Makin’ Tracks
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Modern-day America is full of conspiracy theories. Among them: Votes have been changed by space lasers, birds aren’t real and large corporations are injecting vaccines into over-the-counter foods.
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With his new single, Luke Bryan unintentionally found a conspiracy that’s been grossly overlooked: Honky tonks have manipulated the population with magnets.
To be clear, that is a kooky – and unfounded – proposition, but it is true that country bars have an irresistible attraction for many of their customers. That internal pull is at the heart of Bryan’s “Country Song Came On,” released by Capitol Nashville to country radio Oct. 28 via PlayMPE.
The single’s protagonist is ill-equipped to say no to the joint’s alluring features, and his plan to get a good weeknight’s sleep is derailed by the pursuit of a good time. “I’ve certainly been drawn in, no shortage of times, by the vibes of a bar, and the right songs and the right ambience,” Bryan says.
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He knows that scenario from both sides of the fence: he’s paid the cover charge as a patron, and sang cover songs on a hole-in-the-wall stage.
“From the time I was 16 years old till I got my record deal, I [played] most of my concerts in little bars and honky tonks,” Bryan says, “so I spent a good 12, 13 years playing in those environments and playing the Merle Haggard songs and the Waylon Jennings songs and the Keith Whitleys and all that. So it’s nice to find one like this that really is authentically me.”
“Country Song Came On” found its genesis in a second-floor writing room on April 18, 2022, at SMACKSongs’ Music Row headquarters in Nashville. Songwriters Neil Medley (“Made For You,” “Hung Up On You”) and Ryan Beaver (“Pretty Little Poison,” “Party Mode”) had been co-writing frequently for more than a decade, but it was the first time they worked with River House writer Dan Alley.
Once they settled on the “Country Song Came On” title, the rest of the piece unfolded naturally, as they explored a regular guy who cedes control of his evening hours to a greater power. “It’s not my fault,” Alley says with a laugh. “It’s the song’s fault, or it’s the barstool’s fault.”
Beaver toggled on acoustic guitar between a tonic chord and a two-minor, adding a seventh note into the latter triad to give it extra color. Most, though not all, of the song resides in that simple back-and-forth interplay, as they crafted a bluesy melody over the top.
“I tend to play a lot of voicings,” Beaver says. “If there’s an A-minor, I’ll play it a couple of different ways, just for it to feel fresh or new or different. An A-minor is an A-minor, but if you add a seventh, or you play that A-minor in [a different] position, it feels different, sounds different. We were probably just all entertaining ourselves, but it’s really a lesson in simplicity, going back and forth between those two chords a lot.”
They had the opening line of the chorus (“I was gonna drive by, wasn’t gonna stop”) and the payoff lines (“I wasn’t gonna drink / But then a country song came on”) and mapped out the chords and melodic progression of the first verse and chorus before filling in the rest. Even though the start of the chorus was obvious, it didn’t have a typical lift.
“That character is not going to sing a big chorus,” Medley says. “It just never felt for one second that we needed it. It just felt like this groove is going on, so why take it out of that? Let’s just continue.”
Midway through that chorus, they switched up the phrasing and melody just enough to propel it forward, and they cemented the club’s magnetism once they settled on the lyric for that passage: “Wasn’t gonna let the bar twist my arm / But I’m helpless in a honky tonk.” Bryan suggested that second line could be a title on its own. “’Helpless in a honky tonk’ – we should write that at some point,” Medley quips.
They had the bar’s band cover a George Jones hit in the second verse, and gave “Country Song” a very subtle bridge, then did a work tape to end the day. As much as they liked it, they didn’t get around to demoing “Country Song” until the fall, using a four-piece band. Alley sang lead, unintentionally copping a Blake Shelton sound. Shelton and Bryan were their leading targets once their publishers started pitching it.
“There’s a lot of space in it, [and] it’s kind of traditional, just to leave a little space and not get too many words jumbled in there,” Alley says. “That kind of leans towards the old school.”
Bryan quickly put it on hold when he heard the demo in January 2023. Producers Jeff and Jody Stevens booked a different set of studio players than in past Bryan sessions for a recording date at Nashville’s Starstruck Studios. Steel guitarist Eddie Dunlap and guitarist Sol Philcox-Littlefield got plenty of space to set the sonic tone.
“Due to the title, I think we thought ‘Country Song’ was going to need a lot of steel on it,” Jody says.
Philcox-Littlefield enhanced that attitude by playing a growling baritone guitar instead of the light Memphis soul licks featured in the demo. “[Bryan] wanted something country and something straight ahead,” Jeff says.
Those two musicians played the most prominent role in defining the sound, and divvying up the parts was effortless. “I’ve been recording this kind of band ever since 1993,” Jeff says. “If they’re working well together – and they almost always do – by the time the second run-through comes through, they’ve kind of got their spots figured out.”
It jelled so nicely that even after Bryan stopped singing at the 3:06 mark, the band kept grooving another 50 seconds. “We could have made that outro about half as long,” Jody says, “but I don’t think it’d be as fun.”
Bryan’s final vocal, also cut at Starstruck, was just as effortless, given the easy nature of the song. He made one important revision, replacing Jones in the lyric with “ETC” – short for Earl Thomas Conley, whose songs Bryan covered frequently when he was playing barrooms.
“If people don’t know what ETC is, they’ll get online or Google, and maybe go dive into some deep, deep, deep cuts of Earl Thomas Conley,” Bryan says.
The ETC alteration uniformly impressed the writers. “That was the moment I realized, not only does Luke love this song, but Luke really cares still, this many years into his career, about his craft and about songs,” Beaver says. “And he made it his.”
“Country Song Came On” is as magnetic as the bar it celebrates, and it debuted on the Country Airplay chart dated Nov. 30, easily surviving the internal vetting process. If anyone suggests the decision to make it a single was contentious, consider it another conspiracy theory.
“Through the years, I’ve had songs that I really believed in, that not everybody believed in, and they worked out,” Bryan says. “This one’s funny, because everybody’s really on the same page and excited to see it come out.”
It’s a necessary fact of music-industry life that the conditions in which music is created are often different than the reality in which they’re consumed.
Christmas songs, for example, are often penned in spring or summer, and they’re frequently recorded when Nashville temperatures are still in the 80s or 90s. Similarly, artists typically develop future singles when their current releases are just beginning to grow, and many of their projections about follow-up material are educated guesses about how the already-finished songs might perform.
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In that spirit, Nate Smith’s new single – “Fix What You Didn’t Break,” released by RCA Nashville to country radio via PlayMPE on Oct. 28 – is an example of strong artistic instinct. It’s a power ballad, fueled by crunchy chords and Smith’s trademark rasp, though it’s something of a departure. His first three singles – “Whiskey On You,” “World On Fire” and “Bulletproof,” each of which reached the top 5 on Country Airplay – all incorporated that rasp into defiant post-breakup anthems. “Fix What You Didn’t Break” revises the message, embracing a plot that celebrates a woman who changed the outlook of a previously defeated romantic partner. It’s not exactly the formula Smith has employed thus far, and he’s acutely aware.
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“It’s kind of scary when you put your first kind of ballad out there,” he says. “But I do love this song so much.”
Understandably. Smith was a teenager in the late 1990s and early 2000s when pop/rock radio was spinning Lifehouse’s “You and Me,” 3 Doors Down’s “Here Without You,” Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing” and Goo Goo Dolls’ RIAA diamond-certified “Iris.” That sonic strain is part of Smith’s musical DNA, and provides permission to explore the emotions around successful relationships.“Guys,” he reasons, “are more sensitive than we get credit.”
