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Keith Urban and Kix Brooks are among the five newest hitmakers set to be inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame.
The two country artists — who each wrote several of their own hits — will join the hall alongside fellow inductees Casey Beathard, David Lee Murphy and Rafe Van Hoy.
Since its founding in 1970, the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame has honored many of Music City’s premier songcrafters, inducting 235 songwriters, including Bill Anderson, Bobby Braddock, Garth Brooks, Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, Don and Phil Everley, Harlan Howard, Loretta Lynn, Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Hank Williams, Cindy Walker, Fred Rose and Cindy Walker.
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During a press conference held at Nashville’s historic Columbia Studio A on Thursday (Aug. 3), the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame executive director Mark Ford and chair of the board of directors Rich Hallworth revealed that Beathard and Murphy will be added to hall’s ranks, inducted into the contemporary songwriter category, while Van Hoy will be inducted in the veteran songwriter category. Urban will be inducted as the contemporary songwriter-artist, while Brooks will be inducted as the veteran songwriter-artist.
During the press conference, Urban recalled his early days in Nashville, his first time visiting the Bluebird Café and his years spent in writing rooms along Nashville’s Music Row. He also expressed gratitude for being inducted alongside Brooks.
“Kix was one of the first that came along, who sat at [Nashville venue] Jack’s Guitar Bar to hear me play, and later took me on tour. He’s been a champion ever since. I’m honored to be here with you,” Urban told Brooks.
Urban penned many of his own hits, including “But For the Grace of God,” “Somebody Like You,” “Wasted Time” and the CMA Award nominated songs “Tonight I Wanna Cry” and “Better Life.” His 2009 song “Sweet Thing” was named SESAC’s country song of the year, while 2012’s “For You” was featured in the film Act of Valor and earned Urban a Golden Globe nomination for best original song.
Country Music Hall of Fame member (as part of the duo Brooks & Dunn) Brooks had a hand in writing many of the duo’s hits, including “Brand New Man,” “My Next Broken Heart,” “Lost and Found,” the 1995 ACM song of the year nominee “You’re Gonna Miss Me When I’m Gone” and the 2003 CMA song of the year nominee “Red Dirt Road.” He has also written chart-toppers including John Conlee’s “I’m Only In It For the Love,” Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s “Modern Day Romance” and Highway 101’s “Who’s Lonely Now.”
Brooks said, “I walked in here and saw these guys and was like, ‘We’re doing this together?’” He recalled a time when he and David Lee Murphy were sweeping floors at what is now the Musicians Hall of Fame. He wrote “I’m Only In It for the Love” with fellow inductee-elect Van Hoy.
“I came here as fan of songwriters. That’s all I wanted to do,” Brooks said. “My heroes were not just artists, but artists who wrote their own songs. To even think I would even be recognized in the same sentence as the mention of their names …”
California-born, Virginia-raised Beathard moved to Nashville in 1991; by 1998, he earned his first writing deal and penned the title track to Kenny Chesney’s I Will Stand album. In 2002, he earned his first No. 1 with Tracy Byrd’s “Ten Rounds with Jose Cuervo.” Additional hit writing credits followed, including “Find Out Who Your Friends Are” (Tracy Lawrence), “Cleaning This Gun” (Rodney Atkins), Kenny Chesney’s “Don’t Blink,” “No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems” and “The Boys of Fall.” He’s also frequently collaborated with Eric Church, writing “Like Jesus Does,” “Hell of a View” and “Like a Wrecking Ball.” He also penned “There Was Jesus,’ recorded by Dolly Parton and Zach Williams. Beathard was named BMI’s country songwriter of the year in 2004 and 2008, and was named NSAI’s songwriter of the year in 2008.
“I’m just grateful to God and to everybody in this room … for considering me,” Beathard said. “It’s humbling beyond words and I’m just grateful.”
