start Nowhere" was the perfect opportunity.

"I connect with that video so much," he says. "How much of this is me just connecting to my family and how much of it is just stepping outside myself and just appreciating the nostalgia of that era — just the love in mom's eyes and all the things that show up there that are just real and authentic?"

Sam Hunt performs on THE TONIGHT SHOW STARRING JIMMY FALLON
Sam Hunt. Todd Owyoung/NBC via Getty

The music video also includes scenes of the boys pretending to be singers, a young Hunt stomping through the house wearing a loin cloth, playing football, fishing, riding bicycles and galloping through a field on horseback.

Hunt was worried that there wouldn't be enough home movies to tell a story in the video, but he had plenty from which to choose. He sifted through the clips and found he loved the scenes from when he was a toddler to about 12 years old the most.

"I put aside the little shots that just made me feel something like those shots of my mom and how she just has a light in her eyes that really shows, and it really captures what home is to me," he says. "You just see it in her smile."

Brothers Van Hunt and Singer/Songwriter Sam Hunt attend Th3 Legends Cast For A Cure Tournament Benefiting The T.J. Martell Foundation at Sanders Ferry Park on November 4, 2017 in Hendersonville, Tennessee.
Van and Sam Hunt in 2017. Rick Diamond/Getty

Watching the old home movies in the process of making the music video, he says, helped him reconnect with himself and the essential things in life.

"Having a child myself and seeing my parents at my age now raising me, it's a whole existential experience," Hunt tells PEOPLE. "I don't think I would've forced myself to sit down and actually watch all that stuff if I hadn't been trying to put together a music video. It all was a big full circle moment for me."

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With Thanksgiving approaching, Hunt says he and his wife are about to take little Lucy to visit all of his family featured in his "Start Nowhere" video. He says it will be his extended family's first normal holiday season since the pandemic — and now they have a new little Hunt to show off.

"We'll be making the rounds with our new little girl, so she'll be on kind of a baby tour," he says with a laugh. "She's going to meet all her relatives that she has not met yet."

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