Dwayne Johnson’s Music History Keeps Fueling Questions About a Future Country Project

Dwayne Johnson has spent decades building a career across wrestling, film, and business, and this week he added a genuinely new chapter, one built around a guitar rather than a script.

On July 31, Disney Music Group released Moana: Voices Across the Ocean, a companion album to the recent live action Moana remake, featuring 25 Pacific artists.

Buried inside that tracklist is a song called Your Dad, written and performed by Johnson himself alongside 2023 American Idol winner Iam Tongi.

The song’s backstory, which Johnson laid out in detail to Rolling Stone, is fairly simple. He and his wife, Lauren Hashian, were executive producing the album with fellow producers Tiana Nonosina Liufau and Kayla Fa’amaligi, and the team asked Johnson if he’d contribute a song of his own.

Unsure what he could actually sing, he called Tongi, a fellow Hawaiian artist, and asked if he had anything already written that they could build together.

Two days later, Tongi sent back a song originally called My Dad, written as a message to children he didn’t have yet. Johnson reworked it into Your Dad, a track dedicated to his own three daughters.

What makes this more than a one off soundtrack moment is what Johnson said next. Asked about his musical future, he told Rolling Stone he’d dreamed of becoming a country star back when he was 15 years old, trying and failing to sing in bars before that dream, in his words, died a quick death. Decades later, he’s treating the idea seriously again.

He cited a specific list of influences, Sam Cooke, Elvis, George Jones, Merle Haggard, and Johnny Paycheck, and described wanting to approach any future project with real respect for Nashville’s music tradition.

He also shared a detail that adds some real weight to the country connection, Willie Nelson personally gave him his first guitar, one of only 100 replicas of Nelson’s own well known instrument, Trigger.

This isn’t Johnson’s first time stepping into music either, which is part of why the country interest reads as plausible rather than random.

He voiced the demigod Maui in the original 2016 animated Moana, singing the Lin-Manuel Miranda penned You’re Welcome, a track that’s since racked up 1.8 billion streams on YouTube alone.

He also contributed a verse to Tech N9ne’s 2020 track Face Off, a collaboration that picked up its own attention online for how unexpectedly well Johnson’s delivery landed.

Taken together, those two projects explain why Johnson’s stated country ambitions land differently than a random celebrity mentioning a music project once in an interview.

He has an actual, if scattered, musical track record spanning a Disney blockbuster, a hip hop feature, and now a country adjacent ballad with a rising country and Americana influenced artist in Tongi.

Still, it’s worth being precise about where things currently stand. Johnson has not announced a country album, a release date, or a second single.

He’s described this as something he’s exploring rather than something he’s committed to, and that distinction matters for anyone trying to separate where his career is actually headed from where fans might want it to go.

Given how openly and specifically he discussed his influences and his history with the genre, though, this reads less like a passing comment and more like the early stage of a direction he’s seriously considering, even if nothing beyond Your Dad has been confirmed yet.

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