Makin’ Tracks
When programmers gathered for the Country Radio Seminar in Nashville Feb. 19-21, they heard a scintillating version of the national anthem.
Tigirlily Gold, the Academy of Country Music’s reigning new duo/group of the year, delivered it with a fierce confidence, the kind of assurance that — based on the enthusiastic response — impressed a room full of hard-to-impress professionals. Considering that the duo had just released a new single, the timing was probably advantageous.
“We got such great feedback from that, and there were a couple of people who said they had tears in their eyes afterward,” Tigirlily’s Krista Slaubaugh says. “I’m just glad we were able to do a good job and kick off that week really strong, but I definitely don’t think it hurts.”
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That current Tigirlily single is an anthem in its own right, a celebration of small-town America built on casual acoustics and spacious imagery. And, as it did with “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Tigirlily sings “Forever From Here” like it means it.
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“This song, for me personally, is the most connected I’ve ever felt to a song,” lead vocalist Kendra Slaubaugh Olson says. “I met my husband in our hometown of Hazen, N.D. We’ve been together for 15 years, married for over five, and when we wrote that song, I think I listened to it 100 times that night. I’m not kidding you — probably 100 times. I just felt so connected and so emotional about it. And just really felt like, for the first time, Jared and I had our song. It was a really beautiful moment.”
The title might have been “Forever From Here,” but the phrase that drove it was “harvest season.” It’s a major reason the song resonated so strongly with her.
“Krista had the title ‘Harvest Season’ in her notes for forever,” Kendra says. “Obviously, being from the Midwest, it’s a huge part of where we grew up. Our grandparents both farmed, and harvest season is just one of the most beautiful times of the year. It’s fall. The air is chilly, everybody’s combining. It’s very fruitful, so we really wanted to paint that picture.”
Krista floated “Harvest Season” a few times during 2024, but it didn’t feel like a natural phrase to end a chorus, and it never quite landed. However, when the duo held a short writing retreat with songwriter-producer Pete Good (“We Don’t Fight Anymore”) at the Santa Barbara, Calif., home of songwriter Shane McAnally (“Body Like a Back Road,” “Coming Home”), “harvest season” found its place. They locked into a breezy guitar foundation as they started the third song of the trip on Dec. 3, and Krista reintroduced the title. McAnally thought it was interesting, but he suggested it belonged in the middle of the chorus instead. He even whipped out a melody to go with it. They talked further about what North Dakota was like and started to shape a direction that paired a rural setting with a relationship.
“You’re painting this big open space in this beautiful scenery and geography,” says Good, who hails from South Dakota. “Somebody said that you can ‘just see forever,’ like, ‘Oh, I can see forever both with my eyes and also with my heart.’ ”
It set the tone for the verses, populated almost entirely by references to a stable, warm relationship and images from nature. “We used geese in a song, which I never thought we would use,” Krista notes.
The pre-chorus looked above the birds — “God turns on the stars” — pulling together multiple elements in the “forever” theme. “The most stars you’ll ever see in your life is looking up at a Midwest sky and just feeling so small compared with everything out there,” Kendra says. “To me, it’s like God painted that picture of the stars in the sky, because there’s no other explanation for that kind of beauty.”
As that pre-chorus eased into the chorus, they encountered the day’s biggest challenge: settling on an opening line for the sing-along section. They sifted through several options, ultimately embracing a phrase that places the adjective in the wrong spot: “I can see a house with the shutters blue.”
“A part of me knew it’s got to be ‘shutters blue,’ ” Krista says. “ ‘Shutters blue’ is weird. It’s just going to catch people.”
A passing mention of a prairie rose in the second verse further enhanced the sense of location, and of personal history. “I did a report on a prairie rose in fourth or fifth grade, and it really stuck with me that that’s the state flower of North Dakota,” Krista says. “So there’s a little bit of nerdiness to the song, which I really love as a songwriter.”
Santa Barbara is quite different from North Dakota, but writing in a room that opened to a large lot helped with the outdoorsy nature of the “Forever” lyric, especially since December falls in the harvest season for some of McAnally’s fruit trees.
“I think I ate about 15 oranges writing that song,” Good says. “I can’t pull oranges off a tree in Nashville, so when I was out there, I just couldn’t stop eating oranges.”
They built a simple work tape with vocal, two guitars and a drum loop, and the Tigirlily team got excited about “Forever” when it heard the results. The act recorded the instrumental tracks on Dec. 16 at Sound Emporium’s Studio A in Nashville. The first couple of run-throughs didn’t fully cut it, so an outdoor feel was captured by setting up a single microphone, campfire-style, with five musicians gathered around it: Drummer Evan Hutchings joined Krista and Sol Philcox-Littlefield on acoustic guitars, Todd Lombardo grabbed a banjo, and keyboardist Alex Wright took over on mandolin.
“That was the DNA of that particular session,” Good notes. “It’s just that breezy, acoustic sound.” Krista joined Good to produce the vocals, and she encouraged Kendra to keep her lead part light.
“I was standing on my tippy toes and smiling as much as I can — this is how I know to make it sound easy,” Kendra says. “That actually sometimes is harder for me to do than to sing a powerful song.” Krista added harmonies later, applying a high note first, then adding a low note beneath Kendra’s lead in key spots, particularly on the chorus and on a scorching “wi-i-i-ld” passage in verse two.
Jenee Fleenor also overdubbed fiddle, taking a solo and threading some choice shimmering notes at the end of the bridge. In the end, the personal tone and catchy chorus of “Forever From Here” helped it beat out a couple of other recordings to become the next single. Monument released “Forever” to country radio via PlayMPE on Feb. 13, and it’s already being embraced by dozens of stations, creating a sense that it could become the duo’s biggest single to date. Tigirlily Gold is cautiously considering what kind of success the recording might harvest.
“If this song goes No. 1,” Kendra says, “I’m definitely painting my shutters blue.”
Want to ruin a friendship? Just tell your bestie that you don’t like the person they’re dating.
Most people learn that lesson the hard way somewhere in their teens or 20s. And Broken Bow artist Lanie Gardner, by writing “Buzzkill” about a guy’s difficult girlfriend, has discovered that saying it in a song can create the same negative outcome.
“I guess he still had some sort of feelings for this girl, so before it ever came out, it ended a friendship with him,” Gardner recalls.
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Oddly enough, the guy misread the song’s story. “Once he left that girl, the new girl – he thought it was about her,” Gardner continues. “When he left that [new] girl, it kind of revived a friendship. But it was just funny how that song has caused some ripples in real life.”