Smith’s musical identity was still being forged for the public when he wrote “Fix” on July 11, 2023, at the home studio of producer Lindsay Rimes (LOCASH, Tyler Rich). They were joined by songwriters Ashley Gorley (“I Am Not Okay,” “Truck Bed”) and Taylor Phillips (“I Am Not Okay,” “Hurricane”) – the same team that authored “World On Fire,” which was just in its fourth charted week at the time on its way to becoming Smith’s second No. 1. They already had a sense that Smith needed to think about changing things up with his future radio-targeted releases.
“Our goal,” says Gorley, “is not just to try to get a song on them, but to have a hand in what they should do next, or what we think we’d like to hear from them personally next. This kind of checked all those boxes.”
Phillips submitted the title – “He always has the titles… it’s one of his expected roles,” Gorley says – and it didn’t take long to figure out that it fit a story about a woman who served as something of a savior for a guy who was lost. Rimes cranked up some chords on electric guitar that gave it some testosterone.“Lindsay, he’s always got that electric turned up so loud the neighbors can hear him,” Phillips quips.
The opening lines came early: “I was a 10-year train wreck/ With a last-call longneck.” They captured a guy numbing his pain with alcohol, and Smith says they drew on a past relationship that he hasn’t talked much about publicly. “It had been in the ballpark of 10 years since my divorce and what I went through before, when I left Nashville the first time,” he notes. “It kind of had a little nod of that.”
They mapped out the melody, still applying an anthemic attitude to “Fix,” even if it was a love song. One particularly attractive melodic segment, featuring short phrases and distinct-but-modest intervals, emerged during the work, though it wasn’t immediately apparent how to use it.
“We all dug the melody and the vibe of that section, and we were just trying to figure out where to put it,” Rimes remembers. “At the time, we might have thought that could be a verse, but it felt right as the pre-chorus.”
That pre-chorus was an ideal puzzle piece, easing from the opening verse into the first chorus. The verses themselves had their own forward motion thematically. While the opening stanza established the singer’s brokenness, the second verse focused on the woman, who saw him as salvageable and took the steps to revive his spirits, answering his prayers and picking up “the towel that I threw in.”
“One of my favorite lines – and I’m sure Taylor had something to do with it – is ‘Showed me the past ain’t a tattoo/ Loved me even when you didn’t have to,’” Gorley says. “That’s like a spiritual moment to be like, ‘Hey, you don’t have to be known for your past. It’s not with you forever. I’m gonna change that.’ That really goes with the theme.”
To cap it, they re-employed the pre-chorus as the bridge, figuring that the melody was so good it should be heard again.
“I don’t like doing a lot of pre-peats – it’s what I call them when you repeat the pre-chorus – but in that situation, what else can you say that’s better than that?” Phillips says. “The melody was so hooky, and it gave the song a second to breathe again before the last chorus.”
Rimes built the demo as the writing session progressed, adding programmed drums and bass around his guitar parts. When they thought they were done writing, Gorley took a swing at a scratch vocal, just to see if there were any issues that jumped out. Once he wrapped, Smith sang the real demo vocal, adding his rasp in all the right places.
“Fix What You Didn’t Break” languished for months, but Rimes brought it out this summer during a tracking session at Nashville’s Blackbird Studios with a five-piece band: drummer Evan Hutchings, bassist Mark Hill, guitarist Derek Wells, keyboardist Alex Wright and steel guitarist Justin Schipper. They found themselves with extra time at the end of the booking, and Rimes thought framing Smith’s demo vocal with a real band would better sell it to the team.
“I felt personally that the song wasn’t getting as much love as I felt it deserved, and it wasn’t finished,” Rimes says. “We were all focused on getting the album finished, and cutting songs and listening to new songs and stuff. I wanted to cut a band on this song, because I feel like it’s a huge hit.”
Sol Philcox-Littlefield came in later to drop a loud-but-simple guitar solo, and Smith spent hours finding places to add in backing vocals.
There were other options for singles, but multiple radio stations asked RCA to service it, presenting Smith in a slightly different light. It debuted on the Country Airplay chart dated Nov. 23, reminding listeners that the right situation can help overcome a past hardship.
“I feel like a good relationship exposes it,” Smith says, “but it also gives you the freedom to grow and the grace to forgive and understand that you’re going through this stuff, slowly refining.”
When Jack and Jill went up the hill, they got more than just a pail of water. Or, at least, Jill did. Jack didn’t really stick around.
Jordan Fletcher, in the closing track on his Triple Tigers EP Classic (released Sept. 27), rewrites the centuries-old “Jack and Jill” nursery rhyme with a surprising, modern-day twist. “About Jill” is a sensitive, almost celebrant, portrait of a single mom raising a boy who looks very much like his father, an immature rich kid who leaves a pregnant girl to fend for herself.
But Jack isn’t really the story of “About Jill.”
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“No one likes Jack,” Fletcher allows, “but you don’t want to make him the focal point.”
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Fletcher didn’t know Jack would be the topic du jour when he showed up for a co-writing session with Nora Collins (“Leroy”) at Sea Gayle in Nashville on March 16, 2022. They ended up talking about how she was rebounding from the pandemic, and in the process, Fletcher started thinking about the challenges that single women face trying to succeed in a male-dominated world. He turned to his phone for an appropriate title.
“I think I’ve got 50,000 – that’s a real number – I think, 40,000 or 50,000 voice memos on the phone of partial songs, ideas, partial ideas, full songs, completely unorganized,” he says. “And I had this thing called ‘Jack and Jill.’”
They figured out pretty quickly that they could use that title to write about a woman finding her way.
“He said, ‘You know that everybody knows Jack, but they don’t know jack about Jill,’” Collins recalls. “That got me. He started playing a little guitar part, and then I started writing that first verse.”
The nursery rhyme gave them an obvious starting point, and they altered the rhyme just enough to change the story’s direction: “Jack and Jill had time to kill.” They make out on a back road, and things develop quickly: by the end of line three, she’s pregnant, he decides he’s “too young for kids,” and he leaves it to “Jill to choose.” It’s a subtle hint that she considered an abortion (they wrote that line three months before the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision stripped many women of that choice). They broached the topic so gracefully that the controversy is all but eliminated.
“I think that that was important,” Collins says. “It was, you know, ‘Let’s lightly discuss a really hard topic, and let’s empower Jill.’”
The remainder of the verse and the chorus paint Jack as a playboy who eventually ends up living an easy life with a girl he meets in college. And it’s at the end of that chorus that the hook makes its debut: “Everybody knows Jack/ But they don’t know jack about Jill.”
Musically, “About Jill” disguises the serious nature of the story, using a light chord progression and breezy tempo, maintained by a strong upstroke, owing in part to Fletcher’s reggae appreciation.
Verse two contrasts Jill’s struggles with Jack’s good fortune. She works two jobs, drives a hand-me-down car and can’t look at her boy without seeing Jack’s reflection. But she still loves the kid. “She has a very, very difficult situation,” Fletcher says. “This turns out to be a lot of people’s story, and I didn’t realize that. It’s a story that wasn’t really told often.”
The bridge reiterated her ability to stay positive, concluding that life had given her lemons, but “she makes damn good lemonade.”
