Makin’ Tracks
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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.”
Plenty of listeners likely did a double take when Parker McCollum’s new single premiered on radio stations and streaming playlists on Sept. 13.
It was McCollum’s voice all right, but the Dylan-style harmonica, rough-cut Flying Burrito Brothers arrangement and Hawaiian steel-like slide guitar challenge all the norms of modern commercial country. Even for McCollum, who openly tries to live at the margins of mainstream country, “What Kinda Man” is boldly different.
“I’m a little nervous about this song,” he confesses. “I think it’s going to stick out on country radio like a sore thumb.”
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Standing out from the crowd is, of course, an asset for recording artists, even if it’s sometimes uncomfortable. Willie Nelson, Chris Stapleton, Waylon Jennings and Dolly Parton all earned their place in the genre’s strata by owning a unique sonic personality. McCollum, clearly aware that there are no guarantees about the length of a recording career, seems intent on enhancing his public identity while he has the opportunity.
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“I’ve only got two records left on my first-ever record deal, and I just didn’t want to go put out a record that sounded like the last two,” he says. “I always wanted to be John Mayer and George Strait, you know, and their records are sonically perfect. And I kind of came to the realization over the last year [that] maybe that’s just not me.”
“What Kinda Man” is decidedly McCollum. He started writing it at home alone several years ago after turkey hunting in Kansas, “banging around on my guitar trying to find a melody” and freestyling phrases. He landed on an apologetic line about pulling an all-nighter — “which,” he says, “I used to do all of the time” — and he played it forward from there, each melodic line and lyrical phrase arriving sequentially. The verse segued seamlessly into the chorus, and he worked his way to the payoff phrase: “Forget the man I am/ What kinda man do you need?”
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He knew that hook was worth pursuing, so he saved it for another day. That day arrived on April 26, 2022, when songwriters Natalie Hemby (“Heartache Medication,” “Pontoon”) and Jeremy Spillman (“Hell on the Heart,” “Arlington”) arrived at his house to work on songs. He played the verse and chorus of “What Kinda Man,” and it was already so far down the road, his co-writers felt strongly that they should try to finish it.
“Parker just gifted this to us like our Christmas presents,” Hemby says. “So very grateful to him. Maybe we changed a couple of lines, but that was about it on the first verse and chorus. He came in with a mapped-out idea.”
Like McCollum, they recognized the hook — “Forget the man I am/ What kinda man do you need?” — was strong. “I just don’t know what girl across the universe doesn’t want to hear that,” Hemby deadpans, “because we love to change people.”
McCollum had one specific demand for the second verse. He wanted to include a specific line, “Swore that I would never step foot back in the Union Valley Church again,” which he had written as a reference to a spot in Oklahoma he stumbled on during his drive home from the turkey hunt.
“We’d actually pulled over right there to smoke a joint, which is a little sacrilegious,” he allows. “But I took the picture on my phone.”
The church became a symbol for the singer’s determination to change his life around; he was willing to return to a place he despised and try to find salvation in an effort to win over a woman. “I think that’s a theme that’s true for a lot of guys,” Spillman says. “You can listen to that song and identify with that character. We are kind of hell-raisers till we find the one who gives us a reason not to be that way.”
They recorded a guitar/vocal work tape with a light swing feel to it, Hemby creating a template for a harmony part. McCollum considered recording it for his 2023 album, Never Enough, but never quite got to it. After cutting about seven tracks for his next album, he switched producers, looking to change his sound. He called on Frank Liddell (Miranda Lambert, David Nail) and Eric Masse (Charlie Worsham, Waylon Payne) and recorded a few songs at Nashville’s Blackbird Studio in mid-summer with a handpicked, five-piece studio band: drummer Nir Z, bassist Eli Beard and three guitarists — Adam Wright, Harrison Whitford and Cage the Elephant’s Nick Bockrath.
The night before the session, McCollum decided the phrasing in the back half of verse two could be tighter, and he rewrote that section of “What Kinda Man.”
At the session, Liddell had the band cut an instrumental first to develop some cohesiveness as a unit. Sitting in the control room before they tackled “What Kinda Man,” McCollum determined they should record it as a shuffle, but outside of that, they mostly let the band play the song repeatedly, finding their groove along the way. They played without a click track, giving the performance a looser feel, and the ultimate single was built on one specific pass. McCollum sang full-throated with every take.
“He brought it almost like an athlete,” Liddell says. “It’s really important because, especially when you’re doing something live like that, [the voice is] the most important instrument in the room, and if they can’t hear it, or if the person can’t sing, or they’re just mailing it in, then it affects everything else.”
Liddell thought McCollum’s vocal from the studio floor was strong enough to be the final performance, but McCollum insisted that he was a bit worn down from the road and could improve upon it, so he held an overdub session later, completing his vocal work and throwing in the harmonica piece, too. Wright sang a harmony part, and they called in Madi Diaz, who had worked with Liddell on Lambert’s “Vice,” to lend an atmospheric countermelody in the background.
“We were kind of feeling like there should be a female and just trying to find something interesting,” Liddell says. “It kind of solves the whole element of having a woman in there. The song’s about, you know, talking to a woman.”
The resulting track is at once swaggering and apologetic. “It sounded like a jam when we heard it,” Spillman says.
MCA Nashville surprised McCollum by picking “What Kinda Man” as his next single, since he thought the production might be too rough for country radio. But the storyline fits his own conversion from a rabble-rouser to a married man, and the song overall meets his standards.
“The only thing I ever think about when I write songs,” McCollum says, “is, you know, would Rodney Crowell think this is good? Would Steve Earle think this is good? Would James McMurtry or Robert Earl Keen think this is good for country music? And I think they would think this song was good for country music.”
With apologies to Boy George, Meghan Patrick can be considered a charter member of a small new club of punctuation punks, the Comma Chameleons.
Her debut single, “Golden Child,” purposely omits a comma from the title, disguising a twist in the song’s hook, “Everything that glitters ain’t golden, child.”
Patrick’s not the first to use that punctuation mark to make a clever switch in a song’s meaning. Craig Campbell’s “Family Man” emphasizes the singer’s priorities by answering a question with the simple phrase “Family, man.” Kacey Musgraves’ “Space Cowboy” injects new meaning into an old Steve Miller Band expression: “You can have your space, cowboy.”
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Patrick accomplishes some wordplay by implying there’s a comma in the song’s hook, but leaving it out of the title isn’t only an attempt at creating surprise. It’s also a method of underscoring the parent album’s theme.
“The biggest reason why we didn’t put the comma in was because it’s the title track to the record, and the record is just Golden Child,” she says. “The whole record is connected. It’s sequential, it’s meant to be listened to top to bottom, in order. This song kind of ties it all together.”
