Makin’ Tracks

Life is psychologically challenging in 2024.
The planet gets hotter by the month, the technology that was supposed to improve lives stalls or breaks down, artificial intelligence poses a threat to future employment and there’s a chance democracy could crumble before the United States turns 250. It’s no wonder that one in six American adults are currently battling depression, according to a 2023 Gallup poll. That figure is even higher among women, minorities and people younger than 45.

It’s almost as if the marketplace had been primed for Jelly Roll. His country singles thus far – “Son of a Sinner,” “Need a Favor,” “Halfway to Hell” and the Lainey Wilson collaboration “Save Me” – have captured souls in battles with darkness. He extends that string with “I Am Not Okay,” released by Stoney Creek to country radio via PlayMPE on June 11.

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It’s “real music for real people with real problems,” Jelly Roll says. “That struggle is something that a lot of my music touches on. It’s something I am honest about with my own life and something that’s for anyone who is going through that.”

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“I Am Not Okay” reflects both real-life anxieties and the audacity of optimism. Songwriters Ashley Gorley (“Bulletproof,” “I Had Some Help”) and Casey Brown (“Blue Tacoma,” “Girl In Mine”) booked flights to meet Jelly Roll and fellow writer Taylor Phillips (“Hurricane,” “World On Fire”) on tour in North Carolina last fall, but a series of airline issues delayed their commute by eight hours and took them to a different airport. They rented a car in Charlotte and drove four more hours.

Despite their frustrations, the group composed two or three songs prior to the Oct. 5 show in Wilmington, a concert that proved particularly inspirational.

“I found myself multiple times during the show kind of looking at the crowd to see the reaction of these people that were soaking in this music,” Phillips remembers. “And as you look amongst this crowd, you see people crying, you see people rejoicing, and you see people putting their hands in the air.”

Later, as the bus rolled out for Greensboro, Phillips told Jelly Roll the concert was like going to church. The singer noted that he was essentially making it “okay for people to not be okay.” That corresponded with a title Gorley had logged in his phone, “I Am Not Okay,” and he sat down at a piano, singing the title as a melody and progression began to unfold. He created a cautiously ascendant bassline, with the piece moving instinctively from darker chords into brighter triads.

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“I started all the phrases with the six-minor chord, but then I always ended up on a major chord,” Gorley says. “Not that I was thinking about that. If I was smart, I’d be like, ‘Oh, I did it on purpose.’ But it just sounded like that.”

Gorley was psyched to explore the topic – he’d gone on the trip hoping they could write something that would bring attention to depression, a topic that’s important to him and to Phillips, who lost a friend, Brian Kindle, to suicide on Christmas Eve in 2020. (Phillips now does an annual benefit in Kindle’s honor). The issue resonates with people in every walk of life.

“Everybody has to go through something,” Phillips says, “whether you have a billion dollars in your bank account, or if you got zero dollars in your bank account.”

The “I Am Not Okay” text emerged in linear fashion, each line building on the previous one. Additionally, the song’s individual sections gave a big-picture view of the protagonist’s battle. He starts in verse one mired in total depression. The chorus acknowledges the issue’s prevalence – “I know I can’t be the only one” – and ultimately settles into a quiet confidence: “I’m not okay/ But it’s all gonna be alright.”

Verse two has the character vacillating between progress and backsliding, confessing that some days he can barely get out of bed.

“I’ve been blessed beyond belief,” Gorley says, relating the message to his own life, “But some days, I’m still like, ‘Oh, shoot, this is gonna be rough.’ You know, I lay there, and everybody in the room feels the same. Anybody around the world feels the same, if we’re honest about it.”

By the time “Not Okay” hits the bridge, the singer envisions an afterlife when the struggle is over. It gives some motivation to keep improving, though it’s unclear if the protagonist will ever crawl out of the emotional hole completely.

“If you put too much of a bow on it, it doesn’t feel like an authentic Jelly song,” Brown says. “There’s a really cool thing that all of his songs do, where it kind of meets you in the middle of hurting, and sits there with you and encourages you in a way that doesn’t feel forced. I think he’s a really unique voice that can kind of approach songs from that way.”

Gorley had to leave early the next morning for a family commitment, so he laid down a piano track and sang a rough vocal for the demo. Brown got Jelly Roll to redo the vocal the next day, but left it in that simple form for producer Zach Crowell (Sam Hunt, Dustin Lynch).

“I didn’t really want to do a ton to it,” Brown says. “It felt like a really special way to present the song and just kind of put it in his camp and let Zach kind of treat it however he wanted to.”