“You can’t predict what life’s gonna hand you,” Collins says. “It’s all a choice, how you choose to deal with things. Life by no means is easy for anyone, and if you’re a single mom or a single parent, you do the best that you can for your kid, and you got to make lemonade.”
Collins sang on the work tape at the end of the day as they considered several women – including Lainey Wilson, Ella Langley and Miranda Lambert – as potential matches. “About Jill” received good feedback, but no cuts. Meanwhile, Fletcher posted a back-porch video of the song a week after they wrote it, with the sounds of birds and traffic in the background. He finally decided to record it himself for the Classic EP.
“It honestly is sweeter coming from a guy, because it just seems more objective,” he reasons. “I could definitely see how a female would feel like it was a man-hating song, but if a guy’s singing it, it’s just a very observant song.”
Producer Austin Nivarel (Jelly Roll, Austin Snell) identified “About Jill” on first listen as a song they needed to cut, and he and Fletcher agreed that it should be presented as simply as possible. “We wanted it to just feel so real and raw,” Nivarel says.
They accomplished that by cutting it as a guitar/vocal track at the Black River studio complex on Nashville’s Music Row. Engineer Nick Autry set up two mics in the center of the studio and a couple more placed elsewhere to capture room noise. But after one or two test passes, Nivarel had the room mics shut down, deciding instead to make it authentic to Fletcher’s back-porch demos.
Fletcher played about two feet away from the mics, tracking the guitar at the same time as his vocal, which meant that his voice and the supporting instrument both appeared on every track. The performance itself had to be right, since Nivarel was unable to do much tinkering later – if he were to boost the low notes in Fletcher’s voice, for example, it would also boost the bass in the guitar notes.
“Since the vocal mic is picking up the guitar, you get what you get,” Nivarel says. “You can’t perfect performances. You can’t do too much to edit something like that. So everything the listener hears is very real.”
Fletcher also cut 3-5 minutes of environmental sound from his back porch, and the resulting atmospherics are used to present the singer even more authentically.
“About Jill” provides the clearest picture of Fletcher’s vocal sound and artistic sensitivity. But it also has increased value in the immediate aftermath of the election. Within days, misogynists began posting crude “Your body, my choice” threats on some women’s social media pages. As a result, “About Jill” rises from a well-crafted song to an important one about decency and real American values.
“I want to give light to it,” Fletcher says. “It just tells the positivity and the strength of this woman that [does what] so many women do daily. It’s the side of the coin people don’t want to look at, but it is right there.”
America’s presidential election found the country at a peak in anxiety, angry on one side about immigrants and fearful on the other of a descent into dictatorship.
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In the midst of that tension, Drew Baldridge – on the heels of his first top 5 single, “She’s Somebody’s Daughter” – targeted Nov. 4, Election Day Eve, as the add date for his new single, a litany of disasters and a celebration of resilience titled “Tough People.”
“What I love about this song is that it’s honest and it’s real,” Baldridge says. “It’s what our world’s going through. It’s what we’re all feeling.”
And, it suggests, we can all get through whatever crisis emerges – a tornado, cancer, a school shooting or a war.
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“Don’t give up. don’t stop loving people, don’t stop helping people out,” he says. “What you’re going through, you’re gonna come out better because of it. I think that’s the message that we want to share.”Baldridge was in a “David versus Goliath” mindset, he remembers, when he wrote it. He was about to self-release “She’s Somebody’s Daughter” to radio via PlayMPE on July 25, 2023.
The day before, he met up with fellow indie artist Adam Sanders and songwriter Jordan Walker (“When It Rains It Pours”) in writing room 2 at Sony Music Publishing Nashville. Sanders had heard, on Joe Rogan’s podcast, a version of “The Cycle of Man,” an assessment of generational changes from author G. Michael Hopf’s Those Who Remain: “Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.”
Sanders held on to the hook, “Hard times make tough people,” until he could write with Baldridge, who wasn’t afraid of difficult topics. Both of them were thinking about their own careers as they worked on it, inserting some optimism into the hard times. “It’s just always a fight and a struggle,” Sanders says, “but hey, if you keep going, you can achieve your dreams no matter what. That’s where that came from.”
Walker turned the “hard times” hook into “tough times make tough people” and started playing guitar in a drop-D tuning, ideal for power chords. “It’s emotional, it’s deep,” Walker says. “As soon as you hit that first note, it just hits you.”
The first image accomplishes the same thing. A Midwest town endures a tornado that leaves only a Baptist church and a baseball field standing. The tough people, of course, rebuild it, as they would after a flood or a hurricane. “In my little town, one year, the whole roof of the cafeteria got ripped off, and a couple farmers lost their barns,” Southern Illinois native Baldridge recalls. “The next morning, I woke up and I went out there, and my dad and other farmers – everybody was coming together to help fix stuff. And that just has really stuck with me.”
A four-year-old girl battling cancer in Memphis – presumably at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital – follows the tornado in the text. “You want to talk about three guys in a room crying – Drew’s got a little boy and I’ve got two little girls,” Walker says. “We all got choked up, and that was probably, honestly, the hardest part of the song to write.”
Not that the rest of it was rainbows and unicorns. The final vignette reveals a soldier who returns home in a flag-covered casket, and another recognizes a police officer putting his life on the line at a school shooting. Nashville’s Covenant School incident had occurred just four months prior, scarring the entire community, and it was a natural subject. They debated including that particular tragedy, and decided to go for it.
“It’s one of the biggest problems in this country – it needs to be talked about,” Walker says. “I’ve got two little girls that are in daycare, and luckily, there’s a cop that sits in the parking lot every day, so that deters anyone from wanting to do anything ignorant. But I can’t imagine when these girls get in high school, middle school, just kind of dropping them off and praying you see them at four o’clock.”
All of those hard times, though, were offset by the chorus, beginning with a melodic lift. After a couple lines of lyrics that border on victimhood, it turns to self-determination – a series of “keep on fighting” mantras leading to the feel-good conclusion: “Hard work pays off, good beats evil/ And tough times make tough people.”
They cut a demo, though in retrospect, they missed the creative mark. “I just don’t think that we captured the right emotion,” Sanders says. “It just kind of felt a little stale. We turned the song in to our publishers, and I don’t think anybody said anything.”
But when Baldridge presented a handful of songs to producer Nick Schwarz, he knew “Tough People” had to be part of the next round of recording. “The school shooting line is what made me go ‘Holy moly,’” Schwarz recalls. “It’s so real.”
They recorded it in mid-December at the Sony Tree Studios, focused on making it sound tougher than the demo. A tremolo guitar helped establish some tension. “I’m a sucker for tremolo and slap back – I just love those two sounds,” Schwarz says. “So I asked for tremolo, and they were like, ‘Nick and his tremolo’ and laughed.”
But the recording took an unexpected turn. Sanders got a standing ovation when he performed an acoustic version of “Tough People” at the Franklin Theater. Based on that performance, Walker made a new acoustic demo, and it was so good that he played it on Dec. 29 for Luke Combs, who wanted to cut it. A few weeks later, Lainey Wilson heard it while visiting Baldridge, and she called Combs to ask if she could record it with him. They made their recording on Jan. 25. Combs re-wrote a couple lines in verse two, but he kept the school shooting in the piece.
“One of the responding officers [at Covenant] is the canine officer for Metro Nashville,” Walker says. “He actually lives on Luke’s property and trains dogs out there. So Luke was like, ‘If anything, that line is staying. He goes, ‘That guy’s a buddy of mine, and I think nobody talks about that.”