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Patrick had the album title and concept before she had the title track, which arrived thanks to a suggestion by a co-writer.
After attending the CMT Music Awards on April 7 in Austin, Patrick flew back to Nashville for a next-day writing appointment. Operating on two or three hours of sleep, she showed up at the home studio of co-writer Aaron Eshuis (“One Bad Habit,” “This Is It”), where they were to collaborate with Joey Hyde (“Later On,” “Made For You”). Naturally, she told them about the album she was working on, already titled Golden Child, based on the opening line of “Blood From a Stone.” Eshuis decided the album needed a song named “Golden Child.”
“Aaron is kind of the quiet shaman,” Hyde says. “He doesn’t speak a whole lot. I mean, when we’re together, I take a lot of oxygen out of the room. So when he does say something, everybody really shuts up and listens.”
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Hyde came up with the hook, “Everything that glitters ain’t golden, child,” and Patrick decided the song should represent a letter to her younger self. That angle helped them write the first line or two, but then they turned their efforts toward the chorus, where she compiled some sage advice, a bit like “Humble and Kind” at a faster tempo.
“The thing about writing songs where you’re sort of trying to impart wisdom or give advice, in some ways, you don’t want to ever come across too preachy or too judgy,” Patrick says. “It’s more just ‘Hey, this is what I’ve learned. This is how it goes.’ ”
The clincher, developed by Patrick, was a warning to “wear your diamonds on the inside.”
“The moral of the story is that a lot of things that I thought were the diamonds — the things that I was wanting and striving for within the industry, the people I thought I needed to hang out with, or the things I thought I needed to do — they weren’t that great,” she says. “You can win all you want in this industry, but what you have on the inside — your character and how you treat people — that should be the most valuable thing about you.”
They made a point of crafting “Golden Child” as her own personal statement. “So many of those lyrics were just spoken by her in the room,” Eshuis says. “We just tried to make them rhyme.”
Hyde addressed it musically with a chord progression that invites the listener to lean forward. The opening seconds begin with a minor chord, infusing the piece with a darker texture. The chorus would start with a five chord — a brighter triad that still needs to resolve.
“We never fully give the big breath of relief at any point in this song,” Hyde says. “From a music standpoint, we keep the hooks coming at you so it’s familiar and comfortable, but we don’t let you get off the edge of the cliff.”
They closed shop after nailing the chorus and first verse, then reassembled the next day, April 9, determined to bring “Golden Child” to the finish line. Where the first verse had focused on the younger girl who was to receive the letter from her older self, the second verse highlighted several challenges she could expect to face, offering solutions for each.
Eshuis and Hyde were determined to build a demo that would provide a strong guide for the final production, though since they had produced some of her earlier material, they had an idea that the day’s recording might prove to be the master. “We didn’t know,” Hyde says, “but we knew.”
As they shifted into production, they adjusted the underlying rhythm for “Golden Child.” They had written it as a shuffle, but to toughen it up, they gave it more drive — “kind of a Tom Petty groove,” Eshuis says.After the guys laid down some acoustic guitar parts, Patrick tackled the vocal informally in the center of the studio.
“I do have a vocal booth, but we didn’t use it,” Eshuis says. “She was singing on a Telefunken U47 in the middle of my writing room, and all three of us had headphones on, just looking at each other while she’s singing, which is how I do almost all my vocals now. It just makes it easy for communication.”
She anticipated coming back at a later date to deliver a more suitable vocal when she was better rested, though it was so strong they later decided only to do a small amount of touch-up.
With her vocal in place, Hyde played drums and Eshuis took on the bass parts, establishing the foundation for the track. Leading into the final chorus, Eshuis filled in one instrumental hole with a bass lick played high on the neck, inspired by Craig Young’s work on Lady A’s “I Run To You.” Hyde threw on the electric guitar opening riff and a solo with a dirty tone.
They needed only one additional musician; Patrick had them send the track to fiddler Jenee Fleenor for extra country texture.
“There was just something about adding in that fiddle that gives you that great classic country feel,” Patrick says. “Jenee is just such a great, tasteful player. And also, if I’ve got a chance to put a spotlight on or empower another woman in the industry, I’m going to take it. So all in all, it was a great choice.”
Already established in Canada, Patrick created a Golden Child web series to better introduce herself to American country fans. River House released “Golden Child” to country radio through PlayMPE on Aug. 5, with a Sept. 9 add date. The label believed so strongly in the song that it sent it to broadcasters even before it went to digital service providers, marketing the Comma Chameleon entry with an exclamation mark.
“We did send it out for some testing to a few trusted friends and stuff at radio, and the response was really positive,” Patrick says. “But I have known and felt like this needed to be the single ever since I wrote it.”
The primary question around Texas country singer Randall King for the last several years has not been if will he break through on a national stage, but when? The answer could well be 2024, as Warner Music Nashville releases a single to country radio. “I Could Be That Rain” has a classic sound that draws from his ‘90s-country influences, and a weather-beaten lyric that rings true to his Amarillo roots.
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“I just flat out love storms, man, being from West Texas, how open it is, how flat,” he says. “They say you can watch a dog run off for three days out there. And you can watch the thunderheads just rolling in, and it’s beautiful.”
The emotions in “I Could Be That Rain” aren’t nearly as beautiful, though, as they are twisted. The protagonist finds himself shut out by his ex, with no chance to get close to her again. If only he could take the place of a rain shower, he could manage to touch her once more. Morphing into a downpour might be a little sci-fi for country, but the broken heart behind it grounds the story.
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“It’s just so real,” King says. “That’s what country music should be.”
Songwriter Mason Thornley developed the title and concept circa 2021 when he heard Brit-pop artist Labrinth’s 2014 ballad “Jealous” on Spotify. That song goes through a list of people and natural elements that may be sharing space with an ex, leaving the singer frustrated that his love interest is moving on when he cannot.
Thornley focused specifically on the rain in the opening image of “Jealous,” believing that that smaller concept could be built into something much larger. “I always thought that was a whole country song in itself,” he says.
Thornley developed the chorus hook and opening line, “Wish I could be that rain,” and wrote the front half of the chorus, personifying a downpour. As raindrops, he fantasized, he could touch his ex’s skin or sing her a song through the rhythm of raindrops on a tin roof.
He pitched the idea in several writing appointments, but didn’t get any traction. Finally, he got a good reception for his rain song during a writing appointment at the office of his publisher, the aptly named Deluge Music. Artist-writer Brian Fuller, one of Thornley’s frequent writing partners, thought humanizing the rain was a bit of an outlier concept, but he saw that as a positive.
