Makin’ Tracks

“Let’s take a trip down memory lane.”
Few expressions are more clichéd. Different usages of “memory lane” or “memory’s lane” began showing up in the late 1800s, and the phrase has become a common way to think of nostalgia.

Old Dominion’s new single, which Arista Nashville released to country radio via PlayMPE on Jan. 4, puts a fresh coat of paint on that time-worn “Memory Lane” idea. It exists because three band members — lead singer Matthew Ramsey and guitarists Brad Tursi and Trevor Rosen — were open to it when Jessie Jo Dillon (“Break Up in the End,” “10,000 Hours”) brought it up during a Jan. 24, 2022, appointment at Tursi’s house.

“Whenever you’re in a room full of very successful songwriters and someone throws out something that’s so clichéd, there’s a reason, and they may not even know it,” Ramsey says. “You definitely pay attention to it — because, of course, it’s clichéd. But why is that sticking out right now? So it makes us kind of all sit down and go, ‘All right, forget the clichéd. Why is this title here in this room with us?’”

Tursi actually started the creative chain before his co-writers arrived that day, building a short rhythmic track around an acoustic guitar and kick drum.

“After you write a million songs on the guitar, it starts to become hard to think of a different rhythm,” says Tursi. “I knew those guys — and girl — were coming to my house, and I tried to pull up a little drum program that has a different rhythm than you would play on a guitar. I just kind of found that little groove, that acoustic part in the intro. It was two chords and the loop, and that’s what I played them when they got there.”

It sounds vaguely similar in spirit to the rolling guitar in “Gentle on My Mind,” a song John Hartford wrote based on the traveling plot of the 1965 movie Dr. Zhivago. Dillon thought “Memory Lane,” logged in a page of titles on her phone, was an appropriate match.

“He had this beat that was real fast and kind of pulsing,” she says. “I wouldn’t really think to do that idea that way naturally, but it gave the song so much energy, and I think it feels driving — kind of like you’re driving down memory lane.”

Dillon originally generated the title during her own battle with nostalgia. She was getting over a relationship with another songwriter, and she still missed him significantly.

“When I hear that song, I picture exactly where it was — the house and the place, for me,” she recalls. “I think the guys had their own versions of that as well in their minds when we were writing it.”

One of the guys — likely Rosen — came up with the opening line, “If I could buy a house on Memory Lane,” and Ramsey chimed in with quick rhymes: “I’d put my money down, and I’d sign my name.” They envisioned a corner lot, but never identified the cross street. (It’s tempting to think it’s Lonely Street, which would put Memory Lane in the same neighborhood as Heartbreak Hotel.)

Since that “Memory Lane” title appears in the opening line, it made sense to repeat it in the first line of every successive verse. But that also posed a problem when they reached the chorus; it wouldn’t make sense to repeat the title at the end of the chorus and the beginning of the next verse. So they didn’t included the title in the song’s key stanza.

“It would have been corny to try to somehow wrap the chorus back up into that line,” explains Rosen. “It allows the chorus to just give the images, and it’s such a release when it falls back into that line [in the next verse]. There’s no need to say it in the chorus.”

In fact, they held out the tension at the end of the chorus, creating an extra line over an unresolved chord, while a fantasy from the past — “We’d never let go, and we’d never be over” — plays out in the story. Emphasizing that tension, staying locked in the memory, reminded Rosen of the movie Inception.“It’s a really trippy sci-fi movie where they figure out how to go into other people’s dreams,” he says. “But sometimes when they’re in a dream, they don’t know [it]. It felt like being in that movie, where if I could just live in this [dream], I wouldn’t care if I came back to reality.”

Since the chorus is designed to circle back to the verse, they couldn’t end “Memory Lane” with the chorus. So they concluded by repeating the first verse and changing the lyrics in the back half of that section to “We’d never fade, never fade, never fade…”

Old Dominion, including bassist Geoff Sprung and drummer Whit Sellers, recorded “Memory Lane” with producer Shane McAnally (Sam Hunt, Midland) at Shrimpboat Sound Studio in Key West, Fla., a facility with an appropriately nostalgic atmosphere.