“Buzzkill” is the product of a writing session on Jan. 30, 2024, at the East Nashville home of writer-producers Katie Cecil and Chris Ganoudis. It was only the second time they’d collaborated; their first co-write had produced an emotionally dramatic piece, and they wanted to explore something different in their follow-up session. As they settled in with conversation, Gardner confessed her annoyance about a woman whose attachment to another friend had become an intrusion on her crew.
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“Literally, we would all be having fun, you know, out and drinking, and she would come around and she would start fights and mess with him the whole day,” Gardner says. “I just remember thinking, ‘Man, what a buzzkill.’”
Gardner hadn’t intended to build a song around the situation, but when she introduced that “buzzkill” phrase into the conversation, it made an immediate impression. “I was like, ‘Let me write that down,’” Cecil says. “You know, sometimes you kind of catch the title in the middle of someone’s venting session.”
The scenario had comedic possibilities, so Ganoudis developed a fast-paced mix of acoustic guitar rhythms and programmed 808 bass drum. It felt a little like rockabilly and a lot like the energy of KT Tunstall’s “Black Horse and the Cherry Tree,” and the track set an atmosphere that encouraged cheeky observation. The woman is portrayed derisively in the song’s opening salvos as a “Barbie doll, show stopper, beauty queen” and a condescending “Miss Hollywood takin’ over Tennessee.” Cecil and Ganoudis relocated from California about four years ago, and exaggerating about the women in the story came naturally.
“For lyrical purposes, you kind of have to make things the most dramatic version of themselves, to make it fun to sing and to drive the point home,” Cecil says. “So we were comparing this girl to the most insufferable L.A.-type girl you might come across who’s moved to Nashville but clearly just doesn’t fit in.”
Unlike Gardner and the “Buzzkill” woman, Gardner and Cecil worked well together, hunkering down on the song’s spirited lyrics. Ganoudis pulled on headphones and focused on the track separately, building the verses in a minor key and the chorus in a parallel major.
“You can’t sing the verse melodies over the chorus, or chorus melodies over the verse,” Ganoudis says.That brighter-sounding chorus allowed for more acerbic talk, and the protagonist insists on giving her friend an honest assessment of his girl: “They ain’t gonna say it but you bet your ass I will/ Yeah, buddy, she’s a buzzkill.”
“It’s not good to hate on people,” Gardner observes, “but it’s sometimes good to maybe call certain actions out.”
When they finished writing “Buzzkill,” Ganoudis supplied a track with plenty of energy, created by a spare number of instruments. But those sounds were routinely fattened, making the day’s production sound larger. “I’m really kind of minimalist in in my approach a lot of the times,” Ganoudis notes. “It’s just maximizing each one of those parts, so having less parts that do more, so that the bass is saturated in a way to make it take up the room that I want it to take up.”
Gardner laid down a vocal for it, caught up in the story’s surly sarcasm. “We did go back in and tighten some things up, but we were just such in a zone with ‘Buzzkill’ the day we wrote it, we didn’t have to recut the vocals again,” Gardner says.
Ganoudis took his time finishing the demo, turning it on Feb. 12 once he felt it was good enough to compete with anything else Gardner might be considering.
“When the labels are hearing it and the management’s hearing it, that’s a reflection of what we do,” Cecil explains. “That’s always good to get it sounding where we feel super confident that it will be a contender for a release.”
Ganoudis filled “Buzzkill” out further, playing nearly all the instruments on his own, while creating a framework with some intentional, built-in contrast.
“It’s kind of like a middle-up, middle-down approach,” he says. “The middle-down frequency spectrum of the track is pretty pop, you know. It’s got 808, it’s got a sample kick [drum] – like, there’s no live drummer on this thing. But then the top up is pretty honky tonk. That’s all live, you know. There’s no programming on the top up, with the guitars, and there’s some steel and all that.”
Ganoudis hired guitarist Gideon Boley to rip a fierce solo in the middle of the production, and Gardner returned to stack some tight harmonies on top of her original vocal. She threw in a bundle of ad-libs, too, including an off-the-cuff “one more for the people in the back” that adds to the glibness of the performance.
“That’s honestly one of my favorite parts of the song,” Cecil says. “I was like, ‘We gotta put that in there.’”SiriusXM picked it up, German choreographer Sascha Wolf developed a linedance for it, and Jonathan Craig produced a pool-hall video, released Feb. 3, that plays up the out-of-place snobbery of the buzzkill girlfriend. And just in case country broadcasters decide “Buzzkill” can aid their undying desire for more uptempo singles, Ganoudis fashioned a radio edit that replaces the “ass” reference in the chorus with a sneaky “whoop!”
Meanwhile, the friendship that “Buzzkill” killed appears to have survived, in part because the friend’s second relationship did not.
“All of a sudden,” Gardner says with a laugh, “we’re friends again.”
One of the many benefits of the internet is one that 20-somethings likely take for granted: immediate access to song lyrics.
Prior to the advent of Google and Safari, consumers who wanted confirmation of a song’s words generally needed to buy the album – and hope that it contained the lyrics – or pick up the sheet music. A few publications, such as Country Song Roundup or The Tennessean, regularly printed the text to hit songs, but other than that, fans were left to debate if they were hearing things right.
Still, the lyric sites aren’t always spot-on. Songwriters regularly laugh about the misprints of their material, which get passed from site to site, correctly or not.
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One obvious example comes with the new Parmalee single, “Cowgirl,” where lyric sites include this verse-one line: “Drivin’ a Range, but now I wanna giddy hard.”
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Clearly wrong, right? Wrong, it’s right!
“It’s like, ‘giddy up hard,’ man,” says Parmalee lead singer Matt Thomas. “You want to get it, get with it, you know? Like, ‘giddy hard.’ It’s one of those things where it doesn’t make any sense, but it kind of does, if you think about it.”
The thing that stands out most, though, about “Cowgirl” is a hard, syncopated backbeat. It feels like a cousin to the Bo Diddley groove or, as Thomas suggests, the cheerleader rhythms of the 1982 Mickey Basil pop hit “Mickey.” That alone should have programmers paying attention: sports-based riffs formed the foundation of Shania Twain’s “Any Man Of Mine” and “Man! I Feel Like A Woman!”
Despite the Western motif of the “Cowgirl” title, the song’s drumbeat is imported from the United Kingdom, where four songwriters – James Daniel Lewis, Peter David Newman, Robbie Jay and Thomas Frank Ridley Horsley – fashioned the bulk of it before shipping it off to 33 Creative co-owner Tina Crawford, who found it intriguing. She shared the programmed demo with her co-owner, writer-producer David Fanning (“Take My Name,” “Tennessee Orange”), who in turn brought it to Thomas. And they played it for Parmalee on the band’s bus.