“The wackier or weirder the idea, the more interesting it is to me,” Fuller says. “I like being able to chase hooks like that and just see [what happens]. Sometimes they turn out great. Sometimes they don’t turn out at all. But I really loved it. I mean, it wasn’t anything that I hesitated on at all.”
They finished the back half of the chorus – the first line in that exercise, “Wish I could move some clouds into your sunshine,” might be the song’s best – then moved to the first verse, pitched significantly lower to create some drama in the chorus.
“I like to write those big, overarching choruses a lot of times, if you got a singer in the room who can do it,” Thornley says. “Brian’s got a great voice, and it’s not a problem for him to go up and hit those notes.”Going low in the verse allowed for introspection. For that first stanza, they used a July shower to make the protagonist nostalgic, recalling the romantic moments the couple experienced in the rain. For the second verse, the singer contemplates how, if he had morphed into rain, he could affect her in ways he could not as a human.
“It’s not that I’m going to text her, or I’m going to go try to see where she’s at, if she’s at a bar that we used to hang out at, or she’s with her friends,” Fuller says. “I’m not going to drive by her house and see if she’s home. If there’d be a unique way to do this, if there’d be a way that I could get back to her and make her think about me, I know that the rain would be the way to do it.”
They didn’t cut a demo immediately, but when Thornley was on vacation months later, Fuller discovered that Parker McCollum was considering outside songs for a project. “I Could Be That Rain” seemed like a potential match to Fuller, so he asked Thornley if they could finish the demo. Thornley worked on it during his downtime, and when he got back to Nashville, Fuller put a vocal on it.
“Rain” didn’t land with McCollum, so Fuller recorded his own version with producer Joey Hyde. When Durango artist manager Scott Gunter was shopping for a producer for developing vocalist Jake Jacobson, Hyde sent that recording among several others to demonstrate his skills. Gunter listened steadily to “Rain” for weeks before he realized that the song might work for King. Indeed, King was instantly attracted to it, though he called Fuller to make sure it was cool.
Once he got a thumbs-up, King and co-producer Jared Conrad recorded it at Nashville’s Soundstage in July 2023, intent on balancing his ‘90s proclivities with 2020s touches. “I wanted it to still be the traditional country sound that I have, but with a little bit of that darker, modern edge,” King says. “I have a Gary Allan/Dierks Bentley influence in me, that’s kind of ‘Smoke Rings in the Dark.’ And that’s what we wanted on this record. I wanted to put some ‘Smoke’ on it.”
The band played it three times at a slightly faster tempo with okay results, but on the fourth go-round, King suggested steel guitarist Justin Schipper take a more prominent role, playing the opening signature lick and handling the instrumental solo.
“Production-wise, we did try to take it a little more sad,” Conrad says. “I mean, just adding a steel guitar to it helps that immediately.”
King also wanted to weave the feel of rain on a tin roof into the sound. Tim Galloway hinted at that with a pulsing rhythm on bouzouki, a tinny-sounding Greek stringed instrument, but King heightened the effect by asking drummer Evan Hutchings to play in tandem with Galloway, tapping the metallic side of the snare.
When King sang the final vocals for the album, Into the Neon, he held “Rain” back until the end, fearful that its range might destroy his voice for the rest of the songs. “This is by far the hardest record I’ve ever sang in my life,” he says. But he handled a couple full run-throughs well, then Conrad changed things up to focus on specific parts of the song.
“We just chopped it up into the sections so I could do all the low verses together and then move into the choruses,” Conrad says. “But I’m assuming he had practiced it a lot, because in the studio, it felt super natural.”
Warner Music Nashville released “Rain” to country radio via PlayMPE on July 10, making it his first single the label has worked nationally to primary stations. King is confident in its potential.
“It’s a song that people can relate to,” he says. “People understand when you’re hurting and missing somebody. You’re hoping that they hurt and miss you, too. That’s as straightforward as it could go.”
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When Randy Travis emerged as a game-changing country icon nearly 40 years ago, he won over the audience by mixing songs of infinite love — including “Forever and Ever, Amen,” “Deeper Than the Holler” and “I Won’t Need You Anymore (Always and Forever)” — with songs that address mortality, such as “Three Wooden Crosses,” “He Walked on Water” and “Before You Kill Us All.” And he blended both love and finality with the pledge of “’til death do us part” in “Forever Together.”
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Russell Dickerson has adhered primarily to the first half of that equation during his career, embracing long and lasting love in his singles “Yours,” “Every Little Thing” and “Home Sweet.” But with his latest release, “Bones,” he manages to combine both grown-up Travis themes: commitment and the end of life.
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“Bones,” he says, is “like ‘Yours’ with a mortgage payment.”
Dickerson suggested “Bones” during his last writing session of 2023, held around Thanksgiving at a wood-paneled studio on his Tennessee property. Co-writers Parker Welling (“Blue Tacoma,” “What’s Your Country Song”), Chase McGill (“Chevrolet,” “Next Thing You Know”) and Chris LaCorte (“23,” “Wind Up Missin’ You”) were down the road with it before anyone mentioned that Maren Morris already had a significant recent hit titled “The Bones.” No one was particularly concerned.
“I felt like we were pretty good,” McGill reflects. “They’re just completely different songs.”
Dickerson started strumming through a guitar progression, and LaCorte came up with a gritty riff that created a rough-cut musical tone for the work. On the lyrical side, they wanted to find different ways to incorporate the title throughout the song, so they developed a list of phrases that contained the word “bones,” including “shaking right down to my bones” and “flesh and bones.”
And as Dickerson kept singing a chorus setup line, “I’ll love ya ’til I’m six feet down in the ground,” they played with numerous payoff lines until McGill finally found the winner: “And the gold on my finger’s wrapped around/ Nothin’ but bones.”
“That was just kind of the — no pun intended — nail in the coffin,” Dickerson deadpans. “It’s like, ‘Holy cow, this is a song here.’”
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The melody for that chorus started at an anthemic level and maintained power through the bulk of the stanza until it reached its conclusion with calm serenity. As a result, that chorus sonically mirrors the story of the relationship it covers: intense at the start and steady over time until death brings it to a close. “We didn’t intentionally do that, but I think there’s a feeling about that song that we kind of just followed,” Welling suggests. “I think that’s why it all matches up.”
Welling has been friends with Dickerson and his wife, Kailey, since all of them attended Belmont University, and she spun specific descriptors about Kailey and the couple’s relationship for the opening moments. That verse ended with the singer “shaking right down to my bones” as he proposes. The second verse finds him putting the woman on a figurative pedestal, comparing her to an angel while grading himself as “just flesh and bones.”
“It’s like, ‘Thank you for choosing me,’” Dickerson says.