“It’s this little, unassuming cinder block building that no one knows what’s going on on the inside or pays any attention to, but it’s Jimmy Buffett’s studio,” says Ramsey. “You walk in there, and it’s like a time capsule of his career. There’s Jimmy Buffett memorabilia and all these old Polaroids everywhere. It’s like stepping back in time, and it’s a very creative little vortex.”

Instead of following the band’s typical recording process, in which it plays as much of the track as possible together, “Memory Lane” was built piece by piece over programmed percussion. Sellers replaced most of the synthetic rhythms with real drums after everyone else did their parts, a reversal of the typical order.

Ramsey was challenged by the lead vocal’s phrasing — “It’s really tough to find a place to take your breath and keep going,” he says — and Tursi developed a guitar solo that feels as much like a journey as the rest of the track. “What happens with me is one of those times when we’re running it down, I’ll just take a solo and then spend another 15 minutes trying to beat it,” Tursi says. “And then everyone goes, ‘The first one is the best one.’ I’m never satisfied with anything.”

When Old Dominion played it as a full band for the first time on Jan. 19 in Evansville, Ind., Tursi extended the performance with an adventurous 90-second closing solo after the “never fades” lyric ended. Meanwhile, “Memory Lane” travels to No. 33 on the Country Airplay chart dated Feb. 4.

“It just felt like it was strong and artistic and commercial, and it had the right balance of everything,” Tursi says.

And it brings a fresh attitude to a very familiar phrase from the past.

Surprise!
Chris Young’s “Looking for You” — which RCA Nashville released to country radio via PlayMPE on Jan. 12 — traverses familiar subject matter for the singer, set in the same sort of nightclub that has provided the focal point for “Lonely Eyes,” “Neon” and the Mitchell Tenpenny duet “At the End of a Bar.” But the results are not what one would expect.

For starters, despite a widespread belief that lasting relationships can’t be found in a bar, “Looking” celebrates a guy who discovered a longtime love when he wasn’t actually seeking one in a night spot. Additionally, the song takes a surprising turn at the end of the chorus, injecting a chord that normally wouldn’t work and stamping it with a decidedly unusual melodic twist.

“It feels unexpected,” Young says. “And it’s one of the reasons I love the song so much.”

“Looking for You” got started while his co-writers were waiting for Young on May 22, 2022, at the Middle Tennessee home studio of songwriter-producer Chris DeStefano (“From the Ground Up,” “Something in the Water”). James McNair (“Lovin’ On You,” “Going, Going, Gone”) had the “Looking for You” title, accompanied by a plot that contrasts with the similar-sounding title of Johnny Lee’s “Lookin’ for Love.” Where the guy in Lee’s Urban Cowboy classic had spent much of his life searching for romance “in all the wrong places,” the protagonist in McNair’s idea wasn’t looking at all.

“I remember him kind of disclaiming it,” says Emily Weisband (“Jealous of Myself,” “All for You”). “’It’s not going to blow your mind,’” she recalls McNair saying. “’But it could be a great, uptempo country vibe. I think it might be something.’”

They fashioned it primarily as a two-chord country song, building off the “Looking for You” title with a series of single-guy pursuits, including “looking for a feeling,” “looking for an up-all-night-long” and “looking for a sunrise leading to a sunset.”

The chorus was half finished when Young arrived. That part of the melody relied on syncopated waterfall intervals to cast a sense of adventure, but it needed a change in direction to bring it home. After mostly alternating between the tonic chord and the four chord up to that point, DeStefano took a risk. He lobbed a hit-or-miss four-minor chord, one that would either be a musical goldmine or a sonic train wreck.

“It’s a little bit of a one-bullet gun,” he says. “Sometimes I’ll just kind of throw it out there and see if it feels right, if everybody in the room is digging it, because it’s a commitment. In that situation, everybody was like, ‘Oh, we’ve got to do that.’ So it was like, ‘OK, I trust y’all. Let’s do it.’ ”

The minor chord changed what would typically be an E note to an E-flat — only a half-step difference, but that small alteration created a significant misdirection. Young fitted a melody to the new section, landing directly on that E-flat, the very note that changed the song’s course. It created an enormous amount of musical tension.

But it also arrived at the perfect time for the song’s message, following a “right out of the blue” lyric with an out-of-the-blue sonic flow.

“A lot of songs will end on a ‘ta-da,’ you know — a major chord, and you’re like, ‘Oh, there’s the hook. There it is,’ ” says McNair. “But this one ends on kind of a half ‘ta-da,’ where you’re kind of hanging on the edge.”