“I don’t think there was a bridge in there, but for the most part, it was pretty much there,” recalls the band’s bassist, Barry Knox. “It was a solid, solid idea.”
The group’s other members, drummer Scott Thomas and guitarist Josh McSwain, agreed. Parmalee’s first single, 2012’s “Musta Had a Good Time,” had set expectations for a career built on hard-hitting uptempos, but the group’s biggest successes have leaned toward midtempos and ballads. That includes their last four singles, three of which – the Blanco Brown collaboration “Just the Way,” “Take My Name” and “Gonna Love You” – reached No. 1 on Country Airplay. Matt and Fanning thought the time was right for a song that grooved like “Cowgirl,” if they could fit it to Parmalee.
“We needed something unique and fresh,” Fanning says. “Coming from the U.K. and everything, they’re trying to write towards country music and get into this genre. And they just send us something that we really were like, ‘Hey, that sounds fresh. How do we make this Parmalee?’”
Batting it around for much of May, they changed a few lyrics, made some melodic tweaks and wrote a bridge to generate a change of pace. “We needed something catchy, something fun in there,” Matt says. “We needed something to sing that’s going to be abstract, kind of like the ‘giddy hard’ thing, and we came up with the ‘24-karat palomino.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, man – palomino, golden horse. That’s it.’ Like, everybody’s yell that during the break.”
Matt brought in the “giddy hard” thing, and all told, the song struck a balance between the abstractions and more standard images from mainstream country. “It’s got a lot of clichés in it, too,” Fanning notes. “You’re talking about [trucks] and Levi’s and Bud Light, all the things that are country. But that’s the thing about country music. That stuff never does get old. It’s just, how are you gonna say it differently?”
Halie Welch, the “Hawk Tuah girl,” was recording at the studio across the hall when Fanning produced “Cowgirl” at Nashville’s Sound Stage in early July, building on top of the percussive loop from the original demo, for which Lewis received a co-producing credit. Fanning assembled a small studio band, better enabling them to get through all five of the day’s songs speedily. Parmalee, though, watched from the control room to guide the studio players to performances that captured some of the nuances of the band.
“We’ve been playing together for 25 years, so we call it the Parmalee groove,” Knox says. “It’s more of a laidback kick drum groove, as opposed to a heavy forward[-leaning] punk kick drum. There’s a little more space in the Parmalee groove.”
The band would overdub instrumental parts later to get more of the band’s imprint on the recording, around the time that Matt threw down the final vocal, working the upper part of his register. Knox and McSwain joined him for an intense day of harmonies intended to enhance the light nature of “Cowgirl.”
“We were working in the afternoon, and I was like, ‘Alright, this is the song. We got to have a party,’” Matt recalls. “The idea was to go down to the strip club and have some tequilas, spend a couple hours in there, and then come back to the studio. But that didn’t happen.”
“Plan A didn’t quite work out, but plan B was we were still gonna have a little bit of tequila,” Knox says.The guys chased down harmonies from multiple spots in the studio, creating perhaps 30 or more total voices to fashion a party atmosphere.
“You’re singing eight feet from the mic, two feet from the mic, right on the mic, just going all around the room to try to create that crowdy kind of effect,” Fanning says. And yet, listeners paying close attention will discern an additional voice on the final chorus, a high-harmony enhancement that Matt wasn’t sure he could do until he nailed it.
Parmalee considered several different tracks as the next single, though “Cowgirl” got the nod once Knox broke the ice. “Barry walked on the bus one night,” Matt remembers, “and he’s like, ‘What are we doing? What are we doing? Why are we listening to any of these other songs to be the first single? We’re crazy if we don’t go with “Cowgirl.” ’
As it turned out, the rest of the band agreed. Stoney Creek released “Cowgirl” to country radio via PlayMPE on Jan. 8. It ranks No. 50 on the Country Airplay chart dated Feb. 8 in its fourth week on the list.
Meanwhile, the odd lyric could prove to be one of its most beneficial traits.
“It’ll probably be the one word in the song that people hear and have no idea what it is, and it’s gonna make them Google it,” Knox says. “So I’m like, ‘Put it in there. I’m in.’ That’s kind of our go-to word now. Like, ‘Hey, man, we gonna giddy hard tonight.’”
When Dylan Schneider released his first full-length album Sept. 27, he titled it Puzzled, recognizing after at least five previous EPs that the pieces of his musical persona were fitting together better than ever before.
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“This whole process of creating the album was figuring out, you know, who I am now as an artist, what I want to say, where I want to go with my music,” he says. “And I think that this collection is the best representation and the best songwriting I’ve done.”
A new single from the project, “Better Than You Left Me,” behaves much like a sonic puzzle — it employs a hook with the kind of verbal twist that’s associated with country songwriting, and it opens with a jigsaw instrumental riff, a simple acoustic guitar arpeggio that interlocks with a three-note “drunk steel thing,” as producer Zach Abend characterizes it. That intro establishes a mildly mysterious tone for a piece about a familiar conundrum.
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“It’s a classic sentiment,” Schneider notes. “Someone’s moving on, they’re finally doing good, they’re happier, they found somebody new, and the second that word gets out about that, you know, the person that did them wrong wants to come back around and try to mess it up or sneak back in. I feel like that happens all the time.”
“Better Than You Left Me” arose Oct. 10, 2022, on the first day of a multi-day writing retreat at Nashville’s SMACK offices, where a handful of songwriters crafted material for Schneider. As Schneider drifted periodically between dueling writing rooms, Michael Tyler (“Somewhere on a Beach,” “Mind on You”) and unrelated Brett Tyler (“Cold Beer Calling My Name,” “Wild as Her”) settled into the office of Lalo Guzman (“Cowboy Songs”), and after a long period of catching up, one of the Tylers – which one remains an enigma – offered up the “Better Than You Left Me” word game. It finds the singer in conversation with an ex, affirming that he’s feeling better than when they broke up, but also noting that he’s become a better man since meeting the new girlfriend.
Schneider remembers Michael throwing out the title, though neither of the Tylers is certain who introduced it. Even if the title was Michael’s, Brett had a similar one in his notes, helping to crystallize the song’s direction.
“The idea that I had was sort of that ‘Leave the world better than you found it’ sort of thing,” Brett recalls. “It kind of stems from that quote, and I was thinking it’d be interesting if you were in a relationship and it was bad, [but] the next person is going to get me better than you left me.”
To get the music going, Guzman called up a program that allows a keyboard to approximate acoustic guitars. That might make traditionalists scoff, but it has a practical application in a group setting. “Instead of me being like, ‘Everyone be quiet, I’m gonna mic this up,’ it’s just an easier way to keep the vibe going in the room,” Guzman says.