Murphy moved to Nashville in 1983, before forming the band The Blue Tick Hounds and eventually signing with MCA Records a decade later. In 1994, his debut album spurred the hit singles “Party Crowd” and “Dust on the Bottle.” In the 2000s, he began writing songs for other artists, penning several hits for Kenny Chesney, including “Living in Fast Forward,” “Here and Now” and “Everything’s Gonna Be Alright,” which Murphy performed as a duet with Chesney. The song earned Chesney and Murphy the 2018 CMA Award for musical event of the year. Murphy also penned hits including “Big Green Tractor” (Jason Aldean), “Why We Drink” (Justin Moore) and “Are You Gonna Kiss Me or Not” (Thompson Square).
“It’s a huge honor to be here today,” Murphy said. “Most writers, this is one of those ten feet off the ground moments … The songwriter community in Nashville is such a tight-knit community … guys that I write with all the time. It’s a special group of people that are songwriters in Nashville. They are supportive and hugely talented and creative. That makes it even more special that I am here today with these guys … this is something I will always remember.”
Raised in Bristol, Tenn., Van Hoy and his family moved to Nashville after he graduated from high school in 1972. Curly Putman signed him to Green Grass Music, which led to a publishing deal with Tree International. In 1976, Van Hoy found success as a writer on the George Jones/Tammy Wynette classic “Golden Ring.” His catalog of writing hits would grow to include the 1983 best country song Grammy-nominated “Baby I Lied” (Deborah Allen), “Friday Night Blues” and “I’m Only In It For the Love” (John Conlee), “Hurt Me Bad (In a Real Good Way)” (Patty Loveless), “Let’s Stop Talkin’ About It” (Janie Fricke) and “What’s Forever For” (recorded by artists including Michael Martin Murphey, Anne Murray, Johnny Mathis, B.J. Thomas and Olivia Newton-John).
“To be in the Hall of Fame is something I always dreamed of,” Van Hoy said. “To be included with the club of brilliant minds and brilliant songwriter that are in the Hall of Fame is unbelievably humbling and immense gratitude from my heart.” He also noted that earlier in the day, his phone started playing Tammy Wynette’s “’Til I Get It Right.” “I hadn’t touched it,” he said. “It was like my buddies [the song’s writers] Red Lane and Larry Henley were saying, ‘Welcome in.’”
The honorees will formally inducted into the prestigious organization during the 53rd Anniversary Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame Gala on Wednesday, Oct. 11, to be held at Nashville’s Music City Center.
Country music fans will be hearing more Randy Travis music soon.
On Wednesday (Aug. 2), Travis’ team announced an upcoming concert feting Country Music Hall of Fame member, as ‘A Heroes and Friends Tribute to Randy Travis’ is set for Oct. 24 at Huntsville, Alabama’s VBC Propst Arena.
During a press conference announcing the event, Travis’ wife Mary Travis told reporters that “the chances are 100%” that fans will hear more music from Travis soon, by way of a forthcoming From the Vault album of songs that music fans have never before heard.
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“It has already been mixed,” Travis said. “Everything’s ready to go by Kyle Lehning, Randy’s producer….a whole other album of Randy Travis music.”
The seven-time Grammy winner’s most recent full-length studio project came with the 2014 covers album Influence Vol. 2: The Man I Am, which was recorded prior to the “Forever and Ever, Amen” hitmaker’s near-fatal stroke in 2013.
Over the past few years, Travis’s team has released a few “From the Vault” songs from Travis’s archive of recordings, including “Fool’s Love Affair,” “One in a Row” and “Lead Me Home.”
A performer lineup for the October Huntsville, Alabama show has yet to be revealed.
However, this isn’t the first ‘Heroes & Friends’ tribute concert for Travis; in 2017, dozens of artists including Garth Brooks, Wynonna Judd, Kane Brown, Kenny Rogers and Josh Turner performed at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena, in Travis’ honor.
In addition to music, Travis and his team have kept his life, music and career in the forefront in recent years by releasing the 2020 documentary More Life, as well as Travis’ 2019 memoir, Forever and Ever, Amen: A Memoir of Music, Faith and Braving the Storms of Life.
