How Kim Cross & Mark DenHartigh Built My Favorite Color, From Paper Plates to an Eight Second Ride
Ten Tracks in 32 Minutes From Two BMI Songwriters Writing Country Out of Everyday Life
Read the tracklist of My Favorite Color before pressing play and the method is already on the page. Most of its ten titles are phrases people say out loud, from It Is What It Is to What’s Up, Girl and Keeping It Professional. Kim Cross & Mark DenHartigh released My Favorite Color on 18 September 2026. The country album turns everyday talk into just over 32 minutes of songs.
Kim Cross & Mark DenHartigh’s My Favorite Color is in the playlist below, and their earlier releases are collected on the duo’s artist profile. The album reached this desk through PopHits.Co Music Charts, which verifies independent artists and places their releases across its network of music news titles. Give it a listen, then read on for how the two of them built it.
Two BMI Songwriters Build My Favorite Color From Titles People Already Say Out Loud
Kim Cross and Mark DenHartigh are BMI songwriters who release their shared work as Kim Cross & Mark DenHartigh Music, and they describe the partnership in plain terms. Some writers work from imagination, they say, while they write about real life. They also call themselves two people from the Midwest making music they love. The catalogue on their own website backs that up with album after album of story songs.
Kim brings the larger body of work. She has written more than 400 original songs. Her writing grew out of profound loss, loving someone through addiction and rebuilding her life. Her subjects run through grief, resilience, starting over, friendship, faith and finding joy again. She is also an author, speaker and advocate for people who love someone struggling with addiction. Her memoir, Behind the Booze, The Cross She Left Me, covers that ground in prose.
Mark, by contrast, comes at songs from another direction. His writing finds material in relationships, humour, sports, fast cars, rodeos, faith and the small observations of ordinary days. He writes on his own as well as with Kim, and both of them keep separate solo catalogues alongside the shared one.
The partnership moved quickly. Kim began sharing songs she had stockpiled in March, and Mark came into her life that July. By September, My Favorite Color was out on every platform. By then, the song One Chance had already introduced them to a wide audience through its video.
Titles That Do the Work First
Country songwriting has always prized a title you can repeat, and this album is built on them. It Is What It Is opens the record with a shrug everyone recognises. Next, Paper Plates and Dixie Cups names two pieces of disposable tableware, a homely image rather than a grand one. Eight Second Ride borrows rodeo’s most famous number, the eight seconds a bull rider has to stay on to score. Rodeos also sit right on Mark’s list of subjects.
Meanwhile, What’s Up, Girl and Take Me Out Tonight read like lines from a text thread. On title alone, There’s Still a Place for You and One Good Shot point to the second chances in Kim’s writing. Finally, Keeping It Professional, the closer, reads like a joke told with a straight face. On Spotify, both writers are credited as lyricists. Kimber Legacy Enterprises Inc, the company named on the album’s copyright line, holds the composer and executive producer credits.
Kim Cross & Mark DenHartigh Put the Title Song at the Centre of a Ten-Track Country Album
The running order follows the same economy. Nine of the ten tracks finish in 3:35 or less, and the shortest, One Chance, lasts 2:48. The title track sits fifth, exactly at the midpoint, and runs 3:35. Only Take Me Out Tonight stretches past four minutes, at 4:12, just before the final two. In total, the album comes in at 32 minutes and 16 seconds.
Every track carries both names. That matters for a pair who also write apart. It marks My Favorite Color as the shared project rather than two solo sets stitched together. The plainspoken titles keep the record readable at a glance, and the short running times keep it moving.
Brooks & Dunn and Sugarland Show the Two-Writer Model
Brooks & Dunn are the clearest precedent for two writers who each had a solo career before becoming a duo. Kix Brooks and Ronnie Dunn had both charted solo singles in the 1980s. Then, in 1988, the producer Tim DuBois suggested they team up. Ronnie Dunn wrote Neon Moon, the third single from their debut album, Brand New Man. Released in February 1992, it became their third consecutive number one. Kim and Mark nod to it with their own Under That Same Neon Moon, which they say Brooks & Dunn inspired.
Sugarland show the other side of the arrangement, where one partner writes alone inside a duo. Jennifer Nettles and Kristian Bush continued as a pair after Kristen Hall left in 2006. Later, Stay, released in September 2007, became the first Sugarland song written solely by Nettles. It spent four weeks at number two on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart. Kim and Mark work both ways at once, with solo songs on one side and joint writing on the other. My Favorite Color is where the joint side lives.
Who Should Hear My Favorite Color
This album suits listeners who come to country for story songs and want the humour left in alongside the heartbreak. It also fits anyone who keeps Neon Moon and Stay on the same playlist. Readers who like to know the people behind a record will find plenty here as well. Start with One Chance, then go to the title track and let the running order carry you to the end.
From the TopMusic.News curator team: “This partnership also writes custom songs for weddings, anniversaries and memorials. My Favorite Color shows the same discipline: a clear title, a single idea and no wasted minute. That is a working songwriter’s craft, and it makes this album easy to return to.”
Follow Kim Cross & Mark DenHartigh and Stream My Favorite Color
Stream My Favorite Color on Apple Music and Deezer. Follow Kim Cross on Spotify and Mark DenHartigh on his own Spotify page. Keep up with the duo on Apple Music, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and Facebook. Their full catalogue, solo albums and custom-song service are on the official website.
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