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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.”
On Jan. 14, songwriter Emily Weisband posted a TikTok video of a new song and asked her followers to play publisher and suggest who should record it. The responses brought a string of worthy targets: Maren Morris, Kelsea Ballerini, Camila Cabello, Lauren Daigle, Demi Lovato and Danielle Bradbery, among others.
Additionally, Tenille Arts offered her own ideas about whom Weisband should have sing it: “Ummm, you. Or me. Lol”
Weisband didn’t know it at the time, but Arts — despite the “Lol” — was very serious about “Jealous of Myself.” “That melody was stuck in my head the minute that I heard it,” Arts says. “I kept going back and watching that TikTok over and over again.”
“Jealous of Myself ” became her newest single when Dreamcatcher Artists released it to country radio via PlayMPE on Oct. 14, exactly nine months after Arts first heard the TikTok.
The song’s actual birth came a day prior to its TikTok debut, when Weisband and Old Dominion’s Trevor Rosen met Big Loud writer John Byron in an upstairs writing room at his publisher’s offices. Byron went into the appointment with an agenda. He had previously lost an eight-year relationship, and he had also recently discovered that his ex had started seeing a man from Colorado who was now moving to Nashville to be near her. Byron was bummed, and his disappointment led to that “Jealous of Myself” title.
“I was very jealous of him,” concedes Byron, “but I was definitely more jealous of me when I did have her. So when I thought of the title, I wrote it down.”
He also held it for that Jan. 13 appointment with Weisband, believing she could provide a woman’s perspective for the idea’s inherent vulnerability. It got a positive response when he introduced it, and while they continued winding through other potential titles, they kept coming back to “Jealous.”
Initially, Byron and Rosen mapped out a musical direction on guitar. “We were trying to just start somewhere with some chords,” Rosen recalls. “But then at one point, Emily walked over — he had a piano sitting there — and she just sat down and started playing. It’s incredible how when she just starts singing whatever comes off the top of her head, we’re like, ‘Oh, my God. That’s it.’ It was magical.”
At some point, they came up with the full hook, “I’m jealous of myself when I had you,” and they determined to make it a mystery for the first-time listener by creating a storyline that would sound initially as if the new girlfriend was the target of the jealousy.
Rosen landed on the opening line, “She’s a little bit younger,” which established a path for the story. “That is such a good misdirection,” says Rosen. “It sounds like it’s a younger girl, but it’s the picture of ‘me’ when I was younger. So everything else sort of started to fall in around that.”
The mystery, and the jealousy, fits in a surprisingly melancholy musical package — surprising, since the bulk of Weisband’s chord progression is major chords, but the flow feels more moody, like a minor key.
“I tend to play different voicings of major chords, so sometimes they’ll sound a little more like longing than just the basic major chord,” she says. “There’ll be like one little note off in the chord that kind of makes it feel a little more dissonant because [I think] the full range of human experience is like this bittersweet, tension thing.”
The melody followed in bittersweet suit. In the pre-chorus, it hangs on the seventh note of the key, one that begs for resolution. But it simultaneously falls in the middle of the chord, literally creating heartbreaking dissonance with two of the three notes in the triad.
Byron played piano for a piano-vocal demo at the end of the session, with Weisband delivering a smoky vocal on the floor, hunched over a microphone she clutched with both hands.
“When Emily sings, she does whatever she needs to get into the real emotion,” says Byron. “She gets down on her knees and starts wearing into this song, and it’s just breaking my heart because the title is already near and dear to me. And so she’s ripping my heart out.”
They determined that it needed an extra diversion after the second chorus, so Weisband added a soaring vocal section on the fly. When it was completed, Weisband was anxious to have people hear “Jealous.”
“Writing songs, to me, has been my healer throughout my life, and that’s why I do it,” she says. “If it’s my healer to write it, then it’s going to heal somebody else who listens to it, you know? I kind of feel that way about every sad song I get to be a part of writing; it’s absolutely a part of the healing.”
Once Arts heard it on TikTok the next day, her team reached out to the writers, and a few weeks later, she enlisted producer Nathan Chapman (Taylor Swift, Keith Urban), who had produced three tracks on her 2021 album, Girl to Girl.