But when Baldridge partnered with BBR Music Group/BMG to market the follow-up to “She’s Somebody’s Daughter,” the label insisted “Tough People” was his best option as an artist. Baldridge told Combs he thought he should take it back, and Combs agreed. And when the writers wanted to give Combs a songwriter credit for contributing a couple lines, he insisted on taking only 10% ownership, instead of 25%.
Schwarz subsequently worked more on the recording, cutting new parts and moving a lot of the existing instrumental support around to heighten the song’s drama and better emulate the acoustic demo’s spirit. Baldridge tried to match the story’s intensity in his final vocal. When he heard the results later, he went back in to re-cut the vocal on the second chorus and make that part more forceful ahead of the guitar solo. “I can’t sing the word ‘tough’ weak,” he reasons.
Stoney Creek released “Tough People” through PlayMPE on Oct. 25. While the hard times in “Tough People” might play into the issues of the day, Baldridge hopes he can remain neutral on the song’s controversies but still inspire people to be their best selves.
“I don’t want to have to do political interviews or anything,” he says. “This is where we’re at. Take it how you want to take it, and hopefully some good can come out of it.”
It’s a classic love song, steady and true, delivered so crisply by its A-list vocalists that its unconventionality goes almost unnoticed.
Cody Johnson and Carrie Underwood debuted at No. 13 on the Hot Country Songs chart dated Oct. 12 with “I’m Gonna Love You,” blessed by a Randy Travis-like forever-and-ever lyric, applied to a musical foundation that blends several classic styles.
“It’s big, like a pop song,” Johnson says. “It kind of feels like a blues song, but we sing it like a gospel song.”
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They make it sound standard, too. But it’s not. For starters, the time signature moves around a bit. The verses alternate between 3/4 and 4/4 bars until their conclusion, when the “I’m gonna love you” hook arrives with backto-back waltz-time measures. Then, they ease into a 4/4 chorus — if, that is, the song actually has a chorus. It does have an uplifting, fourline stanza that fills the space where a chorus normally sits. But that section doesn’t include the hook and never makes it to the root chord. Instead, it resolves into the next verse, which ends up feeling like an extension of the chorus.
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“I consider that to be a bridge that you repeat, even though it does feel like the chorus,” says songwriter Chris Stevens (“Everything’s Gonna Be Alright”). “You can label it any way you want.”
“I’m Gonna Love You” took a long time to make it from creation into the public sphere, owing its earliest seeds of inspiration to the 2016 Dixie Chicks tour. (The band has since renamed itself The Chicks.)
Songwriter Kelly Archer (“Sleep Without You,” “Wild As Her”) saw them in Chicago on June 5, and Travis Denning saw them twice in August, in Atlanta and in Nashville. The morning after the Bridgestone Arena show, Denning and Archer met at Stevens’ writing room at Starstruck. When The Chicks became a topic, they discussed their propensity for simple, to-the-point choruses, matched with deeper verses. They decided to write with that approach, and Archer suggested “I’m Gonna Love You” as the simple title.
The process, however, was time-consuming. “We wanted to make sure that it was not only for your significant other,” Archer says, “but to your children, to anybody you love, to your parents, whoever.”
They worked on it until at least 5:30 p.m., building it sequentially with steady-and-true focus. The opening verse explored the dependability of the universe, with its stars, sun and moon. Verse two brought the story into Earth’s atmosphere, with birds, snow and April rain. In its finale, they narrowed the lens even further on the song’s couple, noting that even as the pair grows gray and weathered, its bond will remain firm.
“Everything just sort of fell together like puzzle pieces,” Archer says. “One line led to the next line, which led to the next line, which led to the next line, and then we put a big old solo in the middle of it.”
Stevens developed the pulsing keyboard part, changing the harmonic tuning on the third note of each 3/4-and-4/4 couplet in a way that created a gospel undertone. And Archer offered a key line in the bridge-like chorus, “Steady and true like a Bible verse,” that amplified that feel.
“It brought in another layer of depth to what the message was in the song, and not even necessarily religiously,” Denning says. “Like, when I think of a Bible verse, I think of tradition; I think of the test of time.”
Denning sang the demo that day and played a languid guitar solo, emulating Vince Gill’s melodic style. “I don’t know if anybody gets more out of single notes in country music as a guitar player than he does,” Denning says. “He can shred. I mean, he can do it all. But I think when he does that emotional thing, there’s nobody who does it better.”
Once Archer added harmonies, Denning realized they had something special. Stevens figured that out as he wrapped the demo’s production that night. “I had a panic attack,” he says. “I got this flood of adrenaline because I felt like there was a life to this. The song was coming to life as something that would be important in my career.”
“I’m Gonna Love You” was one of the three songs Denning recorded for a demo that helped him secure a recording deal the next year with Mercury Nashville. Early on, he boldly asked if Underwood would join him on a duet version — “They gave me the nicest answer of ‘no’ ever,” he says — and it got pitched separately to her as well.
“I thought it was a beautiful song,” Underwood remembers, “but I felt like it might be better for a male artist to sing, plus it didn’t really fit with the direction of where my new album at the time was going.”
When Johnson was shopping for a label in 2018, a Big Machine executive played it for him as an example of the kinds of songs they would bring him. He ultimately signed with Warner Music Nashville (WMN), but he periodically asked about the song. Denning eventually recorded it, but felt he needed to properly set up his career before releasing it. The pandemic threw a wrench into his plans, and in 2022, he finally let Johnson have it. Johnson had started a friendship with Underwood at the 2022 CMT Music Awards and thought she was the right vocal partner. She agreed.
Producer Trent Willmon (Granger Smith, Drake Milligan) cut it in two different keys in March 2023, and Underwood FaceTimed into the studio during the session to listen. She picked the lower key, a choice that would cast her voice in a new way. “[Her] voice has this sultry, Aretha Franklin-type quality to it in this key,” Johnson says. “I thought it was a piece of Carrie that we haven’t seen yet.”
The band played simply, framing the melody without drawing attention to itself, and Johnson was present when Underwood came into the studio later to overdub her part. During playback, Johnson sensed she was dissatisfied, and when asked, she said she would prefer they sing it together. “For me, the best possible situation is always when whoever I’m singing with, that we have the luxury of recording our vocals together,” she says. “I think that’s when the real magic happens.”
They each got into a vocal booth, able to see each other through the glass, and once they locked in, Willmon estimates that 95% of the vocal comes from one single performance. “It just reiterated why I love making music for a living,” he says.
Willmon turned to Gill for the solo, and he gave it the same kind of melodic, soulful phrasing that Denning would have expected. “He was out on tour with the Eagles, and it took him a minute to get to it,” Willmon recalls. “He played that solo, and it’s funny. He leaves this message: ‘Hey, T man, I just played what I felt like it needed, and if you don’t use it, I’m fine with it. It wouldn’t be the first time Carrie Underwood fired me.’ ”
The duet was held back from Johnson’s Leather album since its release didn’t fit Underwood’s timeline. WMN put out “The Painter” and “Dirt Cheap” instead, saving “I’m Gonna Love You” for Leather Deluxe, due Nov. 1. The duet was released Sept. 27, and it’s at No. 32 on Country Airplay and No. 21 on Hot Country Songs. Eight years after its creation and six years after Johnson started asking about it, “I’m Gonna Love You” is performing as he had hoped.