And since the programmed version requires pressing keys instead of plucking strings, it also changes some of the creative possibilities. “When I’m playing the acoustic on a keyboard, I’m playing completely different methods,” Guzman says, “and I’m playing completely different inversions of chords that spark a completely different way of feeling and thinking.”
He used that set-up to create the acoustic guitar riff for the intro, and it shifted the group out of its chatty disposition and into more focused progress on the assignment. “After Lalo brought that track up,” Michael says, “it kind of jump-started the whole song.”
The arpeggiation inspired a fairly linear verse melody, and they explored the protagonist’s situation, introducing a breakup-induced period of bar-hopping, when he felt like an “empty glass.” After repeating the linear melody twice, they introduced a pre-chorus with an “I saw the light” positivity that created an anticipation for the chorus.
Even in that early stage, they knew that segment was strong enough they should repeat it again later. “If it’s good enough for the pre-chorus, then it should be good enough for the bridge,” Michael suggests.
That “pre” shifted straight into a hooky chorus that varies between elongated phrasing and lighter, bouncy passages that work in tandem even as they contrast. “I always like crafting melodies where you give something really staccato, almost, and right on the beat, and then throw in a curve ball that makes it pop out a little bit more,” Brett says. “It’s a push-and-pull thing.”
In the second verse, the ex reappears in what could be interpreted as a booty call, or – now that he’s found someone new – a play to take the guy back. Regardless of the motive, the singer pushes back, confirming in the process that he really is in a “Better” place. “You want to find somebody that not only will make you feel better, but will make you a better person, will make you work on yourself,” Schneider notes.
Michael sang lead on the demo, and Guzman finished the bulk of it during the session’s final moments, blanketing the faux arpeggiated-guitar intro with a simple, three-note atmospheric part. “That was something I created with a little pitch-bend on the keyboard,” he says. “I have a couple sounds that I do that with to create a vibe, that you really can’t do without doing it that way.”
When Schneider went to record Puzzled, he included “Better Than You Left Me” in a large batch of potential songs he presented to Abend, who was convinced that it should be part of the project. There was little pre-production conversation about “Better” – Schneider trusted Abend would know what to do with it. For his part, Abend thought he should stick close to Guzman’s roadmap.
“It had that trappy beat, and that sig lick was in there,” Abend says. “It was so like a Lalo kind of demo, kind of more on the urban side.” They recorded “Better” at Sound Stage on Nashville’s Music Row, mixing real musicians with some programmed pieces. The snare sound, for example, was the thin, ticky-ticky style originally popularized in hip-hop recordings, instead of Nir Z’s thicker snare pops. It was tucked in with Tim Galloway’s banjo, the two instruments combining to define the percussive support.
“A real snare would have gotten too busy,” Abend notes.
“There’s no gaps in the lyrics,” he added. “I wanted to put fills everywhere, but it would distract, I think.”
However, guitarist Justin Ostrander took a solo in the middle of the song, deftly rippling his way through a scene-changing side journey. Schneider recorded his final vocal at Sound Emporium, deviating in a few spots from Michael’s original phrasing to make the performance a little more personal. “He sounds really effortless,” Brett says, “and also really believable.”
Wheelhouse originally planned to release “Carhartt,” the opening track on Puzzled, as a single, but “Better” – even though it was the 14th cut on the project – generated nearly the same number of streams. The label took notice and switched its plan, issuing “Better Than You Left Me” to country radio via PlayMPE on Jan. 7, with Jan. 27 pinpointed as the official add date. It’s catchy; it’s also relaxed enough to assist Schneider’s promotion efforts.
“It’s not like a straining thing,” he says. “You can just be easy and run around stage, have fun, and focus a little more on your performance and getting the crowd excited. Which, I think that’s what this song does anyway.”
Country music has its share of talented biographers: Robert K. Oermann, Barry Mazor and Holly George-Warren, just to name a few. They are able to boil a life in the genre down to a few hundred pages. But not everyone gets that kind of space to document their history. Musicians have been known to convey their experiences in three or four minutes — a challenge, to be sure.
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George Birge, coming off back-to-back Country Airplay hits with “Mind on You” (No. 2, 2023) and “Cowboy Songs” (No. 1, 2024), engaged in that very exercise for his latest single, “It Won’t Be Long.”
“I was ready to take another step as an artist,” Birge reflects. “I found a little bit of a lane of stuff that was working for me. But I also wanted to continue to grow as I got a deeper connection with my fans, and kind of pull back the curtain a little bit more and maybe tell a little bit more of a story and showcase a little bit more in my life.”
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Over the course of 2024, he attempted several times to do that very thing, but none of those efforts seemed to land. That changed during a co-writing session on Oct. 22 at the Liz Rose Music offices in Nashville, where Joe Fox (“Last Night Lonely,” “Breakin’ In Boots”) had a room with a piano. The appointment that day also included Chase McGill (“Next Thing You Know,” “5 Foot 9”) and Trannie Anderson (“Heart Like a Truck,” “Wild Horses and Wildflowers”), writing with Birge for the first time after bumping into him regularly on the golf course. Anderson, it turned out, had an idea they all thought was workable, but before they got too far, McGill felt he should speak up.
McGill’s oldest daughter was a few weeks from turning 7, and just a few days earlier, he had had a discussion with his wife, Kara, about how fast their world seemed to be going. It inspired a hook, “Life might be a lot of things/ But it won’t be long.”
“I instantly was like, ‘That’s it. That’s what I’ve been looking for,’ ” Birge says. “And everybody’s like, ‘If you’re in, let’s chase it.’ ”
Even Anderson, whose idea was scrapped by that turn of events, was up for it. “We wrote exactly what he needed, right when he needed it,” she says. “It’s so rare that it happens that way.”
Since they knew what the song’s payoff line would be, they dug in on the opening line, turning the “It won’t be long…” hook into a repetitive device. The writers became Birge’s biographers, questioning him about key moments in his relationship with Kara. Those events — their first meeting, their first kiss in a parking lot, their first child — were folded into the piece, capturing the story of their relationship.
“As a songwriter, I’ve kind of learned that the more specific and personal you are, the more relatable a song usually is,” Fox notes. “That’s why it’s so cool with George on this one. A lot of it’s his details, but you wouldn’t know that listening to it. I mean, anyone listening to it could put their details in there.”
Indeed, Birge’s renovation of a dilapidated house, taken down to the studs, isn’t everyone’s experience, but anyone who has done even a minor home makeover can relate. “Any kind of remodeling you do, man, no one forgets that,” McGill says.