They inserted new lyrics in the final chorus to drive the point of “Bones” home, folding part of a wedding vow into a line LaCorte suggested about carving a pledge into his tombstone, a word the group changed to “headstone.” The image emerged earlier in the writing process, but they saved the drama of that visual for the song’s closing moments.
“We thought the headstone line in ‘Bones’ would have been a lot to have at the halfway point of [an earlier] chorus and then land on the ‘gold on my finger wrapped around nothing but bones,’ ” Welling says. “That’s just a lot of, like, casket.”
It was stark, but no more so than the deathly stories in Travis’ songs, George Jones’ “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” Vern Gosdin’s “Chiseled in Stone” or The Carter Family’s “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” “What I love about country is you can go there,” McGill says. “You can say that.”
LaCorte produced most of the demo that day, creating the intro by layering two different acoustic guitars, one playing a pulsing figure and the other building melodic tension with the foundational minor-key riff. It was a little raw, as LaCorte recorded the part in an uncomfortable position. “It was recorded so haphazardly,” he says. “I had an SM7 microphone, but it was just lying on a table, and I was trying to scoot up next to it to play this thing.”
Dickerson rerecorded the demo vocals within a few weeks to ensure he had a version that showcased well for his team, and he recorded the final version in the spring. Producer Josh Kerr (Maddie & Tae, For King & Country) asked LaCorte to co-produce with him and Dickerson, and insisted that they use LaCorte’s imperfect acoustic guitar parts from the demo. The session came together so quickly that the night before, they were uncertain where that would happen. Ultimately, they booked Peter Frampton’s Studio Phenix for a 6 p.m. date with drummer Evan Hutchings, bassist Tony Lucido, keyboardist Alex Wright and guitarist Nathan Keeterle. After one pass that featured some syncopation, Dickerson asked the band to play the rhythms straight, like an elephant stomping through the jungle. It needed to sound simple and determined, even if it was compiled from different sources.
“A lot of the track is Chris and the bones of the demo — pun intended — and then some other layers,” Kerr says. “I added some drum programming in the second verse and some new synth layers, so it’s a true hodgepodge of things going on in this song.”
Several elements provided a ghostly effect, including a windy sound in the opening section. “That’s my old Moog Model D synthesizer, and it has this one mode on it that’s just called ‘Noise,’ ” LaCorte says. “Sometimes it just adds kind of a cool texture in the background, [but] it’s more felt than heard.”
LaCorte’s Dobro solo from the demo stayed in the master, though Kerr had him double it with electric guitar to create a quasi-slide tonality. Dickerson purposely sang parts of “Bones” a little off-kilter. The phrasing in the opening verse is intentionally awkward, and in the final chorus, he sings two lead vocals for a brief period that lend their own haunting quality, as the voices engage in a short-term battle.
“It’s gritty, it’s crisp, there’s a lot of depth and dynamic to it,” Kerr says of Dickerson’s performance. “That’s something that we really made a point of doing in this song.” Kailey was so enamored with “Bones” that she stayed out late one night just driving and listening to the cut. “If she digs it,” Dickerson says, “then that’s a good sign.”
But not everyone at Triple Tigers thought it should be a single. Several alternative titles were thrown around, though Dickerson held out for “Bones.” The label released it to country radio via PlayMPE on July 15.
“It’s a little jarring at first,” he concedes, “but once you really settle into the song, that kind of fades away. I had to fight for this song to be the single, but I’m betting everything on this song.”
Jordan Davis has built quite the reputation as a modern-day storyteller, winning the Country Music Association’s song of the year award in 2022 with “Buy Dirt,” claiming the Academy of Country Music’s song trophy this year for “Next Thing You Know” and climbing to No. 1 on Billboard‘s Country Airplay chart in May with “Tucson Too Late.”
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Moving at a ballad or midtempo pace, all three explore a life lesson or personal crossroad. But his latest release, “I Ain’t Sayin’,” takes a different attitude, mirroring the barroom setting of his 2017 debut, “Singles You Up,” with a steady dance texture similar to Morgan Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time.”
“It’s been a minute since we’ve released this kind of song,” Davis says. “I feel like I’ve been long overdue for it.”
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“I Ain’t Sayin’” was tailor made for Davis, fashioned May 25 on the final day of a writing retreat in snowy Livingston, Mont. While Davis wrote that morning with several other creatives in a rented cabin, Travis Wood (“Girl in Mine,” “’98 Braves”), Mark Holman (“Flower Shops,” “Don’t Think Jesus”) and Steve Moakler worked in a separate building, determined to craft something a little more speedy for Davis. Holman had created a few musical tracks prior to the trip, and one of them, built around some hand claps and a buzzy acoustic guitar, energized the room.
“It might just be like little guitar parts and a little loop or something behind it just to kind of catch a vibe,” Holman says. “It’s not a full thing. It’s just enough to be like, ‘Oh, we like this. We like the feeling of this.’ ”Wood had a ready-made chorus that he had penned with Los Angeles-based songwriter Emily Reid, with whom he frequently writes “starts” — small chunks of potential songs that can serve as a foundation during a full writing session. He reached out to her to make sure she was OK with this one getting used on this trip.
“I’m in L.A., they’re in Montana, and I got the FaceTime from him,” Reid remembers. “He was like, ‘Hey, we’re writing this “I Ain’t Sayin’” idea. It’s really going well. Can you just make sure this first verse makes sense?’ Because sometimes when you’re in the thick of it, it’s hard to have perspective. And I was like, ‘Damn, sounds brilliant.’ ”
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Reid’s original idea wasn’t actually the title. It was the phrase “He sure as hell ain’t,” which became the payoff line at the end of the chorus that she and Wood started. They weren’t entirely certain what the plot should be, though it fit a scenario involving a mismatched couple. As they built it, they used the phrase “I ain’t sayin’ ” as a repetitive lyrical device in a loaded chorus.
“When we were punching out that phrasing, we wanted to do something that felt really fresh,” Reid notes. “We wanted to make it really rhythmic and get a lot in there.”
When they came up with one particular line, “I’m here and he’s MIA,” they felt it had a lot of potential, though once they finished writing it, Reid put it out of her mind. Thus, the call from Wood was a welcome surprise.
As it started taking shape in Montana, Wood, Moakler and Holman unlocked the opening verse, depicting a woman who had bought a beer for a date who seems to have stiffed her. The protagonist presents himself as a short-term alternative, though the writers knew instinctively that he couldn’t be too pushy.
“We could have gone to further extremes with the guy and the girl,” Moakler says, “but we ended up choosing [to] walk the line, I think, in a cool way where he’s not overtly trying to steal the girl. He sees his opportunity, and he seems like a relatable guy, you know. That was the job of the day.”