“I’ve been waiting,” Johnson says. “I’ve been chomping at the bit for this one.”
When people think about love, they frequently focus on expensive weddings, flowery poetry or heavy kissing sessions. But the ultimate act of love is arguably less romantic: paperwork.
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Making out a will, filling out the beneficiary lines on insurance forms or assigning someone for that “Payable on Death” section of a checking account are boring details that require uncomfortable thoughts about dying. But those actions smooth the passage of assets and can simplify life for survivors at a time when they’re torn by grief. Few things say “I love you” more than demonstrating it when the recipient can’t show appreciation.
“My wife says to me all the time, ‘If something ever happens to me, please be sure the boys know how much their mom loved them,’” Chris Lane says. “I’m like, ‘Honey, please do not ever say that to me again.’ I can’t even bear the thought of that.”
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Lane’s newest release — “If I Die Before You,” which Red Street issued to digital service providers on Oct. 11 — re-creates that kind of conversation with the singer contemplating his own passage. It’s similar to the approach in two high-impact predecessors, Garth Brooks’ “If Tomorrow Never Comes” and The Band Perry’s “If I Die Young,” but leans even closer to those awkward discussions about estates and advance directives. And it manages to transform a difficult moment into an ascendant one.
“I’ve never heard this topic talked about in a song before,” Lane says. “It felt like a really fresh and really cool idea, and they did it in a very emotional way.”
“They” are songwriters Emily Weisband (“Looking for You,” “Dance Like No One’s Watching”), James McNair (“Guy for That,” “Lovin’ On You”) and Seth Mosley (“Make You Mine,” “Build a Boat”). The three met at a second-floor office Mosley was renting at the Starstruck building on Nashville’s Music Row in 2022.
McNair brought up the title, “If I Die Before You,” which he had recently logged into his phone, most likely after hearing the phrase on a TV show. He didn’t know what kind of story it might create, but it led them to acknowledge that they’ve all had conversations with their spouses about how to handle an unexpected passing. “It’s the worst conversation in the world,” Weisband says.
But it had some powerful possibilities, too, if they could find the right balance, even with the word “die” in the hook. “You have to write it just completely bare and honest,” McNair says. “You can’t be cheesy, and it can’t be too morbid. It’s definitely delicate when you have that word in the title.”
They launched with the title in the opening line — “If I die before you/I hope you buy that Mustang” — with Weisband, who had a pop recording deal, leading the melodic charge. They toggled between the verses and chorus as they proceeded, Mosley girding the top line with more minor chords and sevenths than typically emerge in Nashville writing rooms.
“It’s not like a jazz record or anything,” Mosley says. “There are far more complicated songs and chord progressions out there, but I think as Nashville writers often forget, there are other options. And so if I can be a small part of helping just create stuff that’s slightly different, that’s something I like to do.”
The chorus lived primarily in unresolved chordal territory, creating a sweet tension as it recognized that “all our names end up on a rock.” Near the end, it almost came to a halt, imagining that God takes the singer first. “Baby, forgive Him,” the text read, “and keep living if I die before you.”
Imagining Weisband’s future family, verse two referenced “our hypothetical kids” as the weighty conversation continued. By the time they reached the bridge, the song eased into conversational syncopation, the story’s couple refocusing on the current moment. And on a bottle.
“We tried to lighten it up, in that sense of where it was kind of like a couch conversation over wine,” McNair says, “which I think helps it, you know. They weren’t in the lawyer’s office or something like that.”They wrote it in a scant two hours, prioritizing the song itself rather than how it might be received in the marketplace. Mosley produced a demo with an airy tone, Weisband singing lead.
“It was very low pressure,” she says. “It was not the typical Nashville grind it out till every word is perfect and every melody’s a smash-sounding melody. It’s just like, ‘Let’s let the song write itself, and we’re just kind of here to help birth it,’ if you will. We were the song’s midwives.”
Lane heard “If I Die Before You” when a publisher sent him a batch of songs. He was particularly curious about the title and made it one of the first he played from that group. He took the opening “mustang” reference to mean a horse, which fit his wife’s interests, and the rest of the song worked, too. He wanted it.
“I’m not a super-emotional guy at all, nor do I really love slow songs,” he says. “But when I heard this song, it struck an emotional chord in me — probably because I’m married and have kids now, so I look at life differently.”
He responded to the publisher, who apologized: Another artist — Jordan Davis, it turned out — had the song, and Lane shouldn’t have heard it. While Davis debated whether to release it, McNair played it for Luke Combs, who pressured Davis to put it out or let it go. Combs toyed with it, too, but decided it didn’t fit the project he was recording and passed. “We just kept laughing that for how pop-girl of a demo this was, all these guys were wanting to cut it,” Weisband says.
Ultimately, Lane checked in every few months about it, and his persistence won the day. He so revered it that he insisted on using two of the song’s writers — he got Mosley to produce it and asked Weisband to sing harmonies. And Lane was present for almost all the work as Mosley cut new parts — played primarily by multi-instrumentalist Jonny Fung and drummer Phil Lawson — over pieces of the original demo, shifting it to a country production.
Lane made one lyrical change: “Our hypothetical kids” became “our crazy, beautiful kids,” acknowledging his two boys. He worked tirelessly on his lead vocal, singing perhaps 20 or 30 takes to get every part right.
Mosley called on Gideon Klein and Carl Larson to overdub a string section. “I make string arrangements that are just me singing into a mic,” Mosley says, “and I’ll do 10, 15 tracks of me just humming parts, like, ‘This is a cello, part one,’ ‘Cello, part two,’ and then I’ll pass it off to Gideon. He’ll put it on sheet music so it actually makes sense. But then we go in and just stack it a bunch of times.”
Red Street continues to work Lane’s current single, “Find Another Bar,” currently at No. 28 on Country Airplay after 51 weeks. But “If I Die Before You” is the likely follow-up, assuming it generates the reaction they expect.
“Everything in my gut tells me that this is a career song,” Lane says. “I’m praying and hoping that people react to it in the same way that I did, and if they do, then it feels like the next one up.”
It’s quite the picture: Lainey Wilson performs in a club with fewer than 100 seats and sings a song that’s so new she needs one of her fellow performers — Post Malone, of all people — to hold her cellphone so she can read the lyrics off the screen.
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That was the setting when Wilson took part in a songwriters-in-the-round event on June 17 at Nashville’s vaunted Bluebird Cafe. It was, she says, the first time she had performed “4x4xU” live.
“I didn’t even know the chords,” she recalls. “I was just making them up that night.”
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The song would make its way into the public sphere when Broken Bow released the track and its accompanying video to digital service providers on July 4, ahead of the Aug. 23 street date for her album Whirlwind. On Aug. 26, “4x4xU” officially went to radio via PlayMPE, continuing a trend she has unintentionally developed with prior singles “Heart Like a Truck” and “Wait in the Truck,” a collaboration with HARDY.
“For so long,” she says, “I was like, ‘I’m not going to write about trucks.’ That’s what everybody does. [But] every single one of my biggest songs is about a damn truck. I couldn’t help it, but I guess you just write what you know. And the truth is, trucks are a big part of my childhood and even with the way that I live now, I’m always up and down the road.”
Appropriately, Wilson wrote “4x4xU” on the road when she played Indianapolis’ Gainbridge Fieldhouse on Nov. 1, 2023, in conjunction with the 96th annual FFA Convention. The event cultivated some of her creative mindset for the day.