“I Am Not Okay” was the first song recorded for the next album at Saxman Studios, owned by session drummer Grady Saxman. Crowell’s primary goal was to inject more grit into the performance than he heard in the demo. “It had a happier feel, a softer feel,” Crowell says. “When we went to record it, we tried to find a different vibe, just to put it a little more in Jelly Roll land and have a little more of a motion to it.”

Session musician Nathan Keeterle translated the demo’s piano intro on a guitar with a rubber bridge – it sounds a tad like the resonator guitar in the intro of Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain.” Combined with scrape-y, ethereal electric guitar and pedal steel sounds, the track has a mysterious, ominous tone, eventually giving way to a subtle spiritual current created by a string section led by arranger David Davidson, who overdubbed a quartet multiple times.

“It’s probably 100 tracks of strings, just mixed real low,” Crowell says. “I wanted strings on it, just for the emotion of it. But I didn’t want it to get too triumphant and too dramatic.”

During the final vocal session, Jelly Roll tinkered with several small lyrics – “I’m,” “it’s,” “we’re” – at the end of the chorus. As a result, the song takes on a wider meaning as the personal “I’m not okay/But it’s all gonna be alright” becomes more cultural the second time around: “It’s not okay/But we’re all gonna be alright.”

“It felt like the message we wanted to leave people with,” Jelly Roll says. 

His unconventional vocal style – frequently loud and a little raspy at the height of a phrase, trailing off at the end with little diaphragmatic support – was perfect for the song. “It’s not a secret that I am not a classically trained vocalist,” he says. “When I sing, I sing what I feel, what I felt, and I know what it feels like to be in that moment and know what it feels like to have fans tell you what they are going through. I pull from that, and that’s what you hear.”

Stoney Creek had several options for the first single from the next album, but settled on “I Am Not Okay” because of its emotional heft. It currently sits at No. 14 on the Hot Country Songs chart dated July 20, and rises to No. 19 on the corresponding Country Airplay list. Clearly, the world is responding to the much-too-familiar battle with depression that “Not Okay” depicts.

“It’s not a linear path or cure-all, and in the case of addiction, it’s an active choice each moment and still a back and forth,” Jelly Roll says. “In those moments where you’re saying or feeling ‘I am not okay,’ it’s that push and pull of that moment we wanted to capture.”

When Florida Georgia Line decided to go in solo directions, Brian Kelley arguably had the tougher route, simply because of his established role in the duo.
Tyler Hubbard has one of the most identifiable voices in the genre, and he understandably took the lead on all of the pair’s singles, plus most of the album cuts. Those trademark FGL harmonies relied heavily on Kelley’s input, but he found himself in much the same position as Kristian Bush in Sugarland — a familiar face that country fans heard all the time, but rarely by himself.

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So when Kelley turned to producer Dann Huff (Keith Urban, Kane Brown) for assistance with his second solo album, Tennessee Truth, he was fired up by Huff’s appreciation of his tone.

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“From the first meeting, he gave me so much confidence,” Kelley reflects. “He was a fan of my voice, and he was excited to go to work, and when Dan Huff says he’s got it, you’re like, ‘Hell, yeah.’ ”

And Huff really did get it.

“Because he was not the lead singer in the band, I think he really wants to stamp his personality, let people know he can sing,” agrees Huff. “And I always have enjoyed his voice. He’s got a beautiful, kind of almost-Alan Jackson tenor.”

Kelley is set up for success in his latest single, “Acres,” an upbeat release that most certainly stamps his persona. It piles up brands and activities related to one of his favorite getaways — including Mossy Oak clothing and a Chevrolet K5 Blazer — and frames those images with a melody that hammers the sweet spot in his voice. At the end of most lines in the chorus, the next-to-last syllable — “a-cres,” “Bla-zer,” “Ga-tor,” “take her” — repeatedly lands on the same note, one that creates tension within the key signature even as it highlights one of the best sections of his range.

“I think we got it in the groove key for me where it’s easy, in a sense of a vocal,” he says. “But it’s also pushing and it’s got character, and I’m able to utilize my voice to the fullest.”

Kelley wrote “Acres” at his Middle Tennessee home with Adam Sanders (“Ain’t Worth the Whiskey,” “Hell of a Night”) and Will Weatherly (“Good As You,” “Thinking ’Bout You”) on June 15, 2023. 