As the protagonist moves in during the second verse, he attempts to reframe the woman’s bad moment with a bit of hope: “He let you down, but here’s the upside” — using a word, “upside,” in a way that’s rarely heard in a country song.
“It’s a little different,” Holman acknowledges, “which is always good.”
They saved the most elaborate lyrical twist for the end of that second verse, guaranteeing that that stanza could meet — if not exceed — the quality established in verse one.
“ ‘I ain’t trying to change that miss to a missus/But he don’t know what he’s missing’ — I just love that wordplay, Wood says. “It perfectly paraphrases the ‘I ain’t sayin’ I’m the one, I’m just saying he ain’t.’ I mean, you couldn’t find a cooler way to paraphrase that.”
They debated “He Sure As Hell Ain’t” as the title, but settled on “I Ain’t Sayin’,” avoiding a slightly profane word in favor of the song’s most frequently heard phrase.
“I think we picked the right one,” Moakler says. “I haven’t heard a song called that. The only hang-up with the song is, people say, ‘What’s it called?’ And you say, ‘I Ain’t Sayin.’ ’ And they say, ‘Wait, why won’t you tell me?’” Holman quickly whipped a demo together, and Wood went back to his cabin, where Davis’ small group was still writing in a different room. When that team finished, Wood had writer-producer Paul DiGiovanni (Travis Denning, Justin Moore) play the demo, which seemed to connect with Davis.
“Jordan was pretty effusive about it, but I didn’t know if he was just being polite,” Wood says. “When we hit that miss/misses line, he turned around and looked at me after that line. So I was like, ‘I think he likes it.’”
Indeed, the next week, Davis, DiGiovanni and a studio band tackled “I Ain’t Sayin’ ” at Sound Stage in Nashville with drummer Nir Z sharing duties 50/50 with the programmed percussion. “The loop thing was going basically throughout the whole song, so I needed to just go to another level on the master and just keep the energy going,” DiGiovanni says. “The demo was just like the verse feel the whole time, and I just kind of kicked it over the top.”
But the enhancements were comparatively incremental. “We never made a lyric change, we never made a melody change,” Davis says. “We dropped the key a half step from the original demo, maybe we bumped the [beats per minute] down a couple. But other than that, it was basically taking Mark’s demo and letting Paul kind of pepper in his touch on it.”
While the tracking band established most of the rhythm and textural sounds, DiGiovanni did add some color during overdubs, including a Spanish-flavored guitar in the background, steel-sounding guitar parts and a Southern rock-like twin guitar break.
“It didn’t need a shreddy, really crazy guitar solo by any means,” he says. “There’s so much melodic stuff happening in the song, so I just tried to do something that was kind of familiar. I think I sat down and put my track on loop and played like five or six different kinds of melody things, and that one just stuck out.”Davis tends to inject downward-sliding grace notes into his vocal performances, and though the writers didn’t specifically put that into “I Ain’t Sayin’,” it adapted well to his approach.
“That chorus melody, I was kind of like, ‘Wait a second, you’re sure I didn’t write this?’ ” he notes. “It just felt like something that I would write and something that I would say.”
MCA Nashville released “I Ain’t Sayin’ ” to country radio via PlayMPE on July 24, and it’s at No. 52 in its beginning stages on the Country Airplay chart dated Aug. 17.
“It’s something that I think people want,” Davis says of its breezy, summer-ish sound. “It feels like it’s the right release right now.”
Language, like music or fashion, evolves — and as a result, the use of some words or phrases makes it look like the speaker has not.
“Groovy,” “makin’ whoopee” and “the cat’s meow” had their day, and even earlier, so did “Heavens to Betsy,” an exclamation associated with older Southern ladies that seems more appropriate for the Roaring ‘20s than the 2020s. Etymologists don’t know for certain who Betsy is or when she first arrived in the lexicon, though the phrase has been traced back to the 19th century. Thus, word nerds can be forgiven if they’re skeptical of Jackson Dean’s new single, “Heavens to Betsy,” which sounds dated to anyone familiar with the title.
But the phrase is also old enough that many listeners may not have heard it before; Dean had not when the title first came up in a March 2021 songwriting session. “That line has never been used around me growing up or anything,” Dean notes. “I took it very literally.”
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“Heavens to Betsy” came up during a March 2021 songwriting session with Benjy Davis (“The Painter,” “Made for You”) and Driver Williams (“Smoke a Little Smoke,” “Hang Tight Honey”) at Little Louder Music in Nashville. Williams floated the “Heavens to Betsy” title, assuming they could give it a classic sort of twist.
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“My original thought was more country and lighter,” Williams recalls. “In subject matter, it was more like, you know, this girl named Betsy doesn’t need all the finer things in life. She just needs a home and a good man. That’d be Heaven to Betsy.”
That only worked, though, if they could shave the “s” off “Heavens,” but without that one letter, it no longer referenced the original phrase. Dean’s literal interpretation took it in a different direction – he pictured a father in Heaven communicating with his daughter, Betsy, via walkie-talkie or C.B. radio. They all found that idea intriguing.
“It had to be dark,” Williams says, “because whoever was in Heaven, you know, he’s obviously dead. And it’s just like, ‘Man, how dark can we get with this?’ And we went really dark with it.”
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The title became the opening line. Davis started strumming a guitar as the father reveals just enough in the first verse to let a first-time listener know the protagonist is communicating to someone about a drinking problem that “put you through hell.” That brooding stanza then opened into a brighter-sounding chorus that fully reveals the man is reaching out from the afterlife.
“I feel like the verses are the apology,” Davis says. “The chorus is sort of like the redemption, trying to make good on it.”
Verse 2 gave even more character clues, recalling a memory of Betsy when she was “knee high to a stump” – another dated phrase that was new, this time, to Davis. He injected a line about pink rain boots that made that verse even more vivid while drawing on his own past.
“I lived next to a family with some kids, and one day, the dad’s truck stopped showing up,” Davis remembers. “Over time, it became obvious that they were having some sort of issues. But [pink rain boots], that’s a really, really specific image. But that’s kind of what I had.”
Dean related to father abandonment from his own experience. “Both of my best friends growing up slept on my couch for probably two years, on and off,” he says. “I remember Dylan’s dad never being in the picture until we were 16, 17 years old, so I had that little bit of connection with it. And I’ve seen so many situations like that.”
“Heavens To Betsy” came together quickly, though it took longer for the sound to fully evolve. They cut a guitar/vocal work tape that day. Dean would later bring the song to Boy Named Banjo banjoist Barton Davis, who brought a bluegrass undercurrent to it. Dean later worked it up again with his band, who gave it an edgier sound that Williams compares to Kings of Leon.