“I was excited to be at the FFA Convention,” she reflects. “My daddy started one of the very first FFAs at Louisiana Tech in Ruston. It just felt cool. It felt like, ‘Man, I want to kind of write a song about my people. I want to write a song about keeping my people close.’ ”
It was not the first thing on the menu. Co-writers Aaron Raitiere (“You Look Like You Love Me”) and Jon Decious helped her craft a cheeky light-funk piece, “Ring Finger,” first. Once that was completed, they found themselves with a small pre-concert window, and they were all game for a whirlwind attempt at something else.
“We didn’t have more than 30 or 40 minutes,” Decious says. “She had to go be a superstar, you know, in 50 minutes.”
Decious wasted no time — as they strummed guitars on the bus, he brought up the “4x4xU” hook he had developed during a brainstorming session.
“I spend, gosh, several hours a week just title-hunting, I call it, and that was one that I just kind of came across,” he says. “It sort of reminded me — like, I’m a big Prince fan, and you know how he would put numbers [in titles] and also, instead of writing out ‘you,’ he would just put the letter ‘U.’ ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ is a good example. That’s kind of cool, but I don’t see it too often in country.”
Wilson turned the “4x4xU” hook into a gently ascending melody, very close to the way Decious had imagined it, and the phrase became the opening line of the chorus. The next line, “From the bayou to Kentucky,” enhanced the truck’s travel vibe in a personal way.
“She’s from the bayou, and we’re from Kentucky,” Raitiere says. “We were putting all these little, little, little nuggets in there. Hopefully people hear it on the second listen or something.”
Those two lines had a subtle verbal tie — the “4×4 by you” sounds like the “bayou” — and they added a few more locations in the rest of the chorus. They changed those communities on the second verse, covering New York, Los Angeles and a couple of cities with quirky names.
“We just wanted to get them all over the place,” Raitiere says. “And then Timbuktu; I been putting Timbuktu in songs for a while. Kalamazoo rhymes with Timbuktu. Those just seem like weird words. I actually had somebody come up to me from Kalamazoo and say they were so proud to have Kalamazoo in another song.”
When they formed the opening verse, they instinctively took a cinematic approach. The plot’s lens focused first on the singer, riding shotgun in the moving vehicle, then on the guy in the driver’s seat, who has his “hands 10 and two on this heart of mine.” That’s one of those nuggets Raitiere cited, the steering-wheel numbers setting up the four-by-four to come.
They parked the car in verse two, dropping their speed “90 to nothing,” once more feeding more numbers into the text. By the time they reached the bridge, the plot seemingly left the vehicle, pointing the camera toward the sun, the stars and the moon.
“I love that contrast,” Decious says. “You know, four-by-fours, the idea of it is so down home and so tangible, but then the idea of space and time is very intangible. So I love the contrast of those. I think it was just an accident that we went there, a happy accident.”
When Wilson brought “4x4xU” to producer Jay Joyce (Eric Church, Miranda Lambert), the track was layered during tracking at the Neon Cross Studio with multiple keyboards, including soulful electric piano and churchy organ sounds. The bridge received special treatment with a revised set of more ambitious chords and a fermata — an extended hold as pieces of electronica create otherworldly atmospherics.
“Jay does this a lot,” Wilson says. “He kind of takes you to outer space. He’ll kind of take you somewhere up in the clouds, and then when you’re coming back into that chorus, it’s almost like he brings you back down to Earth. When you can get both of those feelings — when you can feel grounded and rooted, like your feet are on the ground but also feel like your head is in the clouds — to me, there’s something really special about being able to feel both in a song.”
One other unusual moment in “4x4xU” occurs in the last half of verse two, with the band breaking into double time, directly contrasting with the “slow motion” lyric.
“That was my one production note,” Wilson says. “I was like, ‘What about if we kind of dug in right here and got a little sexy on it?’ And Jay was down for it.”
The fan base reacted strongly to “4x4xU,” and it continues its steady upward movement on the charts, reaching No. 28 in its sixth week on the Country Airplay list dated Oct. 19 and No. 32 in its fifth week on the corresponding Hot Country Songs. Just as importantly, it has a key role in Wilson’s concerts.
“I still felt like we were missing something that was a big moment, a put-your-hands-in-the-air, sway-back-and-forth kind of thing,” she says. “Truthfully, it’s all about the live show.”
It’s a harsh fact of life for songwriters that the bulk of their creative output is consigned to a shelf, never to be heard outside a small group of friends and co-workers.
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By contrast, nearly every story a reporter turns in typically gets printed. And the vast majority of broadcasters’ voiceovers make it onto the airwaves.
But where the reporters and air personalities are tasked with turning in new content on a daily basis, a great song gets played repeatedly for weeks, months or years. So songwriters keep churning out new material on a regular basis, only to send it into a landscape where a fraction of the industry’s output ever gets significant attention. Under those conditions, ERNEST’s new single, “Would If I Could,” is an outright miracle, a song composed in the 1990s that spent most of the last 30 years collecting figurative dust on a digital shelf.
“There’s a thousand songs coming in today,” ERNEST speculates. “You can imagine, between now and 1993, how many songs are just sitting there.”
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Only one of those songs, though, was penned by Dean Dillon (“Tennessee Whiskey,” “Ocean Front Property”) and artist-writer Skip Ewing (“You Had Me From Hello,” “Love, Me”). They were two of country’s most significant writers during the ’90s, but they only collaborated once. Ewing brought in the hook, they worked through it in short order — and never tackled another song.
“I had that little idea, ‘I would if I could,’ and when I knew I was going to write with him, I thought, ‘Well, that could be right in his wheelhouse,’” Ewing remembers. “We didn’t spend very much time together, and I’ve never talked to him since. It’s the only song we’ve ever written.”
The title, “I Would If I Could,” is a phrase that stands on its own, but it’s also part of a larger meme, “I would if I could, but I can’t, so I shan’t,” that has been in circulation for decades. It appears, in fact, in the dialogue of Jim Parsons’ nerdy Big Bang Theory character, Sheldon Cooper.
Funny enough, neither Ewing nor Dillon had ever heard it. But when they chipped away at the chorus, they ended up chasing a more colloquial version of the same sentiment: “I would if I could, but I can’t, so I won’t.” And then they tagged it with an extension: “But I want to.”
The chorus became an intricate word puzzle. “Want,” “like” and “love” are weaved into the text — along with “I’d love to say, ‘Yes’ ” and “I’m tellin’ you, ‘No.’ ” That maze is attached to a spiraling melody that sounds, as ERNEST notes, a bit like the George Strait hit “The Chair,” written by Dillon.
The first verse — cast in a lower range with a different, but compatible, phrasing — established the story of a former partner asking for a second chance. The singer is respectfully skeptical, though tempted, and the melancholy tone and winding melody add heartbreaking tension to the encounter. “He’s trying to say no,” Ewing observes. “If he was sure, the ‘I want to’ wouldn’t be there, so I still don’t know which one wins.”
Strait, who famously recorded dozens of Dillon’s compositions, got the first crack at “I Would If I Could.” “Every Monday of the week George recorded, I’d go to his office at 10 a.m. in the morning over at [manager] Erv [Woolsey’s] place,” Dillon says. “The stuff he’d like, he’d keep, and then when he cut the session, if I got something, it was all good. And most of the times I did.”
