Dwight Yoakam, Post Malone Duet on ‘I Don’t Know How to Say Goodbye’

On his first album in nearly a decade, Dwight Yoakam is getting a little help from a musician who wasn’t even a country artist when his last album came out. “I Don’t Know How to Say Goodbye (Bang Bang Boom Boom),” the first single from Yoakam’s forthcoming Brighter Days, features Nashville newcomer Post Malone, who released his first country album last month. Yoakam’s full album is due out Nov. 15.

After a little of Yoakam’s yodeling about a failed relationship, Malone lends his plummy voice: “I don’t know how we lost our way,” he sings. “I don’t know where these two hearts both went astray.” Then they join forces for the chorus, a little bang bang, a little boom boom, and fortuitously, the onomatopoeia isn’t about any presidential election talking points but the sound of “how a broken heart beats on.”

Yoakam wrote the song with Post Malone in mind. It’s a fitting follow-up to Post Malone’s surprise appearance at Yoakam’s L.A. concert in July and their April collaboration at Stagecoach.

Yoakam recorded the album over the last three years. The artist, who was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2019, wrote or cowrote the songs on the album, other than covers of Cake’s “Bound Away” and the Carter Family’s “Keep on the Sunny Side.”

The artist will kick off a tour later this month with support from the Mavericks on some dates. Full details are on his website.

Brighter Days track list:

1. “Wide Open Heart”
2. “I’ll Pay the Price”
3. “Bound Away”
4. “California Sky”
5. “Can’t Be Wrong”
6. “I Spell Love”
7. “A Dream That Never Ends”
8. “Brighter Days”
9. “I Don’t Know How to Say Goodbye (Bang Bang Boom Boom)” (with Post Malone)
10. “If Only”
11. “Hand Me Down Heart”
12. “Time Between”
13. “Keep on the Sunny Side”
14. “Every Night”