Country

Thanksgiving was a major life marker for Kelsea Ballerini.
Recently divorced from Morgan Evans, she had had possession of her new home — purchased from fellow country star Kacey Musgraves — for less than a week, and she was already planning to host a holiday soirée with friends.

Single people naturally rely on their compadres in a big way, and Ballerini is set up to do that, not only in her personal life, but also in her latest career move. “If You Go Down (I’m Goin’ Down Too),” which Black River released to country radio via PlayMPE on Nov. 15, is a “besties” single, a track focused on two women with a shared, rambunctious history. If the title generates thoughts of Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon driving off the cliff in Thelma & Louise or the song’s murder reference leads to thoughts of the Dixie Chicks single “Goodbye Earl,” then it’s working as intended.

“We just started talking about Thelma & Louise, and [“Earl” characters] Marianne and Wanda, and these really beautiful best-friend stories that had a tinge of murder attached,” Ballerini remembers. “Me and my girlfriends will all listen to Crime Junkie and text each other every Monday after we listen to the podcast. And if we have a girls’ night, we’re going to watch some kind of true-crime documentary.”

Ballerini had that Thelma & Louise conversation with two male friends — songwriters Julian Bunetta (“Craving You,” “Look What God Gave Her”) and Shane McAnally (“Body Like a Back Road,” “One Night Standards”), who co-produced her current Subject to Change — during the final stages of the album’s production this summer. They felt they had enough material to make a solid album, but they mapped out one last “Hail Mary” writing day on the chance that they could craft a song that would beat what they had already cut. That morning, they penned “I Can’t Help Myself” with Josh Osborne (“I Was on a Boat That Day,” “Merry Go ’Round”); after he left, they had one more hour to work, and they reviewed the topics that might be absent from Subject to Change.

“There was a big, missing puzzle piece, and that was a song that honors my friendships,” she recalls. “Friends was a huge theme on my last record — the two lyrics that popped up the most on that Kelsea record were ‘home’ and ‘friends.’ And so it was like I was doing a disservice to a pillar in my life to not have a song that carried that through.”

Bunetta found a groove with a celebratory attitude, driving home a simple, fast-paced chord progression that provided a foundation for the story. He kept at that rhythm, bolstered by a distinct chop, for much of the write. “I got this funny little guitalele that is my fun writing guitar that songs just seem to pour out of,” he says. “It’s just a fun little nylon-string, so it’s easy on the hands.”

They instinctively locked in on a melody that reflected the attitude. The lines in the opening verse start primarily with an ascendant passage, ending in a flood of syllables. The chorus flips that pattern a bit, descending in its opening moments and making longer notes more prominent. That cheery setting gave them plenty of leeway to go dark with the plot.

“The juxtaposition of lyric and music, if you can get them right [as] opposing forces, it always makes it a bit more intriguing and multilayered than sad music/sad lyric,” notes Bunetta.

The first line — “I’ve known you since Brad and Angelina” — used a celebrity couple rather than a calendar year to provide a sense of the friendship’s longevity. And it also tied the lyric further to Thelma & Louise because that movie introduced the world to a shirtless Brad Pitt. The rest of the lyric embraced holding secrets and hiding evidence as the two women look after each other’s reputations in a mutually beneficial manner: “Dirt on you is dirt on me,” Ballerini sings at the start of the chorus.

The song continues to traverse an outlaw path, with an imaginary bank robbery and a “getaway Mercedes” — shades of Bonnie and Clyde — plus an additional pledge to lie on her girlfriend’s behalf should their crime spree take the ultimate twist: “Hypothetically, if you ever kill your husband …”

They introduced subtle variation to the structure of “Go Down” by playing with the final line of the choruses, singing “If you go down, I’m goin’ down too” once at the end of the first chorus, twice to wrap the second and three times when they reached the fourth (and final) chorus.

Ballerini sang over Bunetta’s guitalele for the demo, though all three writers agreed that the lyrics might be misordered. In fact, when they met up again the next day to record “Go Down” at Starstruck Studios on Music Row, they swapped two of the verses and delayed a lyrical change in the chorus — “Our bodies are buried, and they’re in the same ditch” — until the final chorus, instead of the second; it made more sense for that reference to come after the “kill your husband” thought.

