Makin’ Tracks: No Bull: Kolby Cooper Makes ‘Excuses’ Work For His First Radio Single

When psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross introduced the five stages of grief in her 1969 book On Death and Dying, the original intent was to teach about coping with the loss of significant people in our lives.

But those stages — denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance — don’t apply solely to the passage of our loved ones. They play out with all sorts of losses, including the end of a job, a friend moving away, the crash of a dream or a romantic breakup. Kolby Cooper’s first radio single, “Excuses,” puts that latter scenario into a hyper context, seemingly cycling through three stages before the first chorus even appears.

The pain “may not be as great as grieving a lost loved one,” Cooper reasons, “but it’s still a bad one for a lot of people. And I really think we did a decent job of getting that ‘Oh my God, what has happened’ feeling.”

It helped that Cooper’s road guitarist, Paul Oliger, offered a real-life road map when the subject emerged in a writing room on Oct. 13, 2020. Oliger’s girlfriend had dumped him the weekend prior, and all of her namby-pamby waffling in the breakup only made it worse. 

“She was like, ‘You’re too good for me,’ and ‘I don’t deserve you’ — all this bulls–t, like, ‘You can do better than me,’ ” recalls Cooper. “Everything was just all these excuses.”

That single word, “excuses,” provided the impetus to explore the topic when Cooper met up with fellow songwriters Jordan Walker (“When It Rains It Pours,” “Can’t Do Without Me”) and Brett Tyler (“Cold Beer Calling My Name,” “Wild As Her”) at Combustion Music in Nashville. After perhaps an hour of scrolling through ideas that didn’t spark much interest, Tyler ran across “Excuses.” He had the title, the melody for the back half of the chorus and not much more. But, of course, Cooper had his bandmember’s heartbreak storyline. Those elements were a better match, it seems, than Oliger and his ex-girlfriend.

“I think it took like an hour to write,” Walker says. “It was one of those things where we didn’t really overthink anything and we kept everything simple. I think that’s what kind of helps portray it to the audience because it’s not something you have to think about. You just hear it once, and you get it.”

They developed the scenario in a realistic manner, capturing a moment that nearly everyone has experienced.

“For me, it was a relationship from my past,” notes Tyler. “When we started talking about stories and things like that, we were just kind of like, you know, ‘That’s just excuses. Let’s cut through the crap.’”

They did that very directly in the chorus. The singer calls out his girlfriend’s let-him-down-easy lines as “bulls–t,” saying the word outright in the initial version of “Excuses.” “I like a well-placed cuss word,” Tyler says. “We were all kind of against saying ‘B.S.’ because B.S. just sounds like such a ridiculous way to say ‘bull–it.’ ”

Verse two allows the guy to vent even more, though it also obliquely references the can’t-win situation the girlfriend is in. He laments in the stanza that she “coulda saved us both some time/ And just left me a letter.” Of course, had she split by writing a letter — or, worse, by text — he would have thought she was cold and heartless.

“We were trying to figure out how we were going to write into the second chorus,” says Walker. “I had the line, ‘You coulda come up with a couple better,’ and so needed a rhyme for ‘better.’ It was kind of a joke at first. I was like, ‘What if she just wrote a letter?’ We talked about it, that he’d probably be even more mad if she did write a letter, but it just rhymed so well that we ran with it.”

They wrote a bridge that outlined a few more options for how to dump a man and left time for a guitar solo, too. Before they parted company, they cut a work tape with acoustic guitars that Cooper could play for his producer, Philip Mosley (Blacktop Mojo, Colby Keeling). Mosley subsequently recorded a demo that sounded a bit heavier than the work tape, as well as a new scratch vocal on Cooper before a late-2020 session at Sound Stage.

The studio band mixed familiar country session players and local rock guys: bassist Jacob Lowery, drummer Miles McPherson, Hammond B3 player Will Houchens, steel guitarist Justin Schipper and three other guitarists — Tim Galloway on acoustic and Rob McNelley and Spence Peppard on electric. The crew mostly found its own direction while framing the music with a harder edge than what they heard on the demo.

“The last thing you want to do is just tell somebody of that caliber, ‘Play this,’” Mosley reasons. “You’ve got those guys that are playing on Joe Bonamassa albums and playing with Bob Seger. The last thing you need is some little producer from East Texas telling those guys, ‘Here’s what you’re going to play.’ ”

They started the production with drums, guitar and piano all playing light eighth notes, creating forward motion behind an otherwise languid and pensive verse melody. But that led to a bigger-sounding chorus. “Miles McPherson is just a monster,” says Walker, who attended the session. “Watching him bring it to life behind the drums was the moment that we all looked around like, ‘Damn, this could be a lot bigger than we thought it was.’ ”

“Excuses” helped Cooper secure his recording deal with Wheelhouse, which featured his unvarnished “bulls–t” in the vocal on his EP Boy From Anderson County, released Aug. 6, 2021. When they issued a single to radio via PlayMPE on Aug. 29, 2022, the profanity was edited to sound like a sonic asterisk — “bullsh*t.” They ended up trying multiple approaches to it, and finally, Mosley was summoned to Nashville from his family vacation on Sept. 10, the same day Cooper made his Opry debut. Cooper didn’t want to bleep it, so they cut a version of the line that changed “some bullsh*t that you said” to “somethin’ that you said,” offering an even safer option to broadcasters.

“He wasn’t a fan of doing a radio edit,” Mosley says. “We just backed off trying to be clever with how we got around the edit. And he just said, ‘You know what? I’ll just write another completely different line, just to take its place.’ And it worked out great.”

In its fifth charted week, “Excuses” moves to a new high of No. 52 on the Country Airplay list dated Sept. 29. It’s now a staple in Cooper’s live set, which finds Oliger — whose 2020 breakup inspired it — handling the song’s guitar solo onstage. Now engaged to another woman, Oliger is no longer grieving as he was when “Excuses” was conceived.

“He definitely wouldn’t be as happy with his ex as he is now,” says Cooper. “The thing was, the week after she broke up with him, she was on a date with a rich dude from Dallas. And I don’t know if they’re still together, but I’m sure she’s happier wherever she is.” 

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