They also incorporated Birge’s Little League background, weaving in his No. 7 uniform, as well as his son’s use of the same number. They spent a half-hour on that vignette. “That was the line that took the longest to flesh out,” Birge recalls. “There’s a cadence change to it, and we wanted that line to really pop because it meant a lot seeing your last name [on a uniform] at the plate again. It’s a new version of you. It’s a new chapter. There’s nothing like your kids imitating you.”
The bridge would tie three Birge generations together, while the chorus provided an interpretation of the narrative. Halfway through that stanza, the phrasing and melody change just enough to spotlight the key point of “It Won’t Be Long”: a challenge to the listener to “take the risk” on a life-changing relationship.
“I always like a more drastic melodic change on the second half of a chorus,” Anderson says. “I tend to structure a lot of my songs that way, and I think everyone kind of wanted that to happen.”
“It Won’t Be Long” was written primarily on guitar, but as they finished the work, Fox segued to the piano, which he thought would better reflect the song’s emotional content. He layered that piano part with guitar to create the foundation for a spare demo, with Birge addressing the lead vocal almost as a narration and Anderson shadowing with a single harmony.
It wouldn’t be long before the song made its initial impact. Within hours, Birge’s team was doing figurative handstands over it, and by the end of the week, they had designated it as his next single and even picked an add date. And Fox was enlisted to produce it.
Fox used Birge’s lead vocal from that demo, as well as Anderson’s harmonies, and built a new instrumental framework one piece at a time. Fox played guitars and bass, hired Jerry Roe to deliver a light drum part, got David Dorn to redo the piano and brought in Justin Schipper for atmospheric steel guitar and Dobro. Fox also snuck a single synthesizer note underneath that plays throughout the entire song, even remaining in place when it clashes with the accompanying chord. It provides a barely perceptible, movie-like tension.
“I kind of went for the cinematic thing the whole way through,” Fox says. “It’s one of the first times I put strings in a radio country song.” He did have Birge return to the studio to update his vocal, though he only changed a couple of notes. “We fixed, like, two words,” Fox says. “The way he pronounced them just wasn’t super clear. We just added plosives to the words.”
The production impressed his co-writers, who had suspected Fox would make sure the song’s message remained central to the final recording.
“One of the hardest things to do on these types of songs is use restraint,” McGill says. “It’s so easy to go throw a huge, [amped-up] drum kit on there — big pop and snare — and make it a big banger. Sometimes, with lyrics like these, it’s best just to let it sit right there so the words can sink in. And I think they did an awesome job of that.”
RECORDS Nashville released Birge’s musical biography to country radio via PlayMPE on Jan. 16, anticipating that “It Won’t Be Long” will deepen his connection with listeners as they relate their life stories to his, even if he had only four minutes to create the arc.
“It’s all real life,” Birge says. “It was just picking the stories that pop the most, whittling them down to fit perfectly into the song.”
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.
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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.
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“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.”
A month ago, when holiday shoppers were scrolling through websites for gifts and rockin’ around the Christmas tree, it was easy to miss the quiet release of a three-song EP by the developing sister trio The Castellows.
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But tucked onto the end of Alabama Stone, issued Dec. 6 by Warner Music Nashville (WMN), was an exquisitely melancholy song, “Girl That Boy,” that’s a bit of a mystery. Even though the listener doesn’t know it’s a mystery the first time through until the last few seconds.
At the end of its three-and-a-half-minute run, “Girl That Boy” employs a lyrical flip, unexpectedly changing its innocent meaning. It’s jarring, refreshing – and practically demands a second listen, if for no other reason than to figure out how the storyline ended up in such a surprising place. It’s such a fluid revision that the song’s conclusion can be seen in at least five or six nuanced ways, a scenario that’s entertaining to the group.
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“People will talk to me about our songs and be like, ‘Oh, I love what you meant when you did that lyric,’” says The Castellows’ Ellie Balkcom. “I’m like, ‘That’s not what I meant, that’s not what I was intending.’ But also seeing alternate meanings from what other people have [imagined] is so cool.”
The inverted finale in “Girl That Boy” isn’t just a surprise to the audience. All five writers were likewise shocked when the song’s narrative wrapped with an unplanned meaning. “It just turned into a completely different song,” says Kendell Marvel (“Either Way,” “Right Where I Need To Be”).
Marvel and The Highwomen’s Natalie Hemby (“Bluebird,” “Pontoon”) started building the mystery with all three of The Castellows – 20-something sisters Ellie, Lily and Powell Balkcom – on Nov. 29, 2023, in Nashville. Marvel didn’t know much about the group, but he was quickly impressed by their skill set and demeanor.
“They were super-smart, you can tell – very respectful and just talented musicians, so far ahead of their time for their age,” Marvel says. “I was really blown away by how grown up they were with their songwriting. And I just had that title, ‘Girl That Boy,’ and had this idea on what I thought it should be, and I thought they were the right artists for it. They were the right age to be saying something like this.”
He envisioned “Girl That Boy” as a mother warning her daughter about the pitfalls of dating a specific guy. But instead of drawing on The Castellows’ firsthand dating experiences, the writers instead focused on a long-established relationship. “They’re very close to their parents,” Hemby notes, “and we all started talking about what their mom would say about their dad. It was an interesting journey.”
Hemby started playing piano in the key of D, easing into a musical progression with a handful of major-seventh chords and minor triads that created a frail framework. She also launched into a melody that emphasized the moody notes in the chords. The text opened with a conversational line that incorporated the hook: “Mama said, ‘Girl, that boy will try to hold your hand.” They repeated the “Girl That Boy” title at the beginning of each successive section of verse – that boy would “try to kiss you” and “try to change your name.”
“We were using things we see in our parents to write that song,” Ellie says, “even if we weren’t [doing it] deliberately.”
But at the end of the last verse, as Mom tells her daughter that this guy is actually good for her, she suddenly changes the relationship: “Girl, that boy, he was your dad.” Suddenly, it was clear that “Girl That Boy” wasn’t really the romantic song it seemed; instead, it celebrated the protective nature of a typical father-daughter relationship. “We didn’t write the song thinking, ‘Oh, let’s flip it at the end,” Hemby recalls. “That was something we just ended on. It was kind of an accident.”
Though they’d written the verses in linear fashion, they struggled with the chorus that day and ultimately tabled it for another two weeks, meeting up again at 9 a.m. on Dec. 14 to tackle it again before they headed off to other writing sessions. “Just because you started that day doesn’t mean you’re supposed to finish it that day,” Hemby says. “It’s good to let it breathe for a minute.”
When they reassembled at Concord Music, the work went fairly quickly. They developed a chorus that suggested youth – “He’s gonna make you mad and act a fool/ ‘Cause he’s got a lot of growing up to do” – but would fit the eventual flip. To match it, the center of the chorus melody landed about six notes higher than the verses, providing a lift, though it concentrated on the related key of B-minor, emphasizing the mystery sonically. And that chorus never once included the hook.