“One of my favorite things that he said to me last time we were working together was to sing the verses like you were telling a story and then to sing the choruses like you’re a singer,” she recalls. “The amount of emotion that he was able to get out of my vocals in the past, I just knew that he was going to be able to pull that out of me.”
OneRepublic’s Ryan Tedder had recently mentioned to Chapman that ’80s pop sounds were beginning to feel in vogue again, and when Arts mentioned that she thought “Jealous” needed an ’80s sort of sound, Chapman thought it was an astute read. He had keyboard player Dave Cohen apply an era-appropriate electric piano, and he gave it a slow build.
“A lot of songs in the ’80s kind of bloom like that, and it’s because people’s attention spans were a lot longer,” reasons Chapman. “I thought, ‘If we’re going to be in that world, let’s really unfold the track the way those songs are treated. Let’s not only hit the piano tones and drum sounds, but let’s hit the architecture of how those records are made as well.’ ”
He also chose to record it like a pop song, building it one track at a time with drummer Aaron Sterling, who also programmed a bass part; Cohen; and guitarist Kevin Kadish. Chapman, Arts and Sara Haze added backing vocals, which grew in prominence as the song progressed. And late in the process, Arts and Dreamcatcher founder Jim Mazza visited Chapman’s studio, convincing him at that point to add atmospheric steel guitar to lend a little more country and a little more pain.
“This is one of those songs where it’s like, ‘All right, producer, don’t screw it up,’ ” Chapman says. “ ‘You got a great song. You had a great direction for the artists, and you got a great vocalist who’s going to crush the vocal — don’t screw it up.’ And in this one situation, I don’t think I did.”
Arts debuted “Jealous of Myself” during a CMA Fest performance in June, and fans asked afterward where they could purchase it. It has since become a featured song in the set, and she’s optimistic that it could become a standout on the airwaves, too, once it gets exposed there.
“It’s a true country song to me,” she says. “It’s a story song, it says something new that really hasn’t been out there, and I think Nathan’s production is so different and unique. And that’s been the response that we’ve had from country radio, that it doesn’t sound like anything else out there right now. I hope that’s a good thing and that we can have another No. 1.”
In the opening hour of the 2019 PBS series Country Music: A Film by Ken Burns, Dolly Parton offered a primer on the use of the much-maligned word “hillbilly.”
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“If you’re an outsider… and you’re saying it’s hillbilly music, because you don’t know any better, it’s almost like a racist remark,” she observed. “If we’re hillbillies, we’re proud of it. But you’re not allowed to say it if you don’t really know what you’re talking about.”
Singer-songwriter Stephen Wilson Jr., who was raised in Seymour, Ind., has enough backwoods cred to use the word properly. Or, to be more accurate, enough cred to pull the word apart properly. His song “billy,” released Sept. 16, centers on a hook that revels in its unsophisticated lifestyle choices: “You can call me billy, but the hills come with me.”
“The way hillbillies are generalized in mainstream media, they’re kind of lacking in intelligence, or they don’t think progressively,” Wilson says. “All the hillbillies I grew up with are actually really smart people; they just kind of chose a real simple life — and I kind of wanted to showcase the simplicity of that life without really taking a side.”
But it’s a performance with its own sound: a buzzing undercurrent, quasi-tribal drums and a fiery, futuristic-sounding lap steel with a touch of danger. The sound is, suggests Wilson, “Death Cab for country.”
Wilson developed “billy” in a half-hour fit of inspiration in his Nashville kitchen on Nov. 29, 2021, the Monday following Thanksgiving. He had spent the holiday in Indiana, hanging out with family and reconnecting with his roots. “I took a quick little swim in the hillbilly pool when I went home,” he says. “Maybe me writing that song was getting it off me.”
The “You can call me billy” hook may have been a reaction to his brief Indiana sojourn — he’s not entirely sure how it arrived — but he developed the lyrics first, starting with a chorus that mixes subversive imagery (“Half-mud blood”), hillbilly traits (“Got a strong Southern drawl”), mindless play (“Cannonball in the kiddy pool”) and a little good-guy grace (“Kind as the day is long”).
“It’s really more of an observation of a lifestyle and everything that comes along with it,” says Wilson. “It felt empowering to me when I was seeing it. It kind of made you feel tough, but not with all the typical tough-guy shit.”