Dean’s performance of “Betsy” on the 2023 album Live at the Ryman received play on SiriusXM’s The Highway and emerged as a fan favorite. Thus, as Dean went to work on his next album – On the Back of My Dreams, due Sept. 6 – Big Machine Label Group president/CEO Scott Borchetta suggested he record a studio version. Producer Luke Dick (Miranda Lambert, Little Big Town) assembled a group of session players to re-cut it last fall at Nashville’s Blackbird Studios, intent on keeping the same slow-building spirit as the Ryman release.
“I had worked loosely with Jack on the live record,” Dick says. “I was familiar with the arrangement, and when they said they wanted to record it, I felt like the arrangement had an energy to it that I didn’t want to stray too far from or rethink what should be or shouldn’t be. It already had movement to it that I liked.”
After attempting it first with a metronome-like click track, they dropped that crutch and let drummer Fred Eltringham carve out the rhythm and pace in conjunction with Dean’s vocals. The track gets just a hair faster as it evolves, reflecting the intensity as Dean and the musicians worked together.
“I love when Jack is in a booth with a song that he has played a lot, a song that he knows in his bones,” Dick says. “That allows him to emote on the day and to communicate with the band without speaking. That’s what I feel like was the most compelling thing about recording that song is Jack being able to get his visceral energy into the song. It’s what you’re shooting for as a producer.”
The end product splices parts of that recording with previous versions. Studio guitarist Rob McNelley’s slide guitar solo was melded with a solo previously played by Dean’s road guitarist, Brandon Aksteter. Dean recorded his final vocal this spring, emphasizing the distinctions between the verses’ heavy mystery and the chorus’ hopeful promise.
“I wanted the changes to be not only noticed, but drastically felt,” he says. “You get to right after the first chorus and you get to the hold, and then you drop right into the second [verse], it’s a completely different dynamic change. And then you get to the build, I mean, all those changes are physically moving you.”
Big Machine released “Heavens To Betsy” to country radio via PlayMPE on Aug. 2 with an Aug. 19 add date, with high expectations. Dean had it edited for broadcasters, snipping a reflective ending so that it ends cold on an ascendant high note. It’s a sonic cliffhanger, mirroring the dramatic uncertainty in the “Betsy” plot. It’s a twist that, unlike fashion or language, rarely grows old.
“Every PD in the country that I’ve ever been in contact with has heard that song and knows it and has asked me about it,” Dean says. “It kind of seems like a no-brainer: Just give them what they want and see what this does for the people.”
From the first five rows at a concert, the life of a touring artist looks pretty glamorous – singing songs for an adoring audience and (maybe) for big bucks.
But plenty of performers insist that they play the show for free, and the pay is for the long hours stuck in a metal tube travelling down a lonely highway. That’s particularly true for artists who have a spouse and family waiting for them.
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“I think the longest run we ever did was 67 days or something without coming home,” Old Dominion frontman Matthew Ramsey says. “It was brutal. I mean, those were the days where we were like, ‘I don’t even know where we are or care where we are.’
“We actually got to a random moment where we got to fly home for 24 hours. And we went home and then I learned, for me and for my kids and everybody, that was actually almost worse. Like, when you’re gonna go, go; and when you’re gonna be home, be home.”
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Of course, for country artists who live in Nashville, being home usually means there’s other work to do. Like recording new music. And beginning April 30, Old Dominion took over Sound Emporium to work on a single. They had one song they were prepared to cut, but they also had enough extra time booked to try and write something new. Writing in the studio had previously yielded “Make It Sweet” as well as the entire 2021 album Time, Tequila & Therapy. Hanging out in the Sound Emporium lounge, producer Shane McAnally (Carly Pearce, Sam Hunt) brought up a title he associated with returning home after a long absence. McAnally had read a book about the Vietnam War, and with each chapter, he imagined a soldier getting back from the front line.
“My favorite thing to watch online is people coming home from the service,” he says.
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He had a three-word title, “War” – “I thought that was intriguing,” McAnally recalls – and he had the payoff, “Love you like I’m coming home from war.” “It was just a line,” McAnally says. “I had no clue what to do with it.”
The hook got a slight revision, “Kiss you like I’m coming home from war,” and Old Dominion’s Trevor Rosen started cycling through potential chord progressions. Once they settled on a path, they brought in the rest of the band – guitarist Brad Tursi, bassist Geoff Sprung and drummer Whit Sellers – to knock it out en masse.
They focused first on the chorus, slipping in a line about a “Midnight Rider” that kind of celebrates The Allman Brothers Band, even if it isn’t really about them. “They were road dogs like we are,” Ramsey says. “We have that connection.”
A couple lines later, they promised an intense return when Rosen sang “Katie, bar the door,” a phrase that proved surprisingly unfamiliar to part of the group. “Half the people in the room didn’t even know what that saying was,” Ramsey recalls. “I did, I think Shane did, I think maybe Whit did. But then Brad was like, ‘I don’t know what that means. But I don’t care. It’s cool.’”
They finished writing it in about 45 minutes, then moved into the studio to record it. Tursi established a jangly opening guitar riff, and McAnally made sure it didn’t get lost.
“As a group, they’re ADHD,” McAnally says. “If you put all those personalities together, it’s like, ‘Oh, what about this?’ ‘What about this?’ And no one’s ever going, ‘That’s great.’ With Brad especially, everything he starts to play sounds so cool. But he played that lick, and it described everything perfectly through a guitar lick. I knew what the song was. I think that was the extent of my – quote – ‘production.’ It’s was just going, ‘Do not change that.’”
Old Dominion made several musical choices that reflected the song’s lyrics. Chief among them was the decision to lean toward a ragged, high-energy sound rather than precision. “That is a constant discussion amongst us in this band, as to how slick do we want to be?” Ramsey says. “And how much do we just want to be a band?”
But the text also created a dilemma in the song’s rhythmic build-up. Sellers started with a light, steady beat that grew more intense. By the end of the track, he bashed the snare with a wild exuberance, but the guys disagreed on where to make that transition. One notion was to hit the crash-and-burn motif at the first chorus, 42 seconds in. But anyone who’s gone home knows the emotion gets stronger as the destination approaches; maxing out early would destroy that effect. Ultimately, they waited until the second chorus – past the song’s halfway point – for Sellers to hit full rock-‘em-sock-‘em mode.
“Sometimes,” Ramsey says, “you have to have that discussion of, ‘OK, it feels really good, but is it serving the message of the song as best as possible? Are we paying attention to the lyric, rather than just going in there?’ Because we love slamming and rocking the hell out of it.”
To help ramp up more gradually, Sellers and Ramsey recorded hand claps that arrive during the first chorus.
“We have funny video footage of the two of us around this mic,” Ramsey says, “and as we’re doing it, the mic stand starts to droop and stuff. It’s slowly just lowering down, and he and I are both clapping, but we’re slowly squatting to match the level of the microphone.”