Strait apparently liked “I Would If I Could,” because it got considered during a session. Producer Joey Moi (Morgan Wallen, Florida Georgia Line) notes that when they worked on ERNEST’s recording, fiddler Larry Franklin recognized the song from that earlier Strait date. Strait had toyed with it during that session, but had other songs that were just as good and passed on “I Would If I Could.” Dillon was unaware that Strait had come that close to cutting it. “That’s one more thing I can b–ch to him about,” Dillon deadpans.
The song languished in the Sony/ATV vault for years until July 2023 when Ewing’s demo was issued on numerous platforms. Lainey Wilson cut a version with a fair amount of minor chords for Apple Music’s Lost & Found series, appearing in November 2023. And Dillon’s daughter, Jessie Jo Dillon (“Messed Up As Me,” “Am I Okay?”), brought it to ERNEST’s attention. He loved it.
“All of it,” he clarifies. “The way it felt; I thought the lyric was awesome. Skip’s performance on the demo is very inspiring as well. I mean, Dean Dillon guitar chords and melodies are just as much of a signature as a Banksy painting.”
ERNEST cut his own version of “I Would If I Could,” mixing a few old-school session players — including Franklin and guitarist Brent Mason — with other musicians who have joined the A-list ranks in more recent years. They developed a starkly spacious arrangement, with Bryan Sutton’s acoustic guitar leading the opening verse. Jerry Roe doesn’t start his drum part until the second line of the chorus, and much of the band — including Franklin, Mason, Sutton and steel guitarist Dan Dugmore — operated in unison on many of the key instrumental turnarounds, mimicking a signature Strait element.
“It has to sound like an old classic George Strait song,” Moi says. “We all heard it and barely had to talk about it in the room. It was so obvious how it had to be cut. Every musician walked away and knew the assignment.”
The sparseness of the track let the nuances of ERNEST’s vocals shine. He enunciates the consonants crisply, his breaths are detectable, and those touches enhance the fragility in his performance. “It had to be intimate, but it also had to hurt at the same time,” Moi says. “That’s a hard thing for certain singers to do. Some singers, they kind of have one gear and they sing one way, and they don’t emote the best. But ERN, I feel like he nailed it.”
Wilson added her voice to ERNEST’s version, and their collaboration appeared in April. But she had her own album in the works, and Big Loud released his solo version of “Would If I Could” (the first “I” is shaved off the title) to country radio via PlayMPE on Aug. 21. “Lainey is one of the busiest women in country music, rightfully so,” ERNEST says. “I can’t burden her with another thing to do, but I still want this song on country radio.”
Its official impact date is Oct. 7. Two previous hits, “Flower Shops” and “Cowboys,” teamed him with Wallen; surprisingly, “Would If I Could” — after sitting ignored for three decades — is ERNEST’s first solo release to radio.
“I’m super thankful for the features I’ve had at radio,” he says, “but I’m excited to go do the work it’s going to take to run this song as far as it can go.”
When Bryce Leatherwood repeatedly outlasted the other competitors each week to win NBC’s The Voice in fall 2022, he experienced music as a raw competition.
As he moves into the next chapter of his music career, Leatherwood is still aware of the scads of artists all vying for the same brass ring, and his first radio single, “Hung Up on You,” is designed specifically to make an impression in a busy music marketplace.
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“The biggest part in today’s country is you got to stand out some way,” he says. “You got to differentiate yourself from the pack.”
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“Hung Up on You” definitely separates itself. The chorus features an edgy, anthemic melody, while the production sports a funky bass part at its open, a squealing guitar near its close and tons of growling, uneasy sounds in the middle. In the process, “Hung Up” fulfills Leatherwood’s competitive intentions.
“The whole time we were in the studio, building it out with the musicians, I was just like, ‘Be as off the wall as you can. Do what you want to do. Do the wildest stuff,’ ” he recalls. “As we got into post-production, I was just like, ‘Crank the guitars up, crank that bass up. Make it just punch.’ And it does.”
“Hung Up on You” has existed for a decade. Brandon Lay, then signed to Universal Music Nashville, had a co-write canceled, but Warner Chappell Nashville got him into a room with Neil Medley (“Made for You”) and former Dirt Drifters guitarist Jeff Middleton (“Drowns the Whiskey”) at Liz Rose Music.
“Thank God you’re here,” Medley said when Lay arrived. “We were about to write a ballad.”
Nearly every artist is looking for something uptempo, and all three writers turned their attention to that pursuit. Lay, it turned out, had part of the hook, and his comrades were able to figure out what to do with it.
“I had half of that title,” Lay says. “I was ‘hungover, hung up’ on something, and then they were like, ‘Hung up on you.’ I kind of was missing the forest for the trees, but I had a general idea of the title.”
Middleton dialed up a phat, scrappy bassline he had been playing with and topped that dark sound with some R&B-infused keyboards. They introduced the story with a vivid line, “Stumbled in with the rooster crowing,” that speaks to a long night of partying. The verse continues with more partying as two people stumble down the hallway to a rolling cadence.
“Brandon Lay’s lyrics are so wordy,” Medley says. “I think he listened to a lot more rap or whatever than I did, but I’ve always loved his phrasing. I would assume that the verses are just littered with Brandon Lay-isms. He’s so good at those lyric phrasings and the meter of everything.”
“The choruses,” Middleton adds, “are a little more settled in country songwriter kind of things.”
Those choruses emphasize the melodic part of the quotient with some longer-held notes as the hangover becomes a greater focus: “Keep the shaaaades down, keep the daaaaay out.” A little more rhythmic phrasing ensues “till the haaaaze clears,” and the stanza finally arrives at its “Hungover, hung up on you” hook.
Verse two started with another line, “Woke up with the room still spinning,” that shows some time has transpired. It continues the hungover theme while underscoring that the buzz from the evening is about the two people as much as it’s about the vices they might have employed.
Middleton guided a long bridge, slowing down the mood a bit before they pick up again at the final chorus. It mimics — perhaps unintentionally — the stop-and-start flow between the song’s two characters, whose relationship is not entirely defined. “I’ve always thought of it as kind of a random hookup,” Lay says. “But it could go either way. I guess that’s open for interpretation.”
Lay sang on the fuzzed-up demo with his voice electronically altered. He turned it in to the label and it got some attention, but not enough that it became a single. It was the heart of the bro-country era, and the funk core and long bridge of “Hung Up on You” were likely a little outside the box for the time. “It kind of fell into that Eric Church kind of lane,” Medley says. “And I guess Eric was the only one doing Eric.”
A few other acts cut it but didn’t release it, and before Lay left the label, he recorded it once more with producer Jonathan Singleton (Luke Combs, Riley Green). That version stayed in the Universal vault.Leatherwood moved to Nashville in January 2023, shortly after he won The Voice, and heard “Hung Up” within his first couple of months in town. He was sold on the spot.
“It definitely had that funky vibe to it,” he says. “I think it inspired what the final product was in a big way, but it was definitely not what the record turned out to be.”
Producer Will Bundy (Ella Langley, Graham Barham) oversaw the session at Nashville’s Sound Emporium, with Billy Justineau on Wurlitzer, Evan Hutchings handling drums, Ilya Toshinskiy strumming acoustic, Derek Wells playing seering electric guitar and Mike Johnson manning pedal steel. “That always helps just bring it back in country land,” Bundy says of the steel.