The first verse embraced the outdoor aspects of that lifestyle, akin to Hank Williams Jr.’s “A Country Boy Can Survive” with its references to skinning bucks and cleaning fish. The last verse — owing, perhaps, to its post-Thanksgiving origins — served up collard greens, cornbread and “pig on the griddle.” Even a description of the conversation, “spoke slow and deeply fried,” took on a foodie’s viewpoint.
When the words came to sonic life, Wilson crafted verse melodies with long, held notes at the end of the lines, strung across a static, tonic E chord. Juxtaposed against that framework, the chorus feels quicker, with faster-paced phrasing and a chord structure that throws in a rare chromatic move, rising a half-step in a passing chord that provides an energetic lift.
With its singalong chorus, hooky melody and mysterious patchwork of images, “billy” caught the ear of Wilson’s wife, singer-songwriter Leigh Nash, formerly of the band Sixpence None the Richer. When they attended a Christmas party the next month, the musicians started sharing songs, and Nash suggested he do “billy.” Host Caylee Hammack and Ashley McBryde responded with enthusiasm, and Wilson figured he needed to record it.
He worked it up with his road band first, with drummer Julian Dorio banging stuttered rhythms on snare to carry much of the energy. Bassist Jon Murray anchored the chords beneath Wilson’s active acoustic guitar, and his brother, Scotty Murray, came up with a sneering lap steel part that enhances the song’s edgy quality.
“He plays it through a pedal board, like a Jonny Greenwood meets Duane Allman kind of thing, or Radiohead meets Paul Franklin,” Wilson suggests. “He’s a really great steel player, but he also adds a lot of cool, surreal effects.”
The band played “billy” several times during a spring concert run with The Cadillac Three, then added it to the set on a subsequent tour with Brothers Osborne. When producer Ben West heard “billy,” he wanted to skip some other material that was already in progress to focus on the new song. Wilson’s acoustic guitar part and scratch vocal provided the basic recording, and the other musicians worked around that at Farmland, a recording studio near Nashville’s Lipscomb University.
“It’s a very unassuming studio, and you could drive right past it and never know,” says West. “Jonny and Scotty, the brothers who play in his band, both live there. It’s really perfect. They just stumble out of bed, bring their instruments down and plug in and start recording.”
They had already honed in so much on the arrangement that West’s main focus was capturing the best iteration of their performances. “When we got around to recording it, the drum parts were probably 99%,” West says. “So my job at that point is just to basically make sure that nobody’s overshadowing the main character of the song, which is Stephen’s lyric and his gut-string guitars. Everybody’s supporting that character, but since they’re such big personalities, Julian could be the star of the show if you’re not careful, or Scotty on pedal steel.”
During concert performances, the band developed a Lumineers-like “hey” in the chorus; West and Wilson re-created it in the studio, inspired less by “Ho Hey” than by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ “Don’t Come Around Here No More.”
“We just kind of did like a faux gang-vocal thing with a little slap back on it,” Wilson says. “Really, it’s more of the Tom Petty approach to a ‘hey.’ ”
The self-released “billy” is projected as one track among 22 possibilities for an album that’s currently being shopped around Nashville. Meanwhile, it has become a highlight of Wilson’s live set, speaking directly to fans who share his outsider disposition.
“When I first started playing it, I could see these hillbilly kids start singing it — like, they latched on to it real quick,” Wilson says. “And it means something to people, though they don’t know if they can exactly put their finger on it.”
Maren Morris’ Humble Quest, currently nominated for the Country Music Association’s album of the year, is full of plot lines and small details that emanate directly from her life, her friendships and her marriage to fellow artist Ryan Hurd.
First single “Circles Around This Town” is an autobiographical recap of her ascent in Nashville’s music community, “Nervous” reveals psychosexual passion and sensitivity, and a handful of songs — “Background Music,” the title track and closer “What Would This World?” — grapple collectively with the meaning of life in all its temporal, elusive mystery.
“I definitely made some personal choices on this record, particularly that I was more vulnerable than I maybe had been previously,” Morris says. “Maybe it’s just time and a little bit more wisdom, but I definitely feel like I allowed myself to share a little bit more behind the curtain.”
The project’s second single, “I Can’t Love You Anymore,” is a breezy celebration of making up. Heard on its own merits separate from Humble Quest, that might not be entirely evident — it references hard times and conflict, but there’s no sense that any sort of bitterness might have been in the mix when Morris and Hurd wrote it in January 2021.