Tursi also added a gurgling six-string banjo part at the start of the second verse that helps lift toward that all-out energy. One additional percussive nuance came when McAnally floated the idea of dropping militaristic snare rolls after the “coming home from war” hook. Sellers took the cue, making them apparent, but not too obvious.
“I very much took the chance of being laughed out of the room, because it’s so on the nose,” McAnally recalls. “Whit did it right then, way better than I heard it. He made it subtle – it doesn’t hit you over the head – but when you’ve listened to a few times, you’re like, ‘Oh, that does kind of put me in a place of being at an Army base.’”
One other major decision came with the instrumental solo. A harmonica seemed to fit the ragged goal, but they weren’t initially sure who to hire. Ramsey, who used to play harmonica during his pre-Old Dominion days in Virginia, volunteered, providing an earthy Bob Dylan/Bruce Springsteen dimension to the track on his second take.
“It’s not like I’m a virtuoso,” he says with a laugh. “I was like, ‘Just let me give it a shot.’ I went in, and I played it, and then I could hear everybody in the control room going, ‘What the fuck was that, man? We’ve known you for 25 years, and you’ve never told us that you could do that.’”
Old Dominion and the team agreed that “War” was a better choice for a single than the other song they cut, but there was some pushback on the title. Provocative as the word was, it didn’t represent what was happening in the song. They ultimately settled on “Coming Home,” and Columbia Nashville released it to country radio via PlayMPE on June 27. It rests at No. 47 on the Country Airplay chart dated July 27.
“It’s a full-band effort, and we’re trying new things, harmonicas and all that stuff,” Ramsey says. “We feel like we’re known for bringing some joy, and happiness, and light and levity, and coming off of ‘Can’t Break Up Now,’ it just felt like, ‘Gosh, we got to pick things up.’”
When Elisabeth Kübler-Ross introduced the five stages of grief in 1969, she provided an understanding of the complex reactions people use as coping mechanisms for severe loss.
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The five stages — denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance — don’t always occur exclusively, or even in order, and though they were originally identified to assist people struggling with death, they also apply to other significant experiences, such as the loss of a job, a theft or the breakup of a relationship. That lattermost situation is the source of grief in Drew Parker’s “Love the Leavin’,” featuring a desperate singer in the bargaining stage, attempting to negotiate his way out of a broken heart.
“It is definitely exactly where it lives,” Parker says.
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He created “Love the Leavin’” in February during a co-write with Matt Rogers (“ ’Til You Can’t,” “Freedom Was a Highway”) at the Middle Tennessee home of Lindsay Rimes (“World on Fire,” “Cool Again”). Parker had finished recording his debut album — Camouflage Cowboy, released July 12 — so it was a low-pressure appointment. He brought up the title, written in his notes as “Love the Leavin’ (Out of You),” initially believing it should be witty and uptempo, an “I hate to see you go, love to watch you leave kind of thing,” Parker says.
Rimes explored a series of musical foundations, allowing them to weed out options that didn’t work or seemed too cliché.
“Lindsay is such a mad scientist,” Rogers says. “He’ll go from a song being 130 [beats per minute] to a waltz to four-on-the-floor, and then all of a sudden, we settled into that 6/8 ballad thing. It just came out, and Drew starts singing what we’re writing. He has such a massively powerful voice that it just felt very natural.”
As the song morphed into a ballad, Parker moved to an upright piano, an instrument that inspires a different set of melodies for him than his usual guitar. In the process, they fashioned a chord progression that consists of as many minor seventh chords as it does more standard major triads. “I don’t know that I’ve ever really put two minor chords butted up to each other in a chord progression,” Parker says, “but for some reason, it worked really, really well in the song.”
They wrote “Love the Leavin’ ” in linear fashion, starting with the first line as the protagonist offers reasons for his partner to stay instead of going home. It’s raining, it’s late — his pleading echoes that of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.”
The chorus raised the energy, firmly punctuating the stanza’s opening lines with higher melodies and stabbing phrases. It relied heavily on blue notes that cry out — much like the protagonist — for resolution. “It almost comes off like blues,” Rogers says. “It doesn’t sound like country.”
In verse two, it’s clear that a flicker remains, and Parker suggests they “pour gas” on their emotions, creating a bonfire that would last at least for the night. That sentiment was underscored again in a short, two-line bridge that repurposes phrases from separate sections: The first line in the bridge uses the melody from line three of the chorus, while the bridge’s closing line matches the melody from the end of the verses.
“We could have gone to a different chord,” Rimes says, “but there’s already enough crafty chords in the song.”
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Rimes produced the demo around an acoustic piano, with spare drums and bass parts, designed to frame the vocal without drowning it. Parker responded with a lead performance that captured all of the song’s Kübler-Ross grief. “Drew sang his ass off,” Rimes says. “Honestly, it felt like we could put the demo out.”
Rimes finished that demo the same day, and the writers all texted each other enthusiastically, believing they’d built something special. That was confirmed by their publishers. “You always know a song is a successful song when you get bombarded by the entire team,” Rogers says. “And all of us, instantly when we submitted the song, it was just like bombs going off on our phone.”
The publishers weren’t the only ones who liked it. In short order, Morgan Wallen, Luke Combs and Nate Smith all asked if they could place it on hold. The writers felt even more strongly about “Love the Leavin’ ” and its future potential. But Warner Music Nashville (WMN) co-chair/co-president Cris Lacy required a change of plans.
“A couple days later, I went and played it for my label, and Cris Lacy was like, ‘Why are you not cutting this?’ ” Parker recalls. “I was like, ‘Well, my record’s done.’ She was like, ‘Your record is not done. You have to cut this.’ ”
The label gave Parker an extremely tight deadline so it could release it as a single ahead of the album. Producer Jacob Rice (Conner Smith, Chase Daniel) booked session musicians for the Curb 43 studios in April, but he didn’t wait for the band’s participation to get Parker’s vocal.
“We actually started tracking the vocals before we cut the band,” Rice says. “We used the demo track that Lindsay created to start cutting vocals to get ahead, because the turnaround time that we were given was so short we had to get this thing done quickly.”
Parker was challenged, especially because the most difficult moment in the production occurred when his voice was most exposed.
“I think we cut it in C sharp; that is extremely high for me,” Parker says. “It was the hardest vocal I’ve ever cut, and I sang it over and over and over and over and over, mainly for that last chorus part where the band kind of cuts out. It gets that gravel in there, and my voice cracks. It’s breaking — it almost sounds like I’m crying. I wanted that. And so to get that I had to cut the song in a key that I normally wouldn’t sing in.”
