Strait From the Vault: ERNEST ‘Could’ Have a Hit With an Abandoned Gem

It’s a harsh fact of life for songwriters that the bulk of their creative output is consigned to a shelf, never to be heard outside a small group of friends and co-workers.

By contrast, nearly every story a reporter turns in typically gets printed. And the vast majority of broadcasters’ voiceovers make it onto the airwaves.

But where the reporters and air personalities are tasked with turning in new content on a daily basis, a great song gets played repeatedly for weeks, months or years. So songwriters keep churning out new material on a regular basis, only to send it into a landscape where a fraction of the industry’s output ever gets significant attention. Under those conditions, ERNEST’s new single, “Would If I Could,” is an outright miracle, a song composed in the 1990s that spent most of the last 30 years collecting figurative dust on a digital shelf.

“There’s a thousand songs coming in today,” ERNEST speculates. “You can imagine, between now and 1993, how many songs are just sitting there.”

Only one of those songs, though, was penned by Dean Dillon (“Tennessee Whiskey,” “Ocean Front Property”) and artist-writer Skip Ewing (“You Had Me From Hello,” “Love, Me”). They were two of country’s most significant writers during the ’90s, but they only collaborated once. Ewing brought in the hook, they worked through it in short order — and never tackled another song.

“I had that little idea, ‘I would if I could,’ and when I knew I was going to write with him, I thought, ‘Well, that could be right in his wheelhouse,’” Ewing remembers. “We didn’t spend very much time together, and I’ve never talked to him since. It’s the only song we’ve ever written.”

The title, “I Would If I Could,” is a phrase that stands on its own, but it’s also part of a larger meme, “I would if I could, but I can’t, so I shan’t,” that has been in circulation for decades. It appears, in fact, in the dialogue of Jim Parsons’ nerdy Big Bang Theory character, Sheldon Cooper.

Funny enough, neither Ewing nor Dillon had ever heard it. But when they chipped away at the chorus, they ended up chasing a more colloquial version of the same sentiment: “I would if I could, but I can’t, so I won’t.” And then they tagged it with an extension: “But I want to.”

The chorus became an intricate word puzzle. “Want,” “like” and “love” are weaved into the text — along with “I’d love to say, ‘Yes’ ” and “I’m tellin’ you, ‘No.’ ” That maze is attached to a spiraling melody that sounds, as ERNEST notes, a bit like the George Strait hit “The Chair,” written by Dillon.

The first verse — cast in a lower range with a different, but compatible, phrasing — established the story of a former partner asking for a second chance. The singer is respectfully skeptical, though tempted, and the melancholy tone and winding melody add heartbreaking tension to the encounter. “He’s trying to say no,” Ewing observes. “If he was sure, the ‘I want to’ wouldn’t be there, so I still don’t know which one wins.”

Strait, who famously recorded dozens of Dillon’s compositions, got the first crack at “I Would If I Could.” “Every Monday of the week George recorded, I’d go to his office at 10 a.m. in the morning over at [manager] Erv [Woolsey’s] place,” Dillon says. “The stuff he’d like, he’d keep, and then when he cut the session, if I got something, it was all good. And most of the times I did.”

Strait apparently liked “I Would If I Could,” because it got considered during a session. Producer Joey Moi (Morgan Wallen, Florida Georgia Line) notes that when they worked on ERNEST’s recording, fiddler Larry Franklin recognized the song from that earlier Strait date. Strait had toyed with it during that session, but had other songs that were just as good and passed on “I Would If I Could.” Dillon was unaware that Strait had come that close to cutting it. “That’s one more thing I can b–ch to him about,” Dillon deadpans.

The song languished in the Sony/ATV vault for years until July 2023 when Ewing’s demo was issued on numerous platforms. Lainey Wilson cut a version with a fair amount of minor chords for Apple Music’s Lost & Found series, appearing in November 2023. And Dillon’s daughter, Jessie Jo Dillon (“Messed Up As Me,” “Am I Okay?”), brought it to ERNEST’s attention. He loved it.

“All of it,” he clarifies. “The way it felt; I thought the lyric was awesome. Skip’s performance on the demo is very inspiring as well. I mean, Dean Dillon guitar chords and melodies are just as much of a signature as a Banksy painting.”

ERNEST cut his own version of “I Would If I Could,” mixing a few old-school session players — including Franklin and guitarist Brent Mason — with other musicians who have joined the A-list ranks in more recent years. They developed a starkly spacious arrangement, with Bryan Sutton’s acoustic guitar leading the opening verse. Jerry Roe doesn’t start his drum part until the second line of the chorus, and much of the band — including Franklin, Mason, Sutton and steel guitarist Dan Dugmore — operated in unison on many of the key instrumental turnarounds, mimicking a signature Strait element.

“It has to sound like an old classic George Strait song,” Moi says. “We all heard it and barely had to talk about it in the room. It was so obvious how it had to be cut. Every musician walked away and knew the assignment.”

The sparseness of the track let the nuances of ERNEST’s vocals shine. He enunciates the consonants crisply, his breaths are detectable, and those touches enhance the fragility in his performance. “It had to be intimate, but it also had to hurt at the same time,” Moi says. “That’s a hard thing for certain singers to do. Some singers, they kind of have one gear and they sing one way, and they don’t emote the best. But ERN, I feel like he nailed it.”

Wilson added her voice to ERNEST’s version, and their collaboration appeared in April. But she had her own album in the works, and Big Loud released his solo version of “Would If I Could” (the first “I” is shaved off the title) to country radio via PlayMPE on Aug. 21. “Lainey is one of the busiest women in country music, rightfully so,” ERNEST says. “I can’t burden her with another thing to do, but I still want this song on country radio.”

Its official impact date is Oct. 7. Two previous hits, “Flower Shops” and “Cowboys,” teamed him with Wallen; surprisingly, “Would If I Could” — after sitting ignored for three decades — is ERNEST’s first solo release to radio.

“I’m super thankful for the features I’ve had at radio,” he says, “but I’m excited to go do the work it’s going to take to run this song as far as it can go.”

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