But, in fact, the cheeriness in the three-minute jaunt reflects a post-tiff rebound while they visited the Hawaiian home of co-writer/producer Greg Kurstin (Adele, Kelly Clarkson).
“Ryan and I were bickering about something — I can’t even remember what, it was so stupid,” she says. “But we were kind of arguing that morning, and then going into the write, Ryan threw that title out and it just sort of lightened the mood: ‘I can’t love you any more than I do now.’ So the song ended up becoming couples therapy for us.”
That little window in a relationship, when the cloud of negativity has lifted after a spat and the couple reasserts its commitment, is one of the joys in the process, and the positivity of the moment is reflected in both the song’s effortlessly happy melody and its unencumbered lyrics. Morris, Hurd and Kurstin wrote the chorus first, turning out an easy singalong by repeating the I-can’t-love-you-anymore hook six times in a row.
“It’s a very simple one, and yet repetitive,” she says of the chorus. “It just felt good to sing the same hook over and over again. But then I felt like for the verses — because the chorus, lyrically, was so simple, I wanted to really get colorful with the language on the verses. So that’s why there’s a lot of imagery and opposites. And we could really get a little more edgy with the verse.”
That aspect starts right at the song’s opening as she kicks it off with an unlikely rhyme scheme: “Shoulda known what I was gettin’ in/Fallin’ for a boy from Michigan.” It identifies up front that she’s singing about Hurd, who spent his formative years in Kalamazoo.
A follow-up thought, “You like drivin’ to Texas/ You put up with all my exes,” similarly pinpoints Morris’ roots in Arlington, though her exes inhabit their marriage because of her and Hurd’s occupations — not because she keeps them in her day-to-day orbit.
“They’re not in my life, but they are in my songs,” she says with a laugh. “It’s part and parcel of being married to a songwriter who’s had a past. You do have these relationships internalized in songs. I have songs about previous relationships, and so does he. It’s just something we accept about each other.
“But honestly, I was going for the rhyme, and it felt like a cool ode to George Strait. ‘Texas’ and ‘exes’ just go together so perfectly.”
Verse two took some additional edgy steps. Morris sings about the times “when I’ve been a bitch” (the single version blanks out the profanity), and it closes with her singing, “You’re so good-lookin’, it kinda makes me sick” — it’s amusing to consider Hurd helping write a song that lets his wife cast him as a sex symbol.
“We just don’t get awkward anymore,” she says. “I think because we’ve written so many songs together, we’ve been able to tap into this very intimate role with each other in the room and not feel cringey.”
Following the second chorus, they opted for a vocal interlude that ultimately featured Morris in triple harmony with herself, in a spot that would typically support a guitar solo. Appropriate for a song about a rebounding relationship moment, the final verse has Morris self-effacingly calling herself “an acquired taste,” while looking forward to many more years of bliss… and occasional bickering.
“I think that it takes a very strong person to be with someone like me or, really, any artist,” she says. “Maybe it’s my Texas upbringing, but I’m very stubborn and like things done my way. Being in a relationship takes a lot of balance and compromise, which I’ve learned the hard way.”
Kurstin attended to the musical track as the writing session progressed, laying down a light drum foundation and strummed acoustic guitar playing four basic country chords. When the song was completed and the visit to Hawaii was over, Kurstin continued building the instrumental support at his No Expectations Studio in California. Morris, meanwhile, had time to live with the recording from the writing session and wanted to lean heavily on the country component. Kurstin brought in Rich Hinman to overdub steel guitar in L.A., and he captured Bennett Lewis (of Morris’ road band) on Dobro during additional overdubs at Sheryl’s Barn, the recording studio owned by Sheryl Crow in Tennessee.
Morris ultimately decided the chorus was too repetitive and rewrote the fourth and fifth occurrences when she did her final vocal at the studio, nailing it in a single take. Hurd applied harmony to the choruses, underscoring their relationship’s centrality in the narrative. “I wanted it to feel like we were facing each other and just singing it at each other,” she says.
Columbia Nashville released “I Can’t Love You Anymore” to country radio via PlayMPE on Sept. 13. It has slipped on and off Country Airplay a couple of times while it finds its initial footing, but it ultimately feels well-timed for a fan base that craves authenticity but also could use an emotional break.