Rice recorded several different songs during the instrumental tracking session, primarily using musicians who were best suited for “Love the Leavin’.” They were careful not to overplay, leaving plenty of space for Parker’s performance to shine. Sol Philcox-Littlefield overdubbed a blues-rock guitar solo, and Parker insisted on a steel guitarist, Eddie Dunlap, to heighten the song’s country quotient. Rice also snuck a prog-rock mellotron into the mix on the second and third choruses.
“The Beatles made it popular [primarily through “Strawberry Fields Forever”], and I’m a huge fan of classic rock,” Rice says. “We didn’t make it super apparent in the mix. It’s more of a supporting thing than anything. But I love using those types of things because it kind of makes it older-sounding but in a cool, fresh way.”
WMN released “Love the Leavin’ ” to country radio through PlayMPE on June 24, banking on Parker’s emotional performance and the band’s strategic playing to help the label bargain with stations.
“Everybody that is close to me, I’ve heard many of them say, ‘It sounds like I’ve heard it before,’ ” Parker says. “It does feel that way, which I think gives it that little classic edge.”
In the closing moments of Mitchell Tenpenny’s “Not Today” video, the singer is strapped into an electric chair, waiting for the lightning bolt that ends his existence.
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The mini-film is dark, frenetic and a bit chilling. That mirrors Tenpenny’s experience on the set.
“We finally sit down in the chair to film that, and I had to act like I’m getting electrocuted,” he remembers. “I don’t even know the word for it. It was wild. It was emotional.”
The video draws in part from the movie The Green Mile, while the song itself is a bit of a remake, too. Tenpenny recorded a ballad called “Just Not Today” for a 2014 album, Black Crow, released prior to his affiliation with Riser House and Columbia Nashville. It’s not a shock to discover the original idea came from a college-era breakup that led to a year of hard emotions. The whole premise of “Just Not Today” was to accept those feelings in the moment, fully expecting a positive change would arrive at a later date.
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“I always loved the idea of owning the hurt,” he says. “I’m going to move on. I’m going to figure it out. But not today. Today, I’m going to wear this for a little bit.”
Tenpenny revisited the idea in May 2023 during a writing session at the home of songwriter-producer Chris DeStefano (Chris Young, Chase Rice) with Claire Douglas and Michael Whitworth. And since Tenpenny wrote the original song on his own, he underscored to his co-writers that they need not worry about copyright issues.
“I’m not going to sue myself,” he says with a laugh.
Tenpenny and DeStefano started playing guitars at a brisk tempo, establishing a very different attitude from the original, and Tenpenny sang the opening lines, setting up the premise that everyone handles pain their own way. “Not Today” grew in intensity during the pre-chorus, introducing a specific method of addressing the hurt: “I’ma sit my ass in the back of church.”
“That line tickles me to my core,” Douglas says. “I mean, that is Mitchell. It’s both reverent and irreverent at the same time.”
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At the chorus, the melody jumped to a higher level as the singer vows to forget his ex, hammering the same note seven straight times as they unlocked the song’s singalong power. “It initially gets the listener — at least it does for me — instant singability,” Whitworth says. “You can catch on because it’s a very simple melody, but it’s anthemic and passionate, so that it just immediately grabs you.”
If the chorus’ first line solidified the musical tone of “Not Today,” the next one cinched the storyline. Tenpenny tossed in three ways to erase a memory: “a bottle, a Bible or a mistake,” the latter representing a one-night stand or a rebound relationship. Verse two brought those methods all together on a common bar stool. The protagonist orders a drink, sends up a prayer and scours the club for a potential partner — literally employing the bottle, the Bible and the mistake in a single moment. “That second verse felt kind of like the stars lined up,” Douglas says.
To finish writing, they kicked in a bridge, reusing the pre-chorus and slipping the “ass in the back of church” line in a second time. By re-singing lyrics from an earlier part of the song, it offered the listener familiarity, though they also freshened the section three different ways: They broke into a halftime tempo, Tenpenny took some melodic liberties, and the underlying chords got a slight, ascendant revision.
“What makes it cool to me is the music changes, and it does this sort of building, like a walk up,” Whitworth says. “It’s kind of this triumphant sort of approach to it instead of just the chord progression on the verse.”
DeStefano produced the demo, applying an aggressive drum part and encouraging Tenpenny not to hold back. “I approach demo vocals like I approach record vocals,” DeStefano says. “There’s literally nothing different that I would do. It’s exactly the same. This particular day, you know, we just caught the lightning.”
The writers were ecstatic about the results. Douglas took photos and videos to document the occasion — not a usual part of her writing experience — and they all hit DeStefano’s billiard room for a round of tequila, almost as if they were sharing a winning locker room. “We all did a shot,” he says. “And we’re like, ‘This feels so good, guys.’ This was a magical day. Everybody just brought their A game. It was like, ‘This is NHL right here.’ It felt pretty good.”
Douglas, to be clear, abstained from the tequila. The others repeatedly coaxed her, but she held firm and didn’t tell them why for several weeks. “I was very, very newly expecting my first baby,” she says. “We weren’t telling people, and I was literally sick as a dog.”
DeStefano’s first demo got the crew excited — Douglas texted, “GET THIS ON THE RADIO,” when she heard it later that same day — but in the ensuing months, he cut two more demos around Tenpenny’s vocals. With the third version, he reduced a danceable vibe and made it a tad more country.
Producer Jordan M. Schmidt (Tyler Hubbard, Cole Swindell) knew they couldn’t beat Tenpenny’s demo vocal, so he got those wave files from DeStefano and had a studio crew record new tracks around them at Blackbird Studio. Drummer Nir Z took the percussion even further than the demo, relentlessly bashing a snare with a modern-rock ferocity. “He had a blast doing it, but by the end, he was like, ‘I can’t do another take,’ ” Schmidt recalls. “He was just exhausted.”
The players heightened the dynamics, particularly at the halftime bridge, which contrasts with an intense final chorus. Johnny Fung gave it a guitar solo that created some extra hooks. “He’s got a very melodic way of playing guitar,” Schmidt says. “It’s not about just shredding for him. It’s about creating moments and parts. You know, I love when guitar players can turn down the ego and just decide, ‘Hey, I want to make a guitar solo that people can sing along to.’ ”
Columbia released the death row “Not Today” video on May 9, and the electric chair was used as a prop for fans to take Tenpenny-themed selfies when the label set up its Camp Sony attraction at Acme Feed & Seed during CMA Fest in June. On June 11, the single was released to country radio via PlayMPE, and it’s targeting adds on July 15. The song may be about coping with the loss of a relationship, but Tenpenny believes it applies to numerous life issues.
“We all have one thing in common,” he says. “We should acknowledge the fact that the pain is there. That’s how you begin to heal.”