Country

When new artist Max McNown flies into his falsetto voice in the middle of his first radio release, “Better Me for You (Brown Eyes),” he conveys a sense of strength through vulnerability, as if he’s been doing it for years.

Explore

Explore

See latest videos, charts and news

See latest videos, charts and news

But sounds, like looks, can be deceiving. McNown had never written a song that mined that part of his register before, and it forced him to woodshed when it connected quickly with his fan base.

“’Better Me for You’ is probably the greatest problem child of any of my songs I’ve ever written,” McNown says. “I mean, it was written so early in my career. I had never taken vocal lessons before – I still have only taken a couple – but when it was written, I couldn’t even sing that song all the way through without messing up.”

Not that that mattered in the song’s creation. McNown rode with it as the melody gravitated naturally in that falsetto direction when he wrote “Better Me For You” with Ava Suppelsa, Trent Dabbs and producer-writer Jamie Kenney last May. McNown’s willingness to take on the discomfort moved the song forward.

Trending on Billboard

“That was the moment that got me really excited,” Dabbs remembers.

“Better Me for You” was personal for McNown when they crafted it. He was living in Oregon at the time and had started a long-distance relationship that was still fairly new. His co-writers asked him about his life to get the creative juices flowing at the start of the appointment, and as he spoke of his girlfriend in glowing, almost reverent tones, they launched into a bright midtempo groove on acoustic guitars. McNown pulled out a short phrase with a descending melody – “I didn’t know you’d have brown eyes” – that he’d already written about her. It became the opening line of the chorus; it also ends up being the only physical description of the woman that appears in the entire song. The rest of the text frames her as strong, spiritually-grounded and “deeper than a coal mine.”

“He’s not a superficial guy,” Kenney notes. “He’s a deep soul, and he’s a kind, caring and thoughtful person. So I think we always end up writing those kind of songs. And I think it’s not an accident that we don’t end up leaning on trite euphemisms.”

McNown noted that his girlfriend had inspired him to become a better person, an idea that morphed into the payoff line at the end of the chorus: “I gotta find a better me for you.” Knowing where they were headed, the writers turned their attention to the opening verse, the first-person singer remembering a period dominated by alcohol and romantic conquests.

“If you need to be a better person for someone, what does that look like previously, before them?” Suppelsa asks rhetorically. “Those verses [are] painting the darker side of before this girl. You need to have that chorus there to make that change.”

The second verse would begin with an abstract thought about “dipping toes in the water,” a reflection, McNown says, of a period when he worked at a coffee shop, dodging any sort of commitments. “[It’s] basically not being willing to give things my full heart,” he notes. “That’s symbolic in the relationship department, that’s symbolic in the career department, that’s symbolic in life in so many aspects. For a while, especially when you feel like you may have been wounded, you’re afraid to jump back in again.”

To round out the piece, they built a bridge that, like the chorus, starts with a descending melody. The differences are subtle enough that the first few listens, it doesn’t sound like a departure from the rest of the song. “It’s a sneaky bridge, for sure,” Suppelsa says.

McNown inserted a reference to the long-distance relationship – his cowriters feared it was new information that didn’t quite fit the text, but he insisted it fit him, and they deferred to his judgment. Within five lines, the bridge incorporates a hymnal, pledges undying devotion and solidifies a spiritual quality to the relationship that had been seeded earlier.

“It feels like one of those songs where, if he was playing at the Ryman [Auditorium] and he walked to the front of the stage and played the song, I would be sold,” Dabbs says. “I think that’s what you always look for in an artist. It’s kind of like, ‘All right, I get you. I get I get what you’re about.’”

When the song was finished, McNown remained at Kenney’s studio in Nashville’s Berry Hill neighborhood, and they worked through a rough demo of the song, stacking acoustic guitars and makeshift percussion to create a “blurry picture,” McNown says, “of what we wanted the song to sound like.” He added a scratch vocal with fragile falsetto, then returned to Oregon while the production evolved in Kenney’s hands back in Music City.

Kenney played some additional parts, then enlisted Todd Lombardo to overdub banjo and rubber-bridge acoustic guitar; Aaron Sterling for the core drums; and guitarist Jedd Hughes to add electric guitars. Kenney tucked both Dobro and a slide-guitar sample into the background, then worked to find a balance between the acoustics and electrics. It doesn’t sound as tough as he expected.

“I would go back and forth,” Kenney says. “I feel like the sweet spot was so minute. You think ‘power’ when you get to the chorus. You want to go, ‘Let’s punch them in the face with electrics.’ But I felt like it got less cool when I pushed those electrics.”

As Kenney worked on it, McNown moved to Nashville and resided in a room at the studio for six months, making it convenient to redo vocals. He ended up recutting them three times before he was entirely happy with the results. “The third time we recorded it,” McNown says, “I had already toured for 40, 50 shows, and I had built my vocal capabilities and my confidence, and I also knew the song like the back of my hand, and so I came back in and we got it right.”

“Ironically enough,” Kenney counters, “we ended up using pretty much the original, because it had a bit of a freshness to it.”

Kenney enhanced the falsetto parts in the chorus with different instruments – a mandolin in the first chorus, electric guitar in the second – trailing the vocal and creating a dreamy mood. “Anytime you have a melody like that that’s really hooky and singable, the more you can pile on and just accentuate it, the better,” Kenney says.

McNown introduced the song on TikTok, beginning with short performances that keyed on the opening line in the chorus. As the song grew, he inserted “Brown Eyes” into the title in parentheses.

“When you look at it on TikTok, I think people are looking for ‘Brown Eyes,’” Suppelsa says. “If that hadn’t been put in there in parentheses, it definitely would have been a harder search for people.”

Fugitive Recordings – in tandem with Magnolia Music Group’s promotion department, coming off its work on Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” – released “Better Me For You (Brown Eyes)” to country radio via PlayMPE on Dec. 16.

“It’s gonna be heard by so many different people that have never heard of me,” McNown acknowledges. “So we need a song that is wide-reaching enough and catchy enough to kind of hook people in and make them fans within two minutes. You have to have a gripping hook and a gripping song, and ‘Better Me for You’ just felt like it fit the criteria.”