“I remember just sort of strumming on guitar, the fast chord progression of the intro,” notes Sanders. “I thought that I was just kind of playing around, and Will was like, ‘Hey, that’s really cool, don’t stop’ — and in true Will Weatherly fashion, he just whipped the track out.”

Kelley picked the title “Acres” out of a list on his phone, and he tied it to a piece of land his in-laws own in Georgia. 

“We go there once or twice, sometimes three times a year,” Kelley says. “It’s a place where you can fish, you can hunt, you can chill. We’ve written songs out there, we’ve ridden around; we’ll do night rides, looking for all sorts of stuff. It’s kind of a little bit of a safari vibe, you know, and, man, it’s become a really special place since we got married.”

They started at the chorus, plugging in brand names, with nearly every phrase heading toward the end-of-the-line, melodic sweet spot on the way to the hook: “Put her in the middle of some acres.” The setup line was a bit of a challenge, though Sanders solved the puzzle during a break when he got the line, “My baby loves it when I take her,” along with a staccato melody.

“When I found that it worked at the end of the chorus, in the middle of the chorus and the end of the verse, and placed all three in the same places with the same melody, it somehow became the glue that glues everything together,” says Sanders. “Once we got that, it was kind of like it just wrote itself.”

With that solved, they started working on the verses, where they instinctively altered the sound. The melody shifted to a curvy landscape, and they left more space between the lines.

“Selfishly, as a singer, you have to have some time to breathe,” Kelley says.

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For the listener, it provided enough variance from the rapid-fire chorus to keep it interesting, though still feeling like it naturally connected to the chorus.

“If you’re part of a song where [the verse] isn’t different enough, just trust me when I say you don’t want to listen,” says Weatherly. “You don’t want to hear the chorus a million times over if the verse sounds like the same melody.”

They created more variation at the bridge, where a building melody naturally leads the listener back to one more run through the chorus. The bridge also allows a subtle reference to “something rolled in a pay-per.”

“That just had to be in there somewhere,” Weatherly says. “That’s too aggressive for the verses and the chorus, but you can kind of tuck that into the bridge and maybe people won’t notice. And if they do, then they’re kind of like, ‘Light one up for us.’ ”

Sanders sang lead for Weatherly’s demo, built around acoustic guitar and programmed drums. It provided a great template when Huff cut instrumental tracks with Kelley at Nashville’s Sound Stage. They speeded the tempo up a few clicks, and Evan Hutching’s punchy drums, Ilya Toshinskiy’s ringing acoustic guitar and some electric guitar chunking provided layers of rhythm underneath the verses’ leisurely melody. At the chorus, the electric guitars morphed into heavier block chords to avoid clashing with Kelley.

“When you get in the chorus, it’s such a rapid-fire lyric,” says Huff. “We probably tried some little jangle parts and stuff like that, but ultimately, you do not want to be drawn away from the vocal at that point.”

A song about outdoors life needed some distinctly country flavor, so during overdubs, Huff brought in fiddler Jenee Fleenor and put her in the middle of “Acres,” playing a simple solo with appropriate sonic flavor. “I thought it was badass,” Weatherly says of Huff’s production. 

Kelley’s wife, Brittney, thought so, too, believing it showcased her spouse better than any other solo track he has recorded to date. “When I come in on that first verse,” says Kelley, “she goes, ‘Man, that’s my husband. Heck, I’m going to turn that thing up.’ ”

He made “Acres” the opening track on Tennessee Truth, which Big Machine released on May 10, and it earned immediate positive feedback. The label sent it to country radio via PlayMPE one month later, and Kelley is optimistic that it will help to further set him apart.

“Hopefully,” he says, “fans will start being able to identify with BK.” 

It’s arguably easier to figure a pitcher’s earned run average than to determine a car’s horsepower, and it’s a good bet that the majority of drivers don’t know how much horsepower their engine generates.

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But nearly everyone realizes that a larger number equals more speed. So when Tyler Hubbard brags that he has “700 horses under the hood” in the chorus of his new single, “Park,” it’s easy to get what he’s saying. Especially since he, like most of us, understands it more as a comparative number than one he needs to calculate.

“I had a friend in college who had a super-fast car that was like a muscle car basically,” Hubbard recalls. “There was 800 horsepower. It was like a race car, and I can even go to the drag strip with it and compete. So I knew like 800 horsepower is a ton of horsepower for a car. So 700 is a souped-up car for sure.”

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It’s a detail that fits an automotive-themed T-Hub song.