For years during their concerts, contemporary christian music sibling duo For King & Country — brothers Joel and Luke Smallbone — have been sharing the story of their family’s immigration from Australia to the United States. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news Now, their story is coming […]
Nate Smith reveals his favorite Northern California slang at the Billboard Country Live event. Nate Smith:Hi, I’m Nate Smith, and here are some of my favorite Northern California slang words. In Northern California, we say “hella.” Southern California doesn’t like that — they think it’s kind of silly, but we say “hella cool,” “hella this,” […]
As Jason Aldean‘s “Try That in a Small Town” tops the Billboard Hot 100, giving the country singer his very first No. 1 on the all-genre tally of his career, his wife Brittany Aldean took to social media to celebrate — and to clap back at critics on social media as the song and its video have been embroiled in controversy.
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Brittany shared the news of her husband’s chart-topping status on Tuessday (Aug. 1) with her 2.5 million Instagram followers, saying, “Well, yesterday was a monumental day for Jason Aldean. #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart!!…a career first. That sure did backfire, didn’t it?? The best fans EVERRRR,” followed with four heart emojis.
The post also included photos of the couple hugging, as well as a photo of Jason with the couple’s son Memphis and daughter Navy.
Aldean previously earned a Hot 100 top 10 song in 2011, with “Dirt Road Anthem.”
The country singer’s chart-topping moment is part of a history-making week on the Hot 100. With Aldean at No. 1, Morgan Wallen’s “Last Night” at No. 2 and Luke Combs’ “Fast Car” at No. 3, country hits take the Hot 100’s top three spots in a single week for the first time, dating to the Hot 100’s inception in August 1958.
“Try That in a Small Town” was released back in May, but garnered attention after the video — which featured footage of looting, carjackings, rioting and flags burning — was released. CMT soon pulled the clip from its video rotation, sparking both praise and backlash from music fans. Many social media commentators criticized the music video as racist, pro-gun, anti-Black Lives Matter and anti-protests.
Aldean later issued a statement regarding the controversy. “In the past 24 hours I have been accused of releasing a pro-lynching song (a song that has been out since May) and was subject to a comparison that I (direct quote) was not too pleased with the nationwide BLM protests,” his message on Instagram Stories and Facebook said. “These references are not only meritless, but dangerous. There is not a single lyric in the song that references race or points to it and there isn’t a single video clip that isn’t real news footage- and while I can try and respect others to have their own interpretation of a song with music- this one goes too far.”
The video was later edited to remove imagery of a Black Lives Matter protest and additional footage later in the video, shortening the clip by six seconds. Aldean’s label, BBR Music Group, noted the removal was due to clearance issues, according to ABC News.
See Brittany Aldean’s post below:
One of Jimmie Allen‘s sexual assault accusers has a message for the embattled country star: You can’t sue me for handing over your cell phone – which she calls “evidence of a crime” – to the police.
The new court filing came from a woman who claims that Allen assaulted her in a Las Vegas hotel room and secretly recorded it. In her June lawsuit, she said she took the phone as evidence and handed it over to police. But in a countersuit last month, Allen claimed she essentially stole his property by doing so.
On Tuesday, Allen’s accuser (known as Jane Doe 2) asked a federal judge to dismiss that accusation – calling his claims about theft “nothing more than harassment of a victim and abuse of the judicial process.”
“Now, in addition to being a victim of sexual abuse and illegal video voyeurism, Plaintiff is faced with Defendant’s attempt to harass and intimidate her,” Doe 2’s lawyers wrote. “Allowing a defendant to sue a crime victim for reporting a crime and turning over evidence of that crime to the police is directly contrary to public policy.”
A representative for Allen did not immediately return a request for comment.
Allen, a once-rising country music star, has faced a swift industry backlash after being hit with two separate sexual assault lawsuits. The first case, filed on May 11, claims he “manipulated and used his power” to repeatedly harass and assault an unnamed “Jane Doe” on his management team.