They had said pretty much everything that needed to be said with that maneuver — the words and the music both yelled “surprise!” — so they kept the song’s lyrics to a minimum. When they reached the bridge, instead of introducing any new vocabulary, they borrowed two lines from the pre-chorus near the beginning of the song and paired them with one more four-minor chord, repeating the tension caused by that simple E-flat.

“You do something once, it could be an accident,” DeStefano says. “You do it twice, it’s intentional.” 

The song was mostly written before DeStefano started building a track to support it, but that happened quickly. He didn’t just develop a demo: He created almost the entire final master before his co-writers left.

“People don’t realize just how good he is unless you’ve been in a room with him,” says Young. “He’s probably top five — one of the fastest editors on ProTools that I’ve ever seen. Just on the fly, he’s laying stuff down, so by the time that we’re done writing it, it is done. And that’s not to say that he’s just sitting there building the track. He’s coming up with melodies, coming up with guitar parts, interjecting lyrics. He’s an all-around [talent].”

DeStefano established a pulsing foundation, alternating — sometimes combining — guitar, programmed keyboards and/or banjo to evolve the sound underneath the melody even as the beat moved forward. He also played a short guitar solo that used a series of flatted notes, complementing the attitude from the four-minor chord. 

Weisband tossed in harmonies and some ad-libs to support Young’s lead vocal, with one of those off-the-cuff ideas forming what became a key musical hook. DeStefano pitch-shifted that phrase into a higher octave, generating a sort of electronic Mariah Carey sound. “I sound like a little alien on there,” Weisband jokes. 

Juxtaposed with Young’s lead vocal, the effect brings contrasting elements together in a unique way. “She’s got an amazing voice, and she has a lot of pop sensibility,” says McNair. “His tone is such a rich, country, smooth tone. Mixed with her, the blend of those was really cool.”

The waterfall chorus melody and the tense E-flat in the four-minor chord are unusual enough that they’ll likely challenge fans who sing along with “Looking for You” — though in Young’s experience, repetition solves that issue. “I ended up singing the song the entire day of the video shoot over and over and over,” he says. “So it’s just ingrained in my head.”

The song’s inherent surprises invariably won over Young and his associates, and RCA Nashville made it the lead single from his forthcoming project. “Looking for You” will go for adds on Jan. 23.

“I loved it, and then the label loved it and other songwriter friends of mine that I played it for loved it,” says Young. “It was like the same response every time because when they got to the end of that chorus, everybody was like, ‘Ah, that’s cool.’ ”

Not a shock, since most people like surprises. But it confirmed for Young that the risks in “Looking for You” were likely to pay off: “That’s what I needed to hear.”

After rising to No. 3 on Billboard‘s Country Airplay chart with his debut single, “Don’t Come Lookin’,” Jackson Dean can expect to get plenty of attention with his follow-up.
“Fearless,” which Big Machine released to country radio on Dec. 12 via PlayMPE, takes advantage of that focus by showing off the 22-year-old’s vocal range. The verses harness a Waylon Jennings-like gruffness in his lower range while the chorus showcases a Chris Cornell-ish ferocity in Dean’s upper reaches. There’s a distinct separation between those two sections of “Fearless,” which makes the chorus stand out when it arrives. But it also helps to tell the story behind the protagonist’s confession: an honest, desperate, manly expression of the life-changing power of his mate.

“It is a big jump from the verse to the chorus because not only does it mark, ‘Oh, here it is,’ but just screaming at the top of your lungs, you feel this [sentiment],” Dean says. “I feel like a lot of people would get that.”

New as Dean might be to most of America’s country audience, “Fearless” — originally titled “I’m Fearless” — has a little age on it. He co-wrote it on Nov. 6, 2019, with Jonathan Sherwood and songwriter-producer Luke Dick (“Gold,” “Settling Down”) in a home studio Dick owned in East Nashville.

“He’s always got like some sort of order on the way,” says Sherwood. “An hour into the session, he’s like, ‘Oh, by the way, I ordered burgers. So we’ve got three burgers coming in here in about 45 minutes.’ It kind of gives us incentive to work harder at that moment, and I’ve just always admired that.”

