The country artist known simply as Ernest is a couple of cocktails deep on a recent afternoon in the rooftop garden of West Hollywood’s Soho House, a diamond pendant the size of a AA battery nestled within the open neck of his blue western shirt.

The pendant, which reads DANGEROUS, is one of three matching pieces he commissioned from a jeweler in Orange County — one for Ernest, one for Hardy, one for Morgan Wallen — as a memento of the trio’s time writing songs together for Wallen’s six-times-platinum “Dangerous: The Double Album.” The western shirt, meanwhile, reflects Ernest’s love of Ralph Lauren. The designer’s career in fashion, as depicted in the 2019 documentary “Very Ralph,” “changed my life,” Ernest says. “Seriously. I watched it three or four years ago and shortly after cleaned out my closet and started shopping Double RL.” Ernest’s mood board for the cover of his new album, “Nashville, Tennessee,” contained a picture of Lauren leaning against a barn with an American flag in the background.

“We shot the cover in my barn,” he says of he and his wife, Delaney Royer, who handles Ernest’s visual content. “But we made the mood board before we even bought our farm.”

The rare Nashville native in country music, Ernest, 32, has always been interested in clothes, even if he lacked the wherewithal to indulge his passion. “High school was Sperrys, khakis and a school polo,” he says. Now, though — thanks to No. 1 country hits he’s penned for Sam Hunt (“Breaking Up Was Easy in the 90s”), Kane Brown (“One Mississippi”) and especially Wallen, with whom he wrote nearly two dozen songs across “Dangerous” and Wallen’s 2023 blockbuster “One Thing at a Time” — he’s got plenty of dough to splurge on more imaginative threads.

“I’m here for like 48 hours and I brought five outfits,” he says with a laugh at Soho House, where he’s spending part of a quick trip to L.A. before heading to Dodger Stadium to watch his childhood friend Mookie Betts battle the Giants. (Thus, perhaps, his choice of blue.)

As a songwriter, Ernest specializes in creating melodies and vocal lines that adapt a rapper’s flow patterns to the cadences of country music; his tunes embody the casual hybridity of a generation that grew up in the overlapping shadows of Garth Brooks and Snoop Dogg. His latest hit, “I Had Some Help” by the duo of Post Malone and Wallen, dropped Friday and rocketed over the weekend to the top of Spotify’s Global Top 50 chart with more than 13 million streams.

“Ernest is one of the most magical songwriters in Nashville,” says Jelly Roll, the Southern rapper turned country singer who wrote his chart-topping “Son of a Sinner” with Ernest. “When we look back at the 2020s, he’ll be one of the names remembered for bringing an entire sound to this decade.”

Yet as an artist he’s trying something slightly different on “Nashville, Tennessee,” his second LP under his own name after 2022’s “Flower Shops (The Album).” It’s a sprawling 26-track collection that reaches back to an old-fashioned country-music sensibility, with rip-roaring honky-tonk jams up against finely detailed string-band excursions and handsome tear-in-your-beer ballads. Among Ernest’s goals for the project is introducing these traditional styles to the younger listeners tuned into his more modern work.