“I truly listened to my fans’ reaction to what could be potential singles,” Morris says. “It just felt like people don’t want to stew in depressing, heavy shit right now. They want to hum something over and over again that just feels good. We’ve faced heavy truths plenty. So let’s just dance.”
When psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross introduced the five stages of grief in her 1969 book On Death and Dying, the original intent was to teach about coping with the loss of significant people in our lives.
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But those stages — denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance — don’t apply solely to the passage of our loved ones. They play out with all sorts of losses, including the end of a job, a friend moving away, the crash of a dream or a romantic breakup. Kolby Cooper’s first radio single, “Excuses,” puts that latter scenario into a hyper context, seemingly cycling through three stages before the first chorus even appears.
The pain “may not be as great as grieving a lost loved one,” Cooper reasons, “but it’s still a bad one for a lot of people. And I really think we did a decent job of getting that ‘Oh my God, what has happened’ feeling.”
It helped that Cooper’s road guitarist, Paul Oliger, offered a real-life road map when the subject emerged in a writing room on Oct. 13, 2020. Oliger’s girlfriend had dumped him the weekend prior, and all of her namby-pamby waffling in the breakup only made it worse.
“She was like, ‘You’re too good for me,’ and ‘I don’t deserve you’ — all this bulls–t, like, ‘You can do better than me,’ ” recalls Cooper. “Everything was just all these excuses.”
That single word, “excuses,” provided the impetus to explore the topic when Cooper met up with fellow songwriters Jordan Walker (“When It Rains It Pours,” “Can’t Do Without Me”) and Brett Tyler (“Cold Beer Calling My Name,” “Wild As Her”) at Combustion Music in Nashville. After perhaps an hour of scrolling through ideas that didn’t spark much interest, Tyler ran across “Excuses.” He had the title, the melody for the back half of the chorus and not much more. But, of course, Cooper had his bandmember’s heartbreak storyline. Those elements were a better match, it seems, than Oliger and his ex-girlfriend.
“I think it took like an hour to write,” Walker says. “It was one of those things where we didn’t really overthink anything and we kept everything simple. I think that’s what kind of helps portray it to the audience because it’s not something you have to think about. You just hear it once, and you get it.”
They developed the scenario in a realistic manner, capturing a moment that nearly everyone has experienced.
“For me, it was a relationship from my past,” notes Tyler. “When we started talking about stories and things like that, we were just kind of like, you know, ‘That’s just excuses. Let’s cut through the crap.’”
They did that very directly in the chorus. The singer calls out his girlfriend’s let-him-down-easy lines as “bulls–t,” saying the word outright in the initial version of “Excuses.” “I like a well-placed cuss word,” Tyler says. “We were all kind of against saying ‘B.S.’ because B.S. just sounds like such a ridiculous way to say ‘bull–it.’ ”
Verse two allows the guy to vent even more, though it also obliquely references the can’t-win situation the girlfriend is in. He laments in the stanza that she “coulda saved us both some time/ And just left me a letter.” Of course, had she split by writing a letter — or, worse, by text — he would have thought she was cold and heartless.
“We were trying to figure out how we were going to write into the second chorus,” says Walker. “I had the line, ‘You coulda come up with a couple better,’ and so needed a rhyme for ‘better.’ It was kind of a joke at first. I was like, ‘What if she just wrote a letter?’ We talked about it, that he’d probably be even more mad if she did write a letter, but it just rhymed so well that we ran with it.”
They wrote a bridge that outlined a few more options for how to dump a man and left time for a guitar solo, too. Before they parted company, they cut a work tape with acoustic guitars that Cooper could play for his producer, Philip Mosley (Blacktop Mojo, Colby Keeling). Mosley subsequently recorded a demo that sounded a bit heavier than the work tape, as well as a new scratch vocal on Cooper before a late-2020 session at Sound Stage.
The studio band mixed familiar country session players and local rock guys: bassist Jacob Lowery, drummer Miles McPherson, Hammond B3 player Will Houchens, steel guitarist Justin Schipper and three other guitarists — Tim Galloway on acoustic and Rob McNelley and Spence Peppard on electric. The crew mostly found its own direction while framing the music with a harder edge than what they heard on the demo.