Dick also brought the foundational idea to the appointment. He had a rough percussion track with spacious guitar arpeggios and a target for the song’s narrative: “I’m fearless except when it comes to you.”

“There’s no play on words,” Dean says. “The whole thing is just pounding your chest, and then a moment of vulnerability.”

They dug in first on that chorus, the singer boasting of the fears he does not possess: no fear of heights, no fear of the dark, no fear of fighting. But the song conveys those ideas obliquely: “I’ll jump off the ledges, burn all the bridges, walk on the edges.” The results were a little different than the original version, mostly because they made good use of the letter “s.”

“Those were all one-syllable rhymes when we first started writing, like ‘I’ll jump off the ledge, burn every bridge, walk on the edge,’ and it just wasn’t sticking,” remembers Sherwood. “Luke was like, ‘Let’s just make it plural.’ And it worked.”

As did another phrase in that chorus, “ride in the echoes,” that Dean originated, but can’t fully explain.“Truthfully,” he says, “I just thought it sounded dope.”

“I would argue that it means the echoes of self-doubt, the echoes of gossip that could be spoken about you,” Sherwood counters. “I’m just going to ride it rather than letting it be something that brings me down.”

When they had enough of that chorus worked out, they turned to the song’s opening, and Dick asked Dean a simple question: “What’s the most scared you’ve ever been in your life?” Dean recalled visiting his grandfather’s grave around age 11. One of the man’s catchphrases had been to charge people for good advice: “That’ll be 25 cents.” So Dean stuck a quarter between the headstone and the grass, and the coin instantly disappeared. Even after digging, he couldn’t find it, and that spooky cemetery encounter informed the ghostly opening lines of “Fearless.”

As the lyric progresses, the dark tone shifts from the mystery of spirits to the mystery of love: The protagonist recognizes he’s most fearful of losing his woman and simultaneously admits that her strength keeps him from fearing all those other demons. As they developed the verse melody that accompanied that tale, they also had a better idea of where the chorus could go, and they raised its peak moments, in great part because Dean could handle it.

“Jack has that kind of range, even though on the top end of it, I feel like it’s asking a lot of a singer,” says Dick. “Sometimes I think, ‘Why in the hell would you try to make another singer do that?’ I mean, even though it’s fun in the room, it’s not a practical thing to do.”

Shortly after the song’s creation, Dick produced the master version of “Fearless” at Sound Emporium with an A-list band building on Dick’s original guitar arpeggios. Between Justin Schipper’s pedal steel and Kenny Greenberg’s lap steel, the musicians framed Dean’s vocal with an appropriately haunting texture, and Dick worked out a simple but twisty guitar solo on his own time that provided short relief from the song’s intensity.

“When I get off in my own world, it may take me two hours to come up with a solo,” Dick says. “I don’t know the instrument well enough to sit there and rip, you know, 100 solos, one after another.”

That version was released online in 2021 and included on Dean’s album Greenbroke, released March 11, 2022. The power of its message and the showcase it provided for Dean’s vocals made “Fearless” an ideal single choice — though after singing it live for several years, he had a beefier take on it. So Dick booked Blackbird Studio before the end of 2022, and Dean recut his performance with subtle changes. He swallows the hook (“except when it comes you”) more dramatically, injects more growl into other segments of the chorus and holds out a long, desolate note in the final stanza.

“He’s just grown a lot as a singer,” notes Dick. “He was not on the road [in 2019], and when you start making something your own, it just makes sense to want to try it again when you have the opportunity. And I was happy to hear him sing it again.”

They did some other touch-ups, too, heightening the lap steel’s presence, threading a little more acoustic guitar into the chorus and inserting an extra beat after the bridge, filling it with a scraping sort of sound. The song — which is tagged with a Jan. 23 add date — provides a greater portrait of Dean’s capabilities.

“My biggest influences are like Cornell, [Robert] Plant, [Chris] Stapleton, that kind of stuff,” Dean says. “I don’t have the same high register as them. But I can get up there on occasion. A display of that here and there is what I want to do.”

It’s not a song that will change the world, but it might well change a listener’s mood for three and a half minutes.
Tyler Hubbard’s second solo single – “Dancin’ in the Country,” released to country radio by EMI Nashville on Nov. 21 via PlayMPE – is 21st-century redneck disco, a four-on-the-four backbeat topped with a joyous melody, carefree lyrics and an unfettered country band, freed to play smart fills and jaw-dropping passages that defy the genre’s historically conservative approach to arrangements.