Jimmie Lee Sloas ran his bass through a fuzz pedal, approximating the tone on the demo. “Buckley [Miller], who engineered it with me, he whizzed up a big fuzz on that bass and just made it sort of nasty and made that sort of the backbone of the song, which I feel like is a high risk, high reward,” Bundy says. “It’s definitely different, but it’s cool to see people love it.”
The writers were pleasantly surprised when they learned their 10-year-old song had been cut and even more pleased to discover it was Leatherwood’s first radio single, which Mercury Nashville/Republic released via PlayMPE on Sept. 5. Imitating the demo, Leatherwood’s cut has his voice electronically altered during the verses, though it shifts to its natural tone as the haze clears in the chorus.
“I love the way Bryce sings it,” Middleton says. “It feels country, even with all that stuff going on. He’s a country singer, and that song pushes the boundary a little bit.”
Leatherwood performed “Hung Up On You” during his Grand Ole Opry debut on Sept. 14, and he hopes to keep singing it for years to come. It definitely gives him a chance to be noticed. “There’s nothing like it,” he says. “I think it’s go big or go home. If you go to country radio, you don’t want to leave any stone unturned, and I think this song leaves no stones unturned.”
As Columbia Nashville prepared for the July 12 release of Megan Moroney’s sophomore album, Am I Okay?, the label held back the title track as it rolled out individual songs in advance of the project.
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The move was purposeful: The title matches the reputation she has built with her fan base, and she wanted to catch listeners off guard the first time they heard it.
“I’ve branded myself as the emo cowgirl, and so I knew everyone was going to think that this is going to be a really sad song,” she says. “If you just see it on paper, you’re like, ‘Oh, no, it’s going to be tough.’ And that’s why we didn’t release ‘Am I Okay,’ the title track, ahead of the album, because I wanted everyone to be surprised once the entire album came out.”
The fans would not be the only ones surprised by “Am I Okay?” Her co-writers, Jessie Jo Dillon (“Messed Up As Me,” “10,000 Hours”) and Luke Laird (“Drink in My Hand,” “Undo It”), hadn’t expected to work on something so optimistic. Moroney, in fact, was a little apologetic when she spoke her mind during an appointment at Laird’s writing cabin on Oct. 2, 2023.
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“When I was explaining how I felt, I was like, ‘Yeah, I want to write a love song,’” she recalls. “Like, ‘I’m tired of writing sad songs. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I met this guy, and he’s being really nice to me, and for once, I don’t want to sabotage it. And I think I could be a girlfriend.’ And they were just like, ‘Oh my God, are you okay?’”
That, of course, became the title. The bright, upbeat topic helped meet her musical goals, too. Moroney knew she would be touring with Kenny Chesney in 2024, and she wanted a song that would feel good in a stadium. Laird called up a chugging track he had created around a floating guitar intro, and he believed it would fit her musically.
“She delivers a song so well with just her and a guitar,” he says. “I thought this one will be easy to do that way, too. There’s only, like, three chords. It’s simple. It’s in her key. And she liked it. And I think that it kind of brought an energy to the room, like more of a live thing.”
They attacked the chorus first, capturing the moment Moroney’s then-new squeeze had appeared in a Nashville bar where she had been hanging with some friends. They threw out some descriptors of a guy that most women would find intriguing — 6 feet 2, funny, smart and “good in…” The songwriter antenna went up at that moment, though it only lasted an instant: Would saying he’s good in bed play at radio? On TV? In family settings?
They had the solution before they even discussed it. “We were just rambling,” Moroney notes. “I was probably like, ‘He’s funny and he’s smart and he’s good in…’ And then Jessie Jo or Luke just echoed me. And I was like, ‘Oh, that’s cool.’ There wasn’t too much thought behind it.”
“Instead of just saying it,” Dillon adds, “that felt flirtier, in a way, to just repeat it.”
It wound its way to the final hook — “Oh my God, am I okay?” — kicked out in punchy phrases that seemed right for a gang vocal. Which Moroney didn’t entirely accept at first. “I wasn’t exactly sold on the gang vocals yet,” she recalls. “The last seven syllables of the song are the same note. I was like, ‘Is that weird?’”
As they dug in on the verses, they led with the singer checking to make sure she’s really breathing, a recognition of the change in personality that this new guy had inspired. “I’ve been playing less black keys, baby,” they wrote in that first verse, alluding to the sharps and flats on a piano keyboard, which create an alternative musical scale on their own.
“It’s alluding to writing less sad music,” Dillon says. “I feel like that was [about] being less emo and writing [fewer] sad songs because she’s known for some of her sad songs as much as ‘Tennessee Orange.’ ”
One of Moroney’s managers later capitalized Black Keys on a lyric sheet, believing it to be a reference to the Nashville-based rock band. That development surprised all three writers, who had not contemplated that interpretation.
“I’m a huge Black Keys fan, and their s–t can be pretty emo,” Dillon says. “Their lyrics can be pretty sad — and so I guess either way somebody interprets that, it kind of works.”
In verse two, Moroney sang, “And wait” — then literally waited before continuing, “There’s guys that can communicate.” It was clearly sarcastic; if listeners had any doubt that this “fun little bop,” as Dillon calls it, belonged to Moroney, that confirms it’s legitimately her. “She’s definitely a little snarky,” Laird says, “but the delivery gives it a lightness. I thought it was good.”
Laird finished the demo with the pulsing guitars creating a new wave feel, and all three of them did the gang vocals at the end of the chorus. It provided a solid template for the full recording, produced by Sugarland’s Kristian Bush at Nashville’s Blackbird Studio in January. The musicians bumped up the tempo a few beats per minute, but mostly followed Laird’s demo as a guide. With real musicians replacing some of the programmed elements, it took on more of a Tom Petty pulse, while Jordan Schipper’s steel guitar upped the country quotient. The steel, Brandon Bush’s keyboards and some of Benji Shanks’ guitar tones leaned hazy or fuzzy.
“I’m totally into ambient pedals right now,” Kristian says. “You don’t really know what you’re getting. You put a tone into it, like you’ll play your steel into it, or you play the guitar into it and it’s a very Brian Eno-y thing, where it starts to sort of randomize at certain frequencies the sound that’s coming out of it. You can control it with your hands, like on these knobs, but it’s all kind of voodoo. It becomes dreamy very quickly.”
Bush heightened the dynamic range; the track goes quiet when Moroney sings “Wait…,” and it nearly does it again at the bridge. At the finale, the instruments drop out as she delivers the last line, “I think I’m still breathing.” She could have followed it with a sigh, but it never quite appears.
“At the end of this song, when it cuts off, I wanted you to be waiting for the next song to happen,” Kristian says. “When you’re playing live, at the end of that first song, you want people to be like, ‘Is it over? What’s happening? Oh my God.’ And then all of a sudden, you’re into your next song.” The vocals challenged Moroney. Ironically, the week she sang about her boyfriend, they broke up.
“I’m in the studio having to sing this song about a guy being really nice to me, when actually it was just like three months and he showed me who he actually was,” she says. “And now I have to sing this forever.”
She just might. Columbia Nashville released it to country radio via PlayMPE on Aug. 5. It’s at No. 20 and rising on the Hot Country Songs chart dated Sept. 28. Even if it’s uncharacteristically buoyant for Moroney, the sarcasm still comes through.
“If I’m writing a love song, I must be ill,” she says. “That’s the whole premise of the song.”