Most of the instruments were acoustic — only one electric baritone guitar is present among two acoustics, a mandolin and a Dobro. Drummer Evan Hutchings plays the snare with brushes instead of sticks, and bassist Craig Young borrowed Bunetta’s Kala U-bass, which enhanced that acoustic motif.

“It sounds kind of like an upright bass, but it’s still got like some give in the in the notes, meaning that they bend a lot because of the way that those rubber strings are, so it just fit the texture perfectly,” Bunetta says. “I happened to bring it out and kept it in my car because I just had a feeling that we’d use it.”

They brought in Jenee Fleenor later to overdub a fiddle part, and she filled in half of the original solo section, creating a trade-off between fiddle and mandolin. “We really wanted to lean into a very ’90s country feel, and so we brought in fiddle for the song, which I think to me makes it,” says Ballerini. “That’s also why there’s a Chicks reference to it, which everyone picks up on, which was absolutely intentional. I didn’t want to make it sound like anything else on the record. I wanted it to be its own moment.”

Ballerini spent roughly two hours on the vocal. The notes weren’t particularly difficult, but she worked very specifically on providing lines that sounded like an aural wink, ensuring that the listener would not take the song’s criminal streak seriously.

“You can almost see her acting it out,” Bunetta says. “It was a very visual thing, [the way] the vocal was being shaped.”

Black River assigned “If You Go Down” a Dec. 5 add date, issuing an uptempo single to radio at a time of year when ballads are a little more prevalent. Meanwhile, the running-buddies theme mirrors the new period in her personal life when friends will play a bigger role than they have for several years.

“Sometimes you put out a single because you think that it’s the most radio-friendly, and sometimes you put out a single because it’s actually reflective of where you’re at in your life,” she says. “And then sometimes, both things can be true.” 

Few things are more unsettling than change — moving to a new home, losing a job, getting married or ending a relationship are all fear-inducing events that lead into unknown futures.
And yet, as songwriter Bobby Braddock noted in his 1996 Tracy Lawrence single “Time Marches On,” “everything changes.”

That’s more true in 2022 than it’s likely ever been. New technologies, new vocabulary and new cultural trends dart in and out of life faster than at any time in history. The upheaval is stressful, especially when it means letting go of people or lifestyles before we’re prepared.

“I’m good with the things I like, the things I love,” says Brantley Gilbert, acknowledging his antipathy toward change. “If they’re not a part of life anymore, and something happens to me and I go to heaven, I’m in a better place anyways.”

That’s essentially the theme of Gilbert’s new single, “Heaven by Then,” a collaboration with Blake Shelton that includes prominent harmonies by Vince Gill. It debuted at No. 29 on the Country Airplay chart dated Nov. 19.

The song’s resistance to change is ironic, since its very existence is the result of a change in direction during a songwriter outing. It was a little past midnight on Feb. 22 at a ranch in coastal Matagorda, Texas. Brantley was hanging out on a back patio during the retreat, drinking beer and working on a new song with six other writers. As they struggled for a line, Taylor Phillips (“Hurricane,” “Like I Love Country Music”) blurted out the phrase “heaven by then.” As the words came out of his mouth, Phillips recognized the line actually worked even better as a title. HARDY (“wait in the truck,” “God’s Country”) recognized it, too.

“HARDY looked at me and was like, ‘What did you just say?’ ” Phillips recalls. “I was trying to play it off like I didn’t say nothing. And then I was like, ‘Boys, I think we’re writing the wrong song.’ HARDY grabbed the guitar, and I mean, honestly, it was pretty much a walk in the park. It was very fastly written.”

So fast that Jake Mitchell (“One Beer,” “Some Girls”) was able to send everyone a work tape at 2:03 a.m. “It was just like a pack of dogs on a three-legged cat,” quips Gilbert. “We were all so excited to get it done.”