It’s generated from Hubbard’s home life, where rambunctious energy is welcome.

“Every night after dinner, we have a dance party,” he says. “A lot of times I’m playing them songs that I’ve written, and when the kids love the songs, whether it’s songs I’ve written or other songs, it just makes them feel good and want to dance.”

Hubbard brought a story about that experience into the room and submitted it as a guiding principle when he wrote the song on Nov. 3, 2021, at a Black River studio. Originally, the writing session was booked with fellow composers Jon Nite (“Pick Me Up,” “You Didn’t”) and Ross Copperman (“Gold,” “I Lived It”), but Hubbard amped it up a few days early when he invited Keith Urban to sit in.

“I don’t think I even slept the night before,” Nite recalls, “because I was all keyed up on the nerves of like, ‘Do not screw this up.’“

Nite wasn’t sure if they were writing for Urban or for Florida Georgia Line – he didn’t know until sometime during the co-write that Hubbard was cutting some solo material – and it wasn’t fully verbalized during the process. “The whole time I was laughing because I felt like I was writing for the song,” Nite says. “Keith would be like, ‘This would be great for Tyler’ when Tyler was in the bathroom. And then Tyler would be like, ‘This would be great for Keith’ when Keith was in the bathroom.”

It took a bit to find a direction, though Hubbard was definitely in a mood to write something cheery and upbeat, and he had the “Dancin’ in the Country” title as workable idea. Copperman built a rhythm track, and Urban kicked into a guitar groove that launched with a C chord, complicated by an extra D note that creates dissonance with two of the three foundational tones in that chord.

“That [note] is what’s giving you the disco vibes,” Copperman says.

They fashioned the chorus first, starting with the title and capping the stanza by repeating it two more times. In between, the melody pushes forward with a relentless repetition, each of the first four verses ending with the same melody. It’s an approach that wouldn’t work in another setting – it would have killed a thoughtful ballad like “The House That Built Me” – but it enhances the sing-along quality of “Dancin’ in the Country.”

“It’s an ear worm, and it’s hooky, and it’s really repetitive,” Hubbard agrees. “But it still feels right, you know. It feels appropriate.”

When they developed the verses, the narrative began in a bar, where a couple yearns for a little privacy. They end up in a pasture, playing “some Alabama and Jackson” – presumably, Alan Jackson, though with the danceable beat, one could make a case for Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson or even Outkast’s “Ms. Jackson.”

With the plot serving up a little romance in a field, it’s tempting to call it a bro-country story, though it stays away from the drunken-group dynamic. And it bears some authenticity for Nite, whose first date with his wife ended with the two of them dancing in a field along Soncy Road in Amarillo, Texas during their high-school years.

“That’s where I fell in love with my wife,” he says. “We were out there listening to George Strait on the radio. Our trucks were parked off the edge of this road, and we were just watching stars.” (Romantic sidebar: Some time later, Nite draped flowers over the fence posts and barbed wire in that same location to propose.)

The musical format of “Dancin’ in the Country” got an extra boost of energy from a hip-hop-like pre-chorus. The supporting instruments dropped out, except for a volley of tribal toms and a growling bass, and that chord-less section makes the chorus feel like a blast of sound when the whole band re-emerges. “It just felt like we needed that musical break,” Copperman says. “Maybe that’s why the nursery-rhyme chorus works. You drop out all the chords, and then the chorus hits, and it feels so good.”         

Hubbard laid down a vocal for the demo, then split for a late-afternoon appointment, though before he did, Urban created some clarity about which artist would keep “Dancin’ in the Country.” “When we got finished writing, Keith said, ‘I think we just wrote your first single,’” Hubbard remembers. “It was nice that Keith put his stamp of approval on it.”

Urban and Copperman stayed for another two hours, playing with a multitude of sounds and instruments as they completed the demo, stopping occasionally to ask Nite if he thought what they were doing was working. “It was like watching an artist paint the Mona Lisa,” Nite says.