The second case, filed on June 9 by Doe 2, claims that while she “willingly joined Allen in the bedroom” of a Las Vegas hotel, he later ejaculated inside her against her explicit wishes – and filmed the entire sexual encounter without her knowledge. Doe 2 says she took the phone with her when she left and, after Allen refused to share the password so she could delete the recordings, that she passed it along to the Las Vegas Police Department.
Last month, Allen responded to both lawsuits by denying all the allegations against him. In the case of Doe 2, he admitted to having “unprotected sex” with her, but said he “did not ejaculate during the encounter.” He also admitted to recording the incident but, crucially, said he had secured her explicit permission to do so.
He also countersued with allegations of his own, accusing Doe 2 of “conversion” — a civil tort similar to theft that involves someone taking property that doesn’t belong to them: “By taking his camera phone without permission, Jane Doe 2 wrongfully exerted a distinct act of dominion over Allen’s personal property,” his lawyers wrote at the time.
In her response on Tuesday, Doe 2’s lawyer say that taking the phone was not a form of civil wrongdoing, but merely “her exercise of rights as a victim of crime.” She cited previous cases that excused such seizures, like one in which a babysitter was sued for taking photos of child abuse.
“Plaintiff turned evidence of alleged illegal conduct, i.e., the recording of Plaintiff in a state of undress and of sexual acts without her consent, over to the police to investigate,” Doe 2’s lawyers wrote. “The law does not condemn victims for doing so.”
A decade after 22-time Grammy winner Vince Gill and steel guitar virtuoso Paul Franklin (who has more than 30 CMA Awards nominations to his credit) crafted Bakersfield, which paid homage to the central California country sounds made famous by Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, the two musicians have reunited to shine a light on the music of Country Music Hall of Famer Ray Price on Sweet Memories: The Music of Ray Price & The Cherokee Cowboys, out Aug. 4.
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Seated in Gill’s home recording studio in Nashville — a space with shelves lined with many of the Grammys, CMA Awards and ACM Awards Gill has amassed during his nearly five-decade career, but also a room filled with dozens of guitars, including a white guitar he’s played since 1978, another guitar his parents gifted him for Christmas and one he bought when he was 18, living in Kentucky and “dead broke,” Gill says — longtime tourmates and studio collaborators Gill and Franklin discuss an album that chronicles Price’s life and career, pairing Gill’s illustrious tenor and fleet guitar fretwork and Franklin’s nimble steel playing.
“I’ve told everybody that in the making of these records, it’s more about the musician in both of us than it is about me as the singer,” Gill says. “We chose the songs we chose because it gave us more freedom to play than maybe we would have had on some of those big ballads.”
Between 1952 and 1989, Perryville, Texas native Price entered more than 100 songs on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart, earning 46 top 10 hits and eight No. 1s, including “Crazy Arms,” the Bill Anderson-penned “City Lights” and the Kris Kristofferson-penned “For the Good Times.” Price also recorded more than 50 albums during his career.
Gill and Franklin eschewed recording many of Price’s biggest hits; instead, Sweet Memories largely favors more obscure Price recordings.
“I gotta be honest, there were several songs that I didn’t know who wrote them. I didn’t know ‘Kissing Your Picture’ was a Mel Tillis song, and I didn’t know Bobby Bare had a part in writing ‘Walking Slow and Thinkin’ About Her.’ I knew Willie Nelson wrote ‘Healing Hands of Time,’” Gill says with a soft laugh.
Longtime on-air personality and music scholar Eddie Stubbs, who retired from his roles as WSM Radio personality and Grand Ole Opry announcer in 2020, played a key role, pointing Gill and Franklin to more arcane songs.
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“He’s the greatest disciple of loving Ray Price,” Gill says, recalling a time when he listened to Stubbs’ radio show while on tour with the Eagles. “He played a song I had never heard before and I called him from Australia and said, ‘What’s that?’ He said, ‘I’ll play it again for you again.’ And I’d just call him up out of the blue and say, ‘Play me something,’ and I would take notes and write down some of the songs he would play. He was a big part of pointing me toward some stuff that was not the obvious choices.”