As they searched for an opening line, HARDY served up a few examples of change that a Southern country boy would find unacceptable. Brock Berryhill (“What Happens in a Small Town,” “Homesick”) rhymed one of those examples with “When No. 3 is just a number.”

“Yes,” HARDY said — they had the first line.

The No. 3, as NASCAR fans know, was painted on the hood of the late Dale Earnhardt’s car. “I grew up with my dad watching those races every Sunday,” says Phillips, who has a No. 3 tattoo on his wrist. “When Earnhardt passed away, it was like the last of a dying breed. I mean, it definitely changed racing.”

That No. 3 represents change in other ways, too. During the 20th century, die-hard baseball fans associated it with Babe Ruth. The current hip-hop generation connects the number with Chance the Rapper’s ball cap. 

Along with Randy Montana (“Beer Never Broke My Heart,” “I Hope You’re Happy Now”) and Hunter Phelps (“Give Heaven Some Hell,” “Cold Beer Calling My Name”) — seven writers in all — they fashioned a series of images that would demonstrate the dissolution of a Southern country life: when the dirt roads are all paved, deer hunting is outlawed and “John Deeres are dinosaurs.”

“I don’t know if I’ll ever beat that line,” Phillips says. “When the country boy life goes extinct, that’s really what it is. For me, when we can’t be country anymore, there’s no point in me living. I would just hate life.”

They emphasized that point of view in the chorus with a few twisted lines that work better with a melody than they do on paper: “I don’t wanna go today, but I don’t wanna live/ Down here at a place that thinks that that place don’t exist/ There comes a day this country’s somewhere country don’t fit in/ Hell, I hope I’m in heaven by then.”

“Everyone was sitting there for a second, making sure it made sense,” recalls Mitchell. “It’s tricky, twisty wordplay. But we kind of came to the conclusion, ‘Well, we’ve said “Heaven” two or three times through the song by now.’ So we figured that people knew what we were talking about.”

They developed more lyrical images than a three-minute song would allow and inserted a bridge that underscored the singer’s acceptance of death in the event that the world changed too much around him. Meanwhile, the musical elements held up from the time they started on “Heaven,” which helped them wrap it in less than two hours.

“We all went to the same chords naturally when we were singing the melody,” Mitchell notes. “A lot of times when we write, we’ll try three or four different chord progressions over a melody or something. I just remember the melody and the chords stayed the same from the second we started.”

Berryhill finished the demo with HARDY singing lead on March 4, then co-produced a tracking session with Gilbert at Nashville’s Sound Stage on March 23 using a six-piece studio band: guitarists Ilya Toshinskiy and Derek Wells, steel guitarist Jess Franklin, bassist Craig Young, drummer Miles McPherson and keyboardist Alex Wright. The overall sound was a little more relaxed than Berryhill’s demo, and Wells created a descending signature lick that set the right tone for the cut.

“Derek has a couple of different electrics layered on there, and Ilya doubled that with the Dobro,” says Berryhill. “It’s a stacked part, for sure.” 

The team thought the range and topic would fit Shelton, and Gilbert considered it a bucket-list moment when he agreed to add his voice. In fact, Shelton was so strong that they gave him the lead voice on more lines than they had originally planned. Gilbert drove back to Nashville from Georgia to adjust some harmonies around Shelton. And Gilbert and Berryhill decided that Gill would be an even better harmony singer. They asked, and Gill obliged, lining up artists from three different generations of country music on a song about change.

“It’s three completely different voices,” Berryhill says. “And together, it sounds so cool because you literally hear all three of their voices independently.”

Valory released “Heaven by Then” to country radio via PlayMPE on Nov. 9, two days before the label issued Gilbert’s album So Help Me God. “Heaven” exists at No. 54 in its second week on Billboard‘s Country Airplay chart. The interplay among Gilbert, Shelton and Gill is just a tad rough around the edges, appropriately reflecting the late-night hangout setting behind the song’s origin and capturing the reluctance often applied to change.

“This one definitely called for giving you that front-porch vibe,” Gilbert says. “[It’s] looking at the world off the front porch, picking the six-string and watching it pass you by. And being OK with it.”