“The last thing you want to do is just tell somebody of that caliber, ‘Play this,’” Mosley reasons. “You’ve got those guys that are playing on Joe Bonamassa albums and playing with Bob Seger. The last thing you need is some little producer from East Texas telling those guys, ‘Here’s what you’re going to play.’ ”
They started the production with drums, guitar and piano all playing light eighth notes, creating forward motion behind an otherwise languid and pensive verse melody. But that led to a bigger-sounding chorus. “Miles McPherson is just a monster,” says Walker, who attended the session. “Watching him bring it to life behind the drums was the moment that we all looked around like, ‘Damn, this could be a lot bigger than we thought it was.’ ”
“Excuses” helped Cooper secure his recording deal with Wheelhouse, which featured his unvarnished “bulls–t” in the vocal on his EP Boy From Anderson County, released Aug. 6, 2021. When they issued a single to radio via PlayMPE on Aug. 29, 2022, the profanity was edited to sound like a sonic asterisk — “bullsh*t.” They ended up trying multiple approaches to it, and finally, Mosley was summoned to Nashville from his family vacation on Sept. 10, the same day Cooper made his Opry debut. Cooper didn’t want to bleep it, so they cut a version of the line that changed “some bullsh*t that you said” to “somethin’ that you said,” offering an even safer option to broadcasters.
“He wasn’t a fan of doing a radio edit,” Mosley says. “We just backed off trying to be clever with how we got around the edit. And he just said, ‘You know what? I’ll just write another completely different line, just to take its place.’ And it worked out great.”
In its fifth charted week, “Excuses” moves to a new high of No. 52 on the Country Airplay list dated Sept. 29. It’s now a staple in Cooper’s live set, which finds Oliger — whose 2020 breakup inspired it — handling the song’s guitar solo onstage. Now engaged to another woman, Oliger is no longer grieving as he was when “Excuses” was conceived.
“He definitely wouldn’t be as happy with his ex as he is now,” says Cooper. “The thing was, the week after she broke up with him, she was on a date with a rich dude from Dallas. And I don’t know if they’re still together, but I’m sure she’s happier wherever she is.”
Privacy may be one of the most valuable commodities of life in 2022.
With internet tracking, the proliferation of public cameras and the frequent ping of text-message spam, keeping personal space personal is much more difficult than it was when the biggest issue was a neighborhood snoop.
Finding time alone — specifically adult time alone — is at the heart of “You, Me, and Whiskey,” a new Justin Moore duet with Priscilla Block. It’s also a real-world issue for Moore, who shares a house in Arkansas with his wife of 15 years and their four kids.
“One night, [it’s] softball practice for one of them, the other night is basketball lessons for this one and the next night is church,” he says. “It’s difficult to make time for Kate and I — for just us — so you have to make a concerted effort to do that. So I really related to the song.”
Landing a cut with Moore was the goal when Brock Berryhill (“Homesick,” “What Happens in a Small Town”) hosted a 9 a.m. writing session with Cole Taylor (“Home Alone Tonight,” “Nothing To Do Town”) and Jessi Alexander (“Never Say Never,” “I Drive Your Truck”) on Music Row on Jan. 10. Specifically, they intended to write a potential duet for Moore and an unidentified female.
“I love writing duets and almost can’t get tired of them,” enthuses Alexander. “In a duet, you kind of get more dimension. And I love layering. You can alternate melodies and shift around and [have the singers] accompany each other.”
Taylor brought the title “You, Me, and Whiskey” into the room, and all three thought it lent itself to a song about a casual hookup. But they wanted an angle that was authentic to Moore’s home life and focused on a long-term couple.
“He’s happily married,” Taylor says. “When you’re writing with certain artists in mind, you have to keep their story in your head.”
They wrote the anthemic chorus first, beginning the stanza with the hook and filling the next six lines with rising passion and alcohol, the “black-label buzz” aiding the couple’s private pursuit of “things that stay in the dark.” That led to the setup line, celebrating the romance as both sweet and strong, before they repeated the hook once more.
That setup line “was the hardest one for us to find,” recalls Taylor. “We knew we had something special with the melody and the title and the duet part. And the most important part of the song is how you set up the hook. None of it matters if you don’t have a good hook. We searched and searched and searched for that, and then I want to say Jessi maybe said, ‘Nothin’ as sweet, nothin’ as strong.’ We’re all, ‘Yeah, that’s it.’”