“I remember we were trying to find five or six songs. I came over and Vince broke out this legal pad and I’m expecting it to be one page — but Vince had like a hundred songs,” Franklin recalls. “I didn’t know a lot of these. We’d listen to songs and compare them — it wasn’t like, ‘We gotta pick a shuffle.’ We listened to a lot of shuffles.”
During his career, Price helped usher in two major sonic innovations in country music, beginning in the 1950s with his signature “Crazy Arms,” written by Ralph Mooney and Charles Seals. That song introduced what would become the signature “Ray Price Beat,” a 4/4 shuffle, spearheaded by Buddy Killen’s bass line, bringing a ferocity to his brand of honkytonk that would influence country music for decades. The song cemented itself atop Billboard’s Country Songs chart for 20 weeks, toppling Carl Perkins’s “Blue Suede Shoes” from the chart’s pinnacle during a time when rockabilly artists such as Perkins and Elvis Presley were regularly making inroads on the country charts.
A decade later, Price was again prominent as country music recalibrated into the pop-aimed, string-laden sounds of the 1960s. Sweet Memories includes a rendition of the classic folk song “Danny Boy,” written by Frederic Weatherly, which became a top 10 country hit for Price in 1967, representing a shift from hard-charging honky-tonk singer to countrypolitan crooner.
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“He was probably the first successful country singer to do the full orchestra with ‘For the Good Times,’ and all that,” Franklin says.
Unlike Price’s version, the Gill/Franklin rendering of “Danny Boy” features steel guitar front and center. “This song allowed Vince [to do] voice leading, when the voice gets up to the change and it’s like he’s pulling the band along. You can’t hardly do that in modern music, but these old songs had a lot of space. It’s a unique cut,” Franklin says.
Two songs on the album — “Healing Hands of Time” and the Hank Williams Sr.-written “Weary Blues From Waitin’ — nod to two of Price’s essential musical connections.
In the early 1950s, Price joined Williams on tour and recorded “Weary.” At one point, the two musicians were roommates and Price used Williams’ backing band, The Drifting Cowboys, as his own backing band. After Williams’ death on New Year’s Day in 1953, Price continued touring with members of the Drifting Cowboys, which later morphed into Price’s the Cherokee Cowboys.
Price’s musical acuity bore out not only in his ability to encompass an array of styles, but also in the caliber of talent that passed through the Cherokee Cowboys over the years: Johnny Bush, Buddy Emmons, Buddy Spicher, Nelson, Roger Miller, and Johnny Paycheck, among them. Meanwhile, Nelson, Harlan Howard and Hank Cochran wrote for Pamper Music, which Price co-owned (two Cochran tracks, “I’d Fight the World” and “You Wouldn’t Know Love,” appear on the album).
“That speaks to his talent,” Franklin says. “You can see it happening in any period of country music, where there’s somebody out there that everybody’s going ‘Wow, this guy,’ and everyone wants to be around them. Ray was that guy and he schooled a lot of other great artists.”
While Nelson was playing bass as part of the Cherokee Cowboys, Price recorded his song “Night Life,” making it the title track for his 1963 album. The two would go on to record together several times, including the 1980 album San Antonio Rose, the 2003 project Run That by Me One More Time, and their 2007 album with Merle Haggard, Last of the Breed. Nelson and Price earned a Grammy for their duet “Lost Highway” in 2008.
“Their friendship played a part in this,” Gill says. “All this stuff has a deep, personal meaning. He and Willie were best buds, and these are just crazy great songs.”
Adding to the musical ties, Franklin and Gill worked with Price on his last album, Beauty Is…The Final Sessions, which released in 2014, just four months after Price’s death in December 2013, at the age of 87. Gill lent vocals to two tracks on the album. Franklin and Gill, as part of The Time Jumpers, also played an indelible role in another Price tribute project: Nelson’s 2016 album For the Good Times: A Tribute to Ray Price.