Marvel recorded a gruff-but-emotional work tape, and the Balkcoms made their own work tape with three-part harmony that was, Ellie says, “rough around the edges.”
WMN tapped Durham, N.C.-based producer Brad Cook (Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats, Bon Iver) to produce two songs. But once they got into Sound Emporium, they expanded the work to five tracks, including “Girl That Boy,” which Cook hadn’t previously heard. After Ellie played it through, the studio group – including Cook on bass, Powell on banjo, Ellie and Mike Harris on guitar, and Eric Slick on drums – instinctively chased down the arrangement without any real planning. Not that they needed any.
“A big part of my job is reharmonizing things,” Cook says. “Maybe we can pull out a different emotion if we reharmonize a part of the song, or switch up the changes here and there. But that one was definitely as-is.”
The musicians applied a less-is-more approach, with minimal fills and swells while The Castellows’ parents watched from the control room. Once those spare instrumental parts – including Ellie’s piano overdub – were completed, the Balkcoms cut their vocals facing each other with three different mics in the center of the main studio with Lily on lead vocal, Ellie singing high harmonies and Powell on the low end. It created more of a unified dynamic than had they worked in separate vocal booths.
“I’ve had this happen with young people before, where most of their entire experience has been them hearing each other in proximity,” Cook notes. “To separate that can take out an element of what they understand at this stage. I hadn’t done that, frankly, in a very long time, trying to get isolated group vocals with minimal bleed in the same room.”
At a later date, Cook had Thomas Rhett’s steel guitarist, Whit Wyatt, put a little more melancholy on the track, and Cook overdubbed a cello part he wasn’t sure The Castellows would appreciate. “We told him to turn it up,” Ellie says.
The result is a gorgeous, haunting performance that sounds a tad harmonically like the Trio: Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris. It may have made just a small ripple during the holidays, but some those who unwrapped “Girl That Boy” have flipped out over its flip, and its sweet vulnerability.
“I try not to pay attention to it too much,” Ellie says, “But people who know us personally [were] like, ‘I cried when I heard the end of the song.’ My cousin sent me a picture of her in tears. We’ve gotten a really positive reaction from it. I’m happy – really happy – it’s out.”
The wise philosopher Amy Grant has previously noted that the holidays amplify life’s changes more than any other window of time.
Most families have seasonal rituals — pulling out the same ornaments, baking the same foods and singing the same songs — so the advent of a new baby, a death, a wedding or a divorce are likely to become more extreme during that window and remind people of life’s uncertainties.
With that backdrop, Justin Moore’s new nonseasonal single, “Time’s Ticking,” arrived at an appropriate time, going to country radio via PlayMPE on Oct. 25.
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“It’s pretty simple,” Moore says of the song’s message. “Live life to the fullest, and try to take advantage of every moment you have, whether it be with your family or with your career. Make the most out of every single day.”
That message has quite a track record in country music. Cody Johnson’s “ ’Til You Can’t,” Kenny Chesney’s “Don’t Blink,” Ty Herndon’s “Living in a Moment” and, of course, Tim McGraw’s “Live Like You Were Dying” are just a few of the titles that encourage the listener to experience the present as it passes.
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“When you’re in the daily grind,” Moore says, “you can kind of lose sight of that at times. It’s good to have the opportunity to be reminded of it.”
Co-writer/producer Jeremy Stover (“Til My Last Day,” “You’re Like Coming Home”) appears, according to two of his co-writers, to have brought the title when “Time’s Ticking” was written at his Florida Panhandle property on Feb. 24, 2023.
“My kids are getting a little older,” Stover says, “and just thinking on some of the moments I’ve missed, but also some of the ones I’ve been there for — you know, the ones I’ve been there for have been really, really valuable, and I appreciate a lot. That’s a big part of where that comes from.”
Moore spent about a week writing for his This Is My Dirt album, and the day before he arrived in Florida, Stover prepped a few ideas with Randy Montana (“Beer Never Broke My Heart,” “Pretty Heart”) and Will Bundy (“Friends Like That,” “Half of Me”). Moore willingly addressed mortality in previous hits “If Heaven Wasn’t So Far Away” and “The Ones That Didn’t Make It Back Home,” so when Stover suggested “Time’s Ticking,” no one batted an eye at the subject matter.
“Nobody has a better pulse on Justin Moore than Jeremy Stover,” Bundy notes. “They’ve worked together from day one, so he knows exactly the ins and outs of what Justin is going to love.”
Bundy started working with a brisk train beat, putting an energetic spin on a potentially difficult topic, and they developed the chorus’ lyrical framework, opening with “Call your mama, kiss your babies” and closing with the title. They mapped out the melody a bit, too, and instead of giving the chorus a typical lift, they kept it generally in the same range as the verses.
“Sometimes we call them the anti-chorus,” Montana notes. “So many of those choruses, you go up a third or a fifth in your scale. Some people even go an octave, depending on the singer, but man, there’s something so smooth about a song that kind of just stays in that spot.”
As predicted, Moore happily rolled up his sleeves on it the next day. They decided a funeral procession would reasonably lead the protagonist’s mind toward his own finality, and they dropped a “long, black Cadillac” right in the first two lines. They debated whether a hearse was the right image to start a song, but the debate didn’t last too long.
“When you’re writing a song, if you can leave a mark early, I think it’s better,” Moore explains, “so people kind of instantly have an understanding of where you’re going.”
It didn’t hurt that Bundy tagged the intro with a spry instrumental signature as he built the track, offsetting the potential for “Time’s Ticking” to take a morbid direction.
“I always love to find that sig lick early,” Bundy says. “That’s the first melody you hear of a song, and we know how short people’s attention span is these days. If that doesn’t catch your ear pretty quick, you’re sort of cooked before you get going.”
They crafted “Time’s Ticking” with surprising simplicity. In verse one, the guy honors the motorcade by pulling into a Kwik Sak parking lot. In the chorus, he has a stark attitude adjustment, reminding himself to appreciate every second he’s given. In verse two, he drives back onto the road with his new outlook.
That’s all the action that occurs in the entire three-and-a-half minutes.
“The song is actually longer than what happens in the song in real time,” Montana observes. “I think that’s super cool.”
His co-writers also credit Stover with a quirky stand-out lyric: “Spinner bait a good honey hole.” It might sound a little suggestive to some listeners who don’t know anglers’ lingo — a “honey hole” is a secret fishing hot spot. And “spinner bait” is a noun that’s purposely misused as a verb. The phrase begs the listener to lean in a little and figure out the specifics.