Hubbard co-produced the final version with Jordan M. Schmidt (Mitchell Tenpenny, Ingrid Andress) at Ocean Way in Nashville, assembling an A-list team of musicians and letting them follow Urban’s template from the demo. Bassist Jimmie Lee Sloas provides the melodic movement in the intro and offers a few uncharacteristically bold fills, guitarist Rob McNelley recreated a key riff and fashioned a compact burning solo, and banjo player Ilya Toshinskiy wraps the whole package with a wicked flurry of notes.

“What got me into playing and learning instruments was hearing cool s–t and just being like, ‘How did they play that?’ and then sitting there and trying to learn it,” Schmidt says. “Sometimes I feel like as producers we can dumb stuff down so much, but I’ve really taken the opposite approach now. Like, ‘Let’s inspire newer generations to be players and come up with that s–t, because that’s awesome.’”

Justin Schipper’s steel added a little extra country flavor to offset the dance groove in what proved to be a drama-free experience. “We just had a lot of fun,” Schmidt says of the tracking date. “There wasn’t really anything crazy that happened. It was just a great energy, and it felt like a good new start for T-Hub.”

“Dancin’ in the Country” made its debut on Billboard‘s Country Airplay chart dated Dec. 10, 2022 and steps to No. 40 on the Jan. 14 list. Hubbard is convinced that the good-time vibe that music generates in his household is the right tonic for a much wider audience.

“We’re at this point in culture and our lives where everybody needs an escape from reality for three-and-a-half minutes,” Hubbard says. “That’s kind of the intention behind this song.”

Given that Brad Rempel’s hometown of La Crete, Alberta, is closer to the North Pole than any other country artist’s, High Valley is perhaps better qualified than any other act in the format to cut Christmas songs.
Although, truth be told, Rempel is hard-pressed to get overly sentimental about the holiday. He’s not a Scrooge about it, but he’s often underwhelmed by the music.

“It’s always kind of a joke among my friends that, ‘Well, you live up there near Santa Claus. You should love Christmas stuff,’ ” he says. “There’s nowhere on Earth that feels more like Christmas than northern Canada. You can literally skate on frozen ponds and ride snowmobiles, you know, watch the snow falling down. I mean, everything about it is kind of your stereotypical Hallmark Christmas movie kind of vibes.”

Rempel’s resistance to holiday tracks may have played a role in making High Valley’s new seasonal release, “Back Home Christmas,” an engaging, and pandemically appropriate, piece for 2022. When he showed up at Full Circle Studio — the workplace of songwriter-producer Seth Mosley (for King & Country, Michael W. Smith) — on May 23, the assignment was to craft new yuletide material with Jon Nite (“Pick Me Up,” “You Didn’t”) and Zach Kale (“I Hope,” “The Good Ones”). And Rempel admitted up front that they would have to clear a rather high bar.

“I was like, ‘Hey, full disclosure, guys: I’m not a huge fan of Christmas music,’ ” recalls Rempel with a laugh. “Jon and Zach were like, ‘OK,’ and then they pretend-like packed up their guitars and walked out of the room. And I was like, ‘But I love a great Christmas song. I just want to make sure this feels like a legitimate High Valley song and not just your token “Here Comes Santa Claus” type of deal.’ ”

As it turns out, Rempel was feeling disconnected from his roots as he considered Christmas. La Crete isn’t easy to reach (flying from Nashville to Edmonton takes seven to 11 hours, and then it’s a four-plus-hour drive north from there), and under COVID-19 circumstances, he hadn’t been home since 2019. He felt a need to return for this year’s holidays, and Mosley suggested they get in the spirit by writing something in 6/8 time.

 “For me, 6/8 just always feels like Christmas,” Mosley explains. “It automatically just puts you in a more nostalgic head frame.”

Indeed, the holiday songs written in waltz-time signatures 6/8 and 3/4 — “Silver Bells,” “The First Noel,” “We Three Kings” and “Happy Xmas (War Is Over),” just to name a few — have a classic feel about them. Mosley developed a chord progression for that format, called up plug-in sounds of sleigh bells and church bells, and turned the lights down to mimic the feel of a Tennessee Christmas. And they found a musical style with an old-world vibe.

“I remember playing some Celtic-y stuff, kind of an Irish singalong — almost like a reverent drinking song or like a hymn,” says Nite. “That helped change the direction of the sound.”

Rempel’s desire to get back to Canada for the holiday resonated throughout the room as they began to craft a story.

