Makin’ Tracks
Page: 11
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.
Explore
Explore
See latest videos, charts and news
See latest videos, charts and news
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.”