“The Time Jumpers were on about half of those songs and we cut a bunch of great shuffles and triple fiddles. Gill recalls, adding, “It was a great experience until [producer] Fred [Foster] called me and said, ‘I need you to sing harmony on about half of this record.’ I said, ‘That’s hard to do,’ and he said, ‘You’re the only man I know that can do it,’ so I gave it a whirl. I was doing like three words at a time. It was painstaking, but it was cool,” Gill says of the process of singing harmony to Nelson’s famously fluid vocal phrasing.
Franklin and Gill hope Sweet Memories will bring listeners deeper into Price’s works.
“I think that Ray’s legacy will be how much he changed music,” Franklin says. “Everybody was following him because he was a singer. When he put strings on, you had Faron Young, you had everybody else doing the same thing. I think there are new artists now, like Ernest, who want to know about the past, and have a deep respect for older artists. Hopefully this record will say, ‘Hey, it’s worth looking at these songs.’ And there are a lot of great singers out there, but the songs they sing are really wordy. It’d be nice every now and then, maybe they’ll slip a song in there and get influenced by Ray.”
Gill notes that Bakersfield and Sweet Memories are just the beginning of salutes by Franklin and him.
“We always intended on doing a series and we still have several in our back pocket that we’d love to do — George Jones, Conway [Twitty], Little Jimmy Dickens, are still kind of in the works of possibilities.”
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In the chorus of his latest single, “Burn It Down,” Parker McCollum fantasizes intensely about reducing the memories of a freshly ended relationship to “smoldering coals.”
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It’s a subtly unique idea, that word “smolder.” It’s not particularly obscure, but it’s not one that appears in songs every day, and it’s a key entry point to the tone of “Burn It Down.” The production is an all-out blaze by the time it reaches a guitar solo more than two minutes through its three-minute, 36-second running time. But it’s a slow burn getting there, and McCollum credits producer Jon Randall (Dierks Bentley, Miranda Lambert) for that patient pacing.
“I wanted the first [chorus] to really just floor it,” McCollum says. “He was like, ‘Man, you just got to make them wait, you just got to make them wait.’ And I remember being like, ‘I think he’s got to give it to them.’ Now when I hear it in the store or on the radio or whatever, I’m glad we waited to grow.”
McCollum’s enthusiasm is the opposite of the attitude he brought to the writing session when he hosted the Love Junkies — a.k.a. songwriters Liz Rose (“You Belong With Me,” “Girl Crush”), Lori McKenna (“Humble and Kind,” “It All Comes Out in the Wash”) and Hillary Lindsey (“Blue Ain’t Your Color,” “Ghost Story”) — at his Nashville home on Sept. 27, 2022.
“I was burned out, and I so did not want to be a songwriter at all for several months,” he remembers.His album Never Enough, released May 12, was already finished, and when Rose arrived first, he confessed to her in the kitchen that he wasn’t sure why they were even writing. It wasn’t an encouraging start.
“I’m thinking, ‘Oh, thanks, you know. We’re all here,’ ” she recalls. “And then I thought, ‘You know, Parker, you say that, but you know what always happens. You write that song that you didn’t have, and you can’t believe that you wrote [it].’ He goes, ‘I know. How many times has that happened?’
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Neither told McKenna or Lindsey he wasn’t into it, and once the actual work began, they spent about a half-hour just talking and strumming guitars. At some point, he worked into a slow-boiling groove and repeated the phrase “Burn it down” as if it were a mantra. “I love songs like that,” says Lindsey. “But it felt like the emotion wasn’t all the way there.”
McCollum soon shifted into another gear, filling in extra lines after each “Burn it down”: “ ’Til it’s ashes and smoke,” “To the smoldering coals,” “ ’Til I don’t want you no more.”
“It’s almost like it’s an answer to ‘Burn it down,’ ” Lindsey says. “It just started to develop.”
As they inserted those extra lines between the “Burn it down” phrases, McCollum began to see its bigger-picture potential, and that’s when he became fully engaged.