They made the chorus ultra-flexible. If Moore — or some other artist — wanted to cut it solo, they wouldn’t have to change a single word. But it was also perfect for two singers to trade lines or sing the entire chorus in harmony.
“I’m a big harmony guy, so I love everything harmonized,” Berryhill says. “I’d harmonize drums.”
They used the same four-chord progression for the verses as the chorus, applying a different melodic approach to provide variance. The progression is dark and mostly unresolved, creating a near-constant tension. The chorus’ big, bright melody hides it a bit, though the verses, using a lower melody and more cautious phrasing, make that subliminal need for resolution clearer. That’s quite appropriate for a song about interpersonal tension and release.
In the second verse, they addressed the release a little more with a cheeky line about “talkin’ dirty” at 10:30,” knowing that it might cause an issue for some programmers. “Obviously, it’s really risky,” allows Taylor. “If it needs changing, we can change it. If not, we just got ‘talkin’ dirty’ on country radio.”
Alexander believes allowing the characters to behave in a public song the way they would in private makes it more likely to connect. “There’s going to be people in the carpool lane, people that are also married, that hopefully will go, ‘I remember those kids,’ ” she says. “That’s exciting because I don’t know that they’re spoken to a lot.”
“You, Me, and Whiskey” didn’t get completed during that Monday’s two-hour appointment, but they reassembled on Friday to finish it. Taylor and Alexander laid down the vocal parts for the demo that day, and Berryhill produced it with scratchy programmed drums and acoustic guitar, offset by a shimmering banjo.
“Being a rock dude, I normally take things to 10,” says Berryhill. “But this one, we kind of kept it like 60%, 70%. The demo doesn’t have all the big drums.”
An hour after Taylor turned it in to his publisher at Creative Nation, owner/producer Jeremy Stover (Travis Denning, Jack Ingram) forwarded “Whiskey” to Moore, who identified Block as his first choice for a duet partner. They both appeared at a WUSY Chattanooga, Tenn., guitar pull on March 29, and Moore was impressed by her voice and her poise while performing alongside artists who were all more established.
“I thought Priscilla stole the show that night with her interaction with the crowd,” he says. “She sang her tail off. The songs were really, really good. I was just highly impressed.”
He told her that night he would be happy to help her any way he could. Getting her to sing on “Whiskey” would fulfill that offer. She was interested, but of course wanted to hear it before she agreed. It was an easy “yes.”
“It feels like me,” says Block. “I tend to drink quite a bit of whiskey, so that one was like, ‘All right, we’re on brand here.’ ”
Stover and his co-producer, Big Machine Label Group president/CEO Scott Borchetta, kept some of Berryhill’s drum programming from the demo but otherwise rerecorded “Whiskey” with a full band, providing a tougher sound while cutting six tracks at The Castle in Franklin, Tenn.
“It’s out in the country, and there’s not a lot of distractions, so everybody’s hyper-focused just on the music,” Stover says. “They’re not running somewhere to make a bank deposit or run an errand. Everybody’s just there for the day.”
Stover visited Arkansas to capture Moore’s lead vocal at his home, and he worked with Block at Nashville’s Blackbird Studios to get her part, intentionally highlighting her unique tone and enunciations, even when the two singers are locked in harmony. “Sometimes you can line up the vocal so tight that it just sounds like a background singer,” says Stover. “We left those vocals where you really hear two distinctive voices, but at the same time, you don’t lose the melody.”
He encouraged Block to adjust the part to accentuate her persona, and she found that “Whiskey” went down rather easily. “Thank you, Jesus, they weren’t sending me any Christina Aguilera/Carrie Underwood [song],” Block deadpans. “There’s just no way that my voice would be able to do amazing things like that.”
Valory released “You, Me, and Whiskey” to country radio via PlayMPE on Oct. 10 with an official add date of Oct. 24. Their two voices fit together publicly the way the song’s characters mesh in private. In the process, the singers meet in the middle, using a production that walks the line between Moore’s usual classic country instrumentation and Block’s more progressive sound.
“It reminds me a little bit of ‘Somebody Else Will,’ ” he says. “So we’re being pushed a little bit out of my comfort zone. But sometimes that’s good. We didn’t get outside of the box, but we got a little closer to the edge of it.”