“He’s always loved to go fast,” says co-writer Canaan Smith (“Famous,” “Runaway”). “Back in the day, when we first met at Belmont College, he was riding his motorcycle up and down the interstate doing wheelies at 80 miles an hour.”

“Park” emerged near the end of a songwriters retreat at the Gulf Coast home of Jesse Frasure (“Halfway To Hell,” “Young Love & Saturday Nights”). A couple different teams were working simultaneously on material for Hubbard, who ricocheted from room to room as the songs developed. They’d already built several by the time of the “Park” session, so Frasure, Smith and Ashley Gorley (“I Had Some Help,” “I Am Not Okay”) were in a position to take a few more creative risks.

“There’s a little bit of a freedom when you’ve got a couple in the can on a writing retreat,” Frasure says. “It’s very relaxing, and you’re like, ‘Okay, cool.’ So you pull up some more aggressive tracks.”

Frasure purposely introduced an instrumental track he’d created with a danceable tempo and a bright feel. “I want to put things in the artist’s pile that are fun, energetic, that you could see pyro going off on stage,” Frasure says. “The more I do this, the more that’s what I get excited about, because I just feel like that’s the soundtrack to people’s lives. People love a well-written tune, and we’ll give awards to those, but I want the one that’s gonna be on someone’s playlist on the boat.”

The track resonated in the room – Frasure’s wife, Rhythm House vp Stevie Frasure, and Hubbard’s wife, Hayley, were both grooving along with it – and the writers started sifting through ideas that would fit. Tyler was in the other writer room as they considered titles, and Gorley brought up the word “Park,” from his list. The contrast between the dance tempo and the word “Park” was worth exploring.

“To me, there’s a really interesting, cool flip in the storyline here,” Smith says. “Yes, he likes to go fast, but there’s nothing he’d rather do than just put it in park.”

When Tyler returned, he gave them a green light on the song, which was already in process, and they got the wheels turning on the chorus, launching into it with a line custom-made for Hubbard: “I can drive you from this holler to Hollywood.” The chorus explored the driving theme – the horsepower, speed and screaming tires – but made the thematic flip by the end of the chorus as the singer considers the girl riding shotgun: “All I wanna do is park.”

“It was just sort of a picture of young, innocent, and it’s fun and a little bit risky and wild,” Hubbard says. “We’ve all been there at some point in our life, and I like to think occasionally, it’s fun to just go back to that mindset.”

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The two verses added some detail to the storyline: a couple kids racing through dirt roads around midnight, flirting with the thrill of driving for hours in the anonymous darkness, but flirting even more intensely with each other. As the writers cruised through the lyrics, Hubbard reconnected with one of his own experiences, making out at age 15 in his girlfriend’s car  in the church parking lot, only to have a cop interrupt, then take Hubbard home and rat him out to his parents. Hubbard was grounded for the next month.

“It was a learning lesson, for sure,” he says. “It was only a mile from the house. My dad was like, ‘Why didn’t you just come sit in the driveway?’”

Between the programmed track and the guitars in the room, the song was propelled by stacks of rhythm, and they decided to create room for a guitar solo that ultimately shifted into a short bridge. Those sections use the same four chords as the rest of the song, though they’re arranged in a different order, making that mid-song departure feel easy and natural.

“Bridges usually are for troubled waters,” Smith quips, “but we didn’t feel like this was any trouble. We wanted it to carry along and keep people immersed in what was happening, and sometimes you can do that musically with just a little reset.”

Frasure produced a brisk, almost-skipping demo that gave Hubbard and his co-producer, Jordan M. Schmidt (Mitchell Tenpenny, The Band Camino), a strong foundation. Tony Lucido’s start-and-stop bass hook, layers of guitars and Nir Z’s 700 horses of dramatic drum fills intensified the groove during a tracking session at Nashville’s Sound Stage.

“Certain songs just require certain things,” Smith reasons, “and this one definitely needed the Nir Z treatment.”

Schmidt and Jonny Fung completed the guitar-layering in overdubs, and Hubbard had a relatively easy go of it when he sang final vocals. The “All I wanna do is park” hook was likely the most difficult part of the process, since an “r” consonant can sound harsh at the end of a phrase (think Kevin Cronin singing “remember,” “together” and “forever” in the second verse of REO Speedwagon’s “Keep On Loving You”).

“It does roll off the tongue a little differently,” Hubbard allows, “but it’s somehow always felt natural and always worked, even live. I do have to be a little bit more intentional about it.”