“He was just sitting down in a chair — I feel like it was an armchair vibe, like one of those cushy armchairs,” says Lindsey. “But he threw his hand back. It was as if he were onstage, and he was like, ‘Burn it,’ and he started visualizing what he wanted onstage. He was like, ‘Oh my gosh, y’all. I think we’re on to something. I need this. I need this visually. I need the fire in the back. I need this energy for my set.’ It all just started coming together, and when he threw his arm back, I was like, ‘Hell, yeah. You throw that arm back, partner.’”
They wrote a good part of the chorus, then shifted back to the beginning, where McCollum developed a symbolic line about an ex scattering the goodbye across the lawn. The protagonist finds himself stuck with a house full of memories. “Burn it down,” he concludes. Then in verse two, he considers the bed and the passion it represented. “Burn it down.”
By the time they got to the third verse, they focused more closely on vanquishing abstractions rather than physical items, and that brought more clarity to the song’s metaphoric disposition.
“My drummer was telling me he actually knows a guy who burned down his girlfriend’s house,” notes McCollum. “He’s literally going to go to prison for a considerable amount of time, and I kind of made the joke, ‘I hope he hasn’t been listening to my song.’ I don’t think anybody has listened to the song and actually done it, I would hope. I guess in today’s world, you never know.”
They made a guitar/vocal work tape at the end of the session with Lindsey providing harmony. Ahead of the third chorus, Lindsey freestyled another smoldering “Burn it, burn it,” teeing up the finale. McCollum brought that rough recording to Randall, who prefers that bare-bones format.
“I love listening to the work tapes,” Randall says. “Because I’ve spent enough time as a writer and I know what goes on in those rooms, I can get a pretty good idea of what the mindset was just because I kind of know the process. And I think that that works in my favor, more than it doesn’t.”
Randall recognized McKenna was using an alternate guitar tuning and wanted to re-create its open, droning sound during the tracking date at Nashville’s Blackbird Studios. Session player Jedd Hughes invented a staccato counterpoint riff, and the band built up gradually with each new stanza, primarily from drummer Chad Cromwell’s ascending intensity: After two verses, the kick drum joins subtly at the chorus, and the full kit is employed by verse three. The searing guitar solo brings the entire band to its maximum point and, after a quieter bridge, maxes out again for the finale.
Engineer F. Reid Shippen helped even more in post-production, adding a shaker at verse two and, most notably, running McCollum’s voice through a filter during the first two verses. The effect hollows out his tone and emphasizes the consonants and breaths in his performance. “I think his vocal is smoldering,” says Rose. “The whole song is, honestly, the tempo and the mood of the track, and the way he’s singing it. It’s a lot of smoldering.”
When MCA Nashville decided to make it a single, Randall did a quick, more typical, remix that dropped the vocal filtering and ramped up the sound before the first chorus. By then, everyone agreed that the slow-building approach was right for this release.
“Everybody kind of fought me on it, and I think everybody thought I was crazy to not go big on the first chorus,” Randall says. “But eventually everybody came back and said, ‘The coolest part of the song is that it waits to get big.’ Which breaks [with] the way everybody thinks in town.”
Country radio received the single via PlayMPE on June 5, and it moves to No. 45 on the Country Airplay chart dated Aug. 5. “Burn It Down” seems positioned for a long, smoldering life rather than flaming out in a flash, which would aptly reflect both the slow build McCollum experienced on the day he wrote it and the arrangement that Randall oversaw.
“He’s such a seasoned veteran,” McCollum says. “He knew exactly what he was doing. I was the young guy trying to bust it out real quick, and he was right. He usually is.”
As Tim McGraw prepares to hit the road in 2024 for his Standing Room Only Tour featuring Carly Pearce, the singer and 1883 actor is speaking out about the troubling trend of concertgoers throwing items onstage at artists. “I think it’s terrible,” McGraw told CNN in a new interview. “I mean, you could really injure […]
Four-time CMA entertainer of the year winner Kenny Chesney‘s longtime affinity for the islands was on display recently, when he dropped into Captain Tony’s Saloon in Key West, Florida. Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news Chesney posted a video on his social media of himself, dressed down in […]