“It sounds a hair left-footed, but I love that,” Montana says. “That’s the part that sticks with me after I listen to it.”
Once Bundy built out the demo, Moore nailed the final vocal for “Time’s Ticking” in the kitchen, and he joined Stover and co-producer Scott Borchetta at a later date for a tracking session at The Castle in Franklin, Tenn. Moore’s road band handled the parts with Danny Rader augmenting on acoustic guitar and banjo. Bundy’s sig lick was rerecorded with two guitars delivering the riff, and Tucker Wilson’s drum part was heavily filtered in the first verse.
“It added that kind of lo-fi, boxy sound,” Stover says.
Steel guitarist Mike Johnson ladled a spiritual twang onto the cut during an overdub session at Blackbird Studio, perpetuating the players’ overall musical mission.
“It’s more of a happy feel,” Stover says. “It’s a positive song. It’s not a punch to the face to say, ‘Hey, wake up, time’s a-tickin’.’ It’s more like a peck on the shoulder.”
Dierks Bentley made a guest appearance on the album version, though conflicts in his own release schedule nixed any possibility of him participating in a single. So Valory serviced radio with a mix that relies on all of Moore’s original solo vocal.
The make-the-most-of-it message of “Time’s Ticking” ends up applying to Moore’s career as much as to his fans’ lives.
“You never know when the last [single] you’re going to have is the last one you’re going to have,” he says.
“So I’m trying to put out music that will stand the test of time, and I believe this song has that opportunity.”
Modern-day America is full of conspiracy theories. Among them: Votes have been changed by space lasers, birds aren’t real and large corporations are injecting vaccines into over-the-counter foods.
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With his new single, Luke Bryan unintentionally found a conspiracy that’s been grossly overlooked: Honky tonks have manipulated the population with magnets.
To be clear, that is a kooky – and unfounded – proposition, but it is true that country bars have an irresistible attraction for many of their customers. That internal pull is at the heart of Bryan’s “Country Song Came On,” released by Capitol Nashville to country radio Oct. 28 via PlayMPE.
The single’s protagonist is ill-equipped to say no to the joint’s alluring features, and his plan to get a good weeknight’s sleep is derailed by the pursuit of a good time. “I’ve certainly been drawn in, no shortage of times, by the vibes of a bar, and the right songs and the right ambience,” Bryan says.
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He knows that scenario from both sides of the fence: he’s paid the cover charge as a patron, and sang cover songs on a hole-in-the-wall stage.
“From the time I was 16 years old till I got my record deal, I [played] most of my concerts in little bars and honky tonks,” Bryan says, “so I spent a good 12, 13 years playing in those environments and playing the Merle Haggard songs and the Waylon Jennings songs and the Keith Whitleys and all that. So it’s nice to find one like this that really is authentically me.”
“Country Song Came On” found its genesis in a second-floor writing room on April 18, 2022, at SMACKSongs’ Music Row headquarters in Nashville. Songwriters Neil Medley (“Made For You,” “Hung Up On You”) and Ryan Beaver (“Pretty Little Poison,” “Party Mode”) had been co-writing frequently for more than a decade, but it was the first time they worked with River House writer Dan Alley.
Once they settled on the “Country Song Came On” title, the rest of the piece unfolded naturally, as they explored a regular guy who cedes control of his evening hours to a greater power. “It’s not my fault,” Alley says with a laugh. “It’s the song’s fault, or it’s the barstool’s fault.”
Beaver toggled on acoustic guitar between a tonic chord and a two-minor, adding a seventh note into the latter triad to give it extra color. Most, though not all, of the song resides in that simple back-and-forth interplay, as they crafted a bluesy melody over the top.
“I tend to play a lot of voicings,” Beaver says. “If there’s an A-minor, I’ll play it a couple of different ways, just for it to feel fresh or new or different. An A-minor is an A-minor, but if you add a seventh, or you play that A-minor in [a different] position, it feels different, sounds different. We were probably just all entertaining ourselves, but it’s really a lesson in simplicity, going back and forth between those two chords a lot.”
They had the opening line of the chorus (“I was gonna drive by, wasn’t gonna stop”) and the payoff lines (“I wasn’t gonna drink / But then a country song came on”) and mapped out the chords and melodic progression of the first verse and chorus before filling in the rest. Even though the start of the chorus was obvious, it didn’t have a typical lift.
“That character is not going to sing a big chorus,” Medley says. “It just never felt for one second that we needed it. It just felt like this groove is going on, so why take it out of that? Let’s just continue.”
Midway through that chorus, they switched up the phrasing and melody just enough to propel it forward, and they cemented the club’s magnetism once they settled on the lyric for that passage: “Wasn’t gonna let the bar twist my arm / But I’m helpless in a honky tonk.” Bryan suggested that second line could be a title on its own. “’Helpless in a honky tonk’ – we should write that at some point,” Medley quips.
They had the bar’s band cover a George Jones hit in the second verse, and gave “Country Song” a very subtle bridge, then did a work tape to end the day. As much as they liked it, they didn’t get around to demoing “Country Song” until the fall, using a four-piece band. Alley sang lead, unintentionally copping a Blake Shelton sound. Shelton and Bryan were their leading targets once their publishers started pitching it.
“There’s a lot of space in it, [and] it’s kind of traditional, just to leave a little space and not get too many words jumbled in there,” Alley says. “That kind of leans towards the old school.”
Bryan quickly put it on hold when he heard the demo in January 2023. Producers Jeff and Jody Stevens booked a different set of studio players than in past Bryan sessions for a recording date at Nashville’s Starstruck Studios. Steel guitarist Eddie Dunlap and guitarist Sol Philcox-Littlefield got plenty of space to set the sonic tone.
“Due to the title, I think we thought ‘Country Song’ was going to need a lot of steel on it,” Jody says.
Philcox-Littlefield enhanced that attitude by playing a growling baritone guitar instead of the light Memphis soul licks featured in the demo. “[Bryan] wanted something country and something straight ahead,” Jeff says.
Those two musicians played the most prominent role in defining the sound, and divvying up the parts was effortless. “I’ve been recording this kind of band ever since 1993,” Jeff says. “If they’re working well together – and they almost always do – by the time the second run-through comes through, they’ve kind of got their spots figured out.”
It jelled so nicely that even after Bryan stopped singing at the 3:06 mark, the band kept grooving another 50 seconds. “We could have made that outro about half as long,” Jody says, “but I don’t think it’d be as fun.”
Bryan’s final vocal, also cut at Starstruck, was just as effortless, given the easy nature of the song. He made one important revision, replacing Jones in the lyric with “ETC” – short for Earl Thomas Conley, whose songs Bryan covered frequently when he was playing barrooms.
