Mama's Boy, Lany's third album, is an intentional return to the trio's Great Plain roots. After finishing the last leg of their world tour behind Malibu Nights, Paul Jason Klein – the band's primary songwriter, lyricist and producer who was born and raised in Oklahoma before moving with the band to L.A. – decamped to a studio in the country outside Nashville where he began working on an outline for Mama's Boy. He polished the demos alongside bandmates Jake Goss and Les Priest and a host of gifted songwriting collaborators including Dan Smyers of Dan + Shay; Shane McAnally, best known for his Grammy-winning contributions to Kacey Musgraves' Golden Hour; and songwriting power couple Sasha Sloan and King Henry. Others, including Adele co-writer Dan Wilson, also contributed to the album when the sessions returned to L.A., where Mama's Boy was completed.

Over those two weeks in Nashville Paul began to put into words and music the cognitive dissonance between the L.A. persona he'd adopted over the band's rise and his Great Plains heritage. "Someone asked me where I was from and somewhere, out of my spirit, I just said ‘Man, I'm from Oklahoma!' It was a weird sense of pride, to be from the middle of nowhere," he says of the realization that he needed to look to the country's heartland for this album's inspiration. Thematically Mama's Boy is a sweeping tribute to home, heritage and Americana filled with songs that highlight what's "symbolic of being an American kid" today.

"There was only one person in the world I cared about hearing Malibu Nights," adds Paul. "Now, there's not one person in the world I don't want to hear Mama's Boy."