“I wanted to feel that feeling of going back home when you’re just out of high school and you go to college, and you go back that first or second time,” Nite says. “There’s something magical about when you’re 18 or 20 years old, you’re coming back for the first time after leaving town. It’s so amazing to come back home and be like, ‘OK, this is a safe place that made me who I am. These people love me no matter what.’ ”

Even though the song was about returning somewhere, it took some work to nail down a hook that would serve as the song’s destination. “At one point, we were like, ‘I’ll be back on Christmas,’ ” remembers Kale. “ ‘Back Home Christmas’ seems to land that hook a lot better and makes you feel something — just the word ‘home.’ We started writing toward that.”

The first lines of the chorus — “I miss those O holy silent nights/Popcorn-on-pine-tree traditions” — knitted the titles of two classic carols together, setting up an occasional theme: phrases from “Joy to the World,” “The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire)” and “Away in a Manger” all find their way into the lyric, though they’re dropped in as casual conversation rather than obvious puns.

They avoided Santa Claus entirely, and the only mention of gifts wasn’t about what might be under the tree; it was a simple recognition that the one gift Mama wanted was for her son to be home. Appropriately, the bridge ramped up to a highly rhythmic fever, celebrating a sacred Christmas Eve church ceremony while capturing the sense of arrival.

“If you’re on that journey, on the way back home, the last mile and a half or two miles, it’s the excitement of seeing the people that you love,” Kale says. “I think that energy, we unknowingly put into the bridge.”

Mosley layered instruments onto the demo that day, and a fair amount of those sounds remained on “Back Home Christmas” all the way through to its release. “He is some kind of savant,” says Rempel. “It’s insane.”

Meanwhile, High Valley guitarist Raymond Klassen whipped up a scenic sonic side trip with an effective Dobro solo. Additionally, a group of around seven musicians gathered in Santa hats to sing an anthemic, Coldplay-like signature theme, stacked over a unison mandolin and electric guitar, creating an easy singalong for listeners who share the “Back Home” spirit.

Mosley brought the whole thing to a close with a church bell effect that brightened the ending but also leaves the listener with a complex cluster of notes. “Any time there’s a tubular bell, it’s always really hard to make them be perfectly in tune because a tubular bell has like five harmonic notes to it,” he explains. “I actually use it a lot in production, but you have to use them in the right spot. It’s one of those things where you can’t really tune it. Otherwise, it sounds fake.”

“Back Home Christmas” sounds quite authentic; it’s a fairly universal topic, and Rempel’s desire to get back to Canada is real, allowing the song to pass even his holiday-music skepticism. He released it to terrestrial radio through his Cage Free label and Sony Music Canada on Nov. 11 via PlayMPE. And yes, after three years away, Rempel and his family will be back in La Crete for Christmas.

“I was able to book flights for my family just a few weeks ago, and I was able to call my mom and let her know that,” Rempel says. “That’s definitely, definitely special.” 

Absence, it is said, makes the heart grow fonder, and touring musicians ought to know.
The travel, the time spent waiting and prepping in the dressing room and the let-down moments after the show is over are all windows of time ripe for gnawing self-reflection and what-ifs. Time apart can indeed change a heart, and Russell Dickerson figured that out roughly a decade ago, when a breakup with Kailey Seymour forced him to confront a gaping hole as he traversed the club circuit as a newly single man.

“We had just broken up, and I was looking for anybody,” he remembers. “I was like, ‘I’m going to be out here on the road. Might as well see if I can find a wife out here.’ It didn’t work. But at the time, we were just playing crappy bar after crappy bar. I’m giving it my all, nobody’s showing up, I’m lonely, I just left my future wife back in Nashville.”

A lot turned around on that particular tour. Dickerson’s mindset changed; they reunited and married in May 2013. Kailey was the inspiration — and the videographer — for his first hit, the 2017 single “Yours,” and she’s again a looming figure in the plot of “God Gave Me a Girl,” penned during several days of focused songwriting last spring at the Middle Tennessee home of songwriter Ashley Gorley (“She Had Me at Heads Carolina,” “Take My Name”). 