“If people don’t know what ETC is, they’ll get online or Google, and maybe go dive into some deep, deep, deep cuts of Earl Thomas Conley,” Bryan says.
The ETC alteration uniformly impressed the writers. “That was the moment I realized, not only does Luke love this song, but Luke really cares still, this many years into his career, about his craft and about songs,” Beaver says. “And he made it his.”
“Country Song Came On” is as magnetic as the bar it celebrates, and it debuted on the Country Airplay chart dated Nov. 30, easily surviving the internal vetting process. If anyone suggests the decision to make it a single was contentious, consider it another conspiracy theory.
“Through the years, I’ve had songs that I really believed in, that not everybody believed in, and they worked out,” Bryan says. “This one’s funny, because everybody’s really on the same page and excited to see it come out.”
It’s a necessary fact of music-industry life that the conditions in which music is created are often different than the reality in which they’re consumed.
Christmas songs, for example, are often penned in spring or summer, and they’re frequently recorded when Nashville temperatures are still in the 80s or 90s. Similarly, artists typically develop future singles when their current releases are just beginning to grow, and many of their projections about follow-up material are educated guesses about how the already-finished songs might perform.
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In that spirit, Nate Smith’s new single – “Fix What You Didn’t Break,” released by RCA Nashville to country radio via PlayMPE on Oct. 28 – is an example of strong artistic instinct. It’s a power ballad, fueled by crunchy chords and Smith’s trademark rasp, though it’s something of a departure. His first three singles – “Whiskey On You,” “World On Fire” and “Bulletproof,” each of which reached the top 5 on Country Airplay – all incorporated that rasp into defiant post-breakup anthems. “Fix What You Didn’t Break” revises the message, embracing a plot that celebrates a woman who changed the outlook of a previously defeated romantic partner. It’s not exactly the formula Smith has employed thus far, and he’s acutely aware.
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“It’s kind of scary when you put your first kind of ballad out there,” he says. “But I do love this song so much.”
Understandably. Smith was a teenager in the late 1990s and early 2000s when pop/rock radio was spinning Lifehouse’s “You and Me,” 3 Doors Down’s “Here Without You,” Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing” and Goo Goo Dolls’ RIAA diamond-certified “Iris.” That sonic strain is part of Smith’s musical DNA, and provides permission to explore the emotions around successful relationships.“Guys,” he reasons, “are more sensitive than we get credit.”
Smith’s musical identity was still being forged for the public when he wrote “Fix” on July 11, 2023, at the home studio of producer Lindsay Rimes (LOCASH, Tyler Rich). They were joined by songwriters Ashley Gorley (“I Am Not Okay,” “Truck Bed”) and Taylor Phillips (“I Am Not Okay,” “Hurricane”) – the same team that authored “World On Fire,” which was just in its fourth charted week at the time on its way to becoming Smith’s second No. 1. They already had a sense that Smith needed to think about changing things up with his future radio-targeted releases.
“Our goal,” says Gorley, “is not just to try to get a song on them, but to have a hand in what they should do next, or what we think we’d like to hear from them personally next. This kind of checked all those boxes.”
Phillips submitted the title – “He always has the titles… it’s one of his expected roles,” Gorley says – and it didn’t take long to figure out that it fit a story about a woman who served as something of a savior for a guy who was lost. Rimes cranked up some chords on electric guitar that gave it some testosterone.“Lindsay, he’s always got that electric turned up so loud the neighbors can hear him,” Phillips quips.
The opening lines came early: “I was a 10-year train wreck/ With a last-call longneck.” They captured a guy numbing his pain with alcohol, and Smith says they drew on a past relationship that he hasn’t talked much about publicly. “It had been in the ballpark of 10 years since my divorce and what I went through before, when I left Nashville the first time,” he notes. “It kind of had a little nod of that.”
They mapped out the melody, still applying an anthemic attitude to “Fix,” even if it was a love song. One particularly attractive melodic segment, featuring short phrases and distinct-but-modest intervals, emerged during the work, though it wasn’t immediately apparent how to use it.
“We all dug the melody and the vibe of that section, and we were just trying to figure out where to put it,” Rimes remembers. “At the time, we might have thought that could be a verse, but it felt right as the pre-chorus.”
That pre-chorus was an ideal puzzle piece, easing from the opening verse into the first chorus. The verses themselves had their own forward motion thematically. While the opening stanza established the singer’s brokenness, the second verse focused on the woman, who saw him as salvageable and took the steps to revive his spirits, answering his prayers and picking up “the towel that I threw in.”
“One of my favorite lines – and I’m sure Taylor had something to do with it – is ‘Showed me the past ain’t a tattoo/ Loved me even when you didn’t have to,’” Gorley says. “That’s like a spiritual moment to be like, ‘Hey, you don’t have to be known for your past. It’s not with you forever. I’m gonna change that.’ That really goes with the theme.”
To cap it, they re-employed the pre-chorus as the bridge, figuring that the melody was so good it should be heard again.
“I don’t like doing a lot of pre-peats – it’s what I call them when you repeat the pre-chorus – but in that situation, what else can you say that’s better than that?” Phillips says. “The melody was so hooky, and it gave the song a second to breathe again before the last chorus.”
Rimes built the demo as the writing session progressed, adding programmed drums and bass around his guitar parts. When they thought they were done writing, Gorley took a swing at a scratch vocal, just to see if there were any issues that jumped out. Once he wrapped, Smith sang the real demo vocal, adding his rasp in all the right places.
“Fix What You Didn’t Break” languished for months, but Rimes brought it out this summer during a tracking session at Nashville’s Blackbird Studios with a five-piece band: drummer Evan Hutchings, bassist Mark Hill, guitarist Derek Wells, keyboardist Alex Wright and steel guitarist Justin Schipper. They found themselves with extra time at the end of the booking, and Rimes thought framing Smith’s demo vocal with a real band would better sell it to the team.
“I felt personally that the song wasn’t getting as much love as I felt it deserved, and it wasn’t finished,” Rimes says. “We were all focused on getting the album finished, and cutting songs and listening to new songs and stuff. I wanted to cut a band on this song, because I feel like it’s a huge hit.”
Sol Philcox-Littlefield came in later to drop a loud-but-simple guitar solo, and Smith spent hours finding places to add in backing vocals.
There were other options for singles, but multiple radio stations asked RCA to service it, presenting Smith in a slightly different light. It debuted on the Country Airplay chart dated Nov. 23, reminding listeners that the right situation can help overcome a past hardship.
“I feel like a good relationship exposes it,” Smith says, “but it also gives you the freedom to grow and the grace to forgive and understand that you’re going through this stuff, slowly refining.”