On the second or third day of the retreat, after they had written several songs and emotional walls were down, Zach Crowell (“Body Like a Back Road,” “Waves”) suggested a solid potential title, “God Gave Me a Hometown,” that the quartet started playing with and reshaping. In the process, Dickerson turned it into “God Gave Me a Girl,” a title that checked at least two boxes for him.

“I love alliteration,” he says, “and my reputation precedes myself as the love song guy.”

Chase McGill (“5 Foot 9,” “Never Say Never”), working with an electric guitar borrowed from Crowell, started playing with a random tone — a little glassy, a little dirty — and created a melancholy riff that rises slowly before tumbling back to its starting point. Gorley toyed with the word “gave” — “God gave me a girl, girl gave me a kiss/Kiss gave me a feelin’ that I still get” — and halfway through the chorus, they knew they were on to something with a worthwhile lyrical bent and a melody that fits, climbing as it progresses through the initial lines of the chorus.

“The key to melodies is where it’s repetitive, but changes,” says Gorley. “I know that sounds crazy, but it has a little bit of rise where it’s repeating the rhythm, but then the melody changes and has tension and release.

“I want you to almost be able to sing along during the first chorus,” he continues, “like where you can kind of join in when you’re singing a song and you don’t really know it.”

As they kept building the lyric around shades of the word “give,” it changed tense and reversed roles between the couple: “She gave me her hand, I gave her a ring.” And finally at the end, the singer credits the Almighty for shifting his viewpoint: “I knew what I wanted but He knew better/ God gave me a girl.”

“I almost wanted God to come out of nowhere, because that’s kind of how it happens for me,” McGill says. “You’re going along, you’re doing your thing, and then God interjects. Then from that point on, it’s a progression of the changes in your life.”

The song’s progression is a familiar one to many adult men. The protagonist spends part of verse one trolling at night — “I gave my all to those empty bars” is a direct reference to Dickerson’s touring when he and Kailey had broken up — and by verse two, after the divine intervention, his friends adjust slowly to his shifting priorities. By the bridge, he pledges to “give her the world” after recognizing some sort of destiny brought the couple together.

“I feel like it was God who changed my mind, that convinced me that this was my wife,” says Dickerson, further connecting the song to his actual life. “As soon as I broke up with her in college, all the peace left my body. And that’s just a spiritual thing, like I was being convinced that she’s my wife, this is happening, we’re doing it.”

At the end of the March 30 writing session, Crowell produced a demo built around Dickerson’s vocal and McGill’s guitar work. At some juncture over the next few months, the vocal was mistakenly erased, and Dickerson recorded another version.

But that also meant he had more repetition before the tracking session at Nashville’s Sound Stage on June 22. Crowell and Dickerson co-produced the date, fashioning an arrangement that gradually unfolds from the original demo’s sound — the glassy guitar and programmed percussion — to a full band. The musical elements all help to keep it from becoming overly mushy.

“That probably goes back to that guitar riff and that guitar tone,” Crowell says. “It’s not so pretty, light and fluffy, and the other production stuff I did hopefully all ties into it. If it’s a pretty poem as a lyric, it’s nice that the track may have a little bit of a slight edge to it that makes it a good Russell Dickerson song.”

The other production elements included some cloudy, atmospheric sounds and a slide guitar that lend a slightly mysterious aura.

“The mystery is definitely a good thing,” says Crowell. “There’s a little tension in it, but it’s not a bunch of dark, eerie chords or anything. It’s all still hopeful.”

Ultimately, “God Gave Me a Girl” embraces the natural femininity of a love song, offset with a touch of grit. “It doesn’t feel like a ballad,” Gorley says. “I’m a piano guy, so every day, I fight the temptation of writing a ballad. To just write a love song on piano, super slow, every day would be great, but I’ve worked that out of my system. And so I’m always looking for some way for it to feel fun or celebratory or something like that. This one pulls that off.”

The writers weren’t the only fans. “Our real test for songs is always playing them for our girls,” says McGill. “My four-year-old and three-year-old are old enough where they can sing along with Daddy’s songs and whatnot. Me and my wife can always tell if they request it in the car. When they did that, I was like, ‘Maybe we got a little hit here.’ ”

Triple Tigers released “God Gave Me a Girl” to country radio on Nov. 18. Dickerson felt they had a commercial winner on their hands even before they finished writing it, and its release suggests his assessment that day still holds true: “I think we’re headed to hitty city with this one.” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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