The entire chorus fit perfectly into Hubbard’s vocal sweet spot. “His voice has always, throughout his entire career, cut really well,” Frasure says. “It’s very noticeable, and there’s certain melodies and certain tones – and certain keys, actually – with Tyler’s voice that are just money.”

EMI Nashville released “Park” to country radio via PlayMPE on June 3 as the second single from Hubbard’s album Strong. Hubbard played “Park” second in the set during Kane Brown’s In the Air Tour, though the possibility exists that he could bunch it with “Dancing in the Country” in the future to create an extended party atmosphere.

“When I get a few more singles under my belt and have a little more to play with, we could definitely make a 10- or 12-minute moment,” Hubbard says. “They do live in the same family for sure.”

Cole Swindell taps into his history on his new single, “Forever to Me.”
It’s the second time he’s sung about Carolina in the chorus of a song he issued to radio, following his 2022 release “She Had Me At Heads Carolina.” And a line in the bridge, “I wish you coulda met my daddy,” references the loss of his father, a life event that formed the backbone of his 2015 ballad “You Should Be Here.”

But “Forever to Me” also uses history to anticipate the future, recounting the 2023 engagement that led to his June 12 marriage in California to former NBA dancer Courtney Little. “Forever to Me” represents the start of the next phase in his personal life, now unfolding in a way he doubted it would.

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“I always wondered if I’d ever get married – you can’t really have a song like that if you don’t,” he says. “So for all this to happen within a year, man, and to have [the song] out there and finally be playing it live, it’s really cool.”

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“Forever to Me” is actually more than three years in the making. Swindell had met Little at a NASCAR event, and they struck up a friendship. But when his video team needed a love interest for his intricate 2021 video “Some Habits,” Swindell thought it’d work better to shoot it with Little than with an unfamiliar model. Working on that particular song on a Tennessee backroad created a spark, and the two began dating.

“The whole feeling on that day, I just felt like there was something,” he reflects. “I don’t know that I thought we’d be getting married, but I definitely knew that’s what I was missing.”

In May 2023, Swindell planned to pop the question in Texas in conjunction with the Academy of Country Music Awards, but just days before that event, he called an audible and arranged to take Little on a surprise detour to that same “Some Habits” backroad. He knelt on a soggy field, she said “yes,” and as he worked on his next album, he periodically attempted to write about the relationship for their first dance. Oddly enough, “Forever” arrived in tandem with a football game.

Swindell was to headline a swanky private party in Houston on Jan. 7, the eve of the National College Football Championship, and at the last minute, he asked Greylan James (“Next Thing You Know,” “Happy Does”) to join him and to suggest a third writer. James picked Rocky Block (“Cowgirls,” “Man Made a Bar”). They wrote a couple songs on the way to Houston, and after the concert, they stayed up late on the bus talking – so late that they saw the sun come up. They asked Swindell to describe his relationship, and he replied that Little is “forever to me.” That, his co-writers agreed, was the song they would write – after they slept.

When they awoke, James and Block worked on it a bit before Swindell was ready. James developed an opening acoustic guitar riff that Swindell compared to a Keith Whitley vibe.

“It was a really purposeful part,” James says.

They came up with the chorus’ opening line, “She gave 18 summers to Carolina” – not quite the correct number of years, but definitely the right state. “That was a little bit poetic license, but it got the point across,” Block notes. “We were just trying to say she grew up somewhere.”

Block controlled the melody at the close of that chorus, including the all-important set-up line, “I might’ve gave her the diamond/But she gave forever to me.” “I would have never sang that off the bat,” James says. “That’s just a Rocky Block special.”

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The word “gave” became an important device – “She gave 18 years…,” “I gave her a diamond…,” “She gave forever…” Swindell’s co-writers were very specific about it. “We kind of went in on what else she gave [in] other places in that chorus,” Block says.

Swindell didn’t quite realize it was happening. “It is a lot of ‘gaves,’” he says. “I didn’t even notice that we had done it. It just kind of felt right.”

One of the “gaves” – “I gave a grass stain to my knee” – is the kind of detail that specifically personalizes “Forever.” Originally, they started writing the verses with a line that referenced Dallas, since that’s where he intended to propose. Along with the references to Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee, the geography felt cluttered, but they kept it. Eventually, that became the second verse as he spent the first recounting how they met.

The song’s powerhouse moment comes with the bridge. It sews in a cultural reference, “She said ‘yes to the dress’ with her mama,” as the writers specifically included Little’s mother in the lyric. It’s there that Swindell sings “I wish you coulda met my daddy,” tying in his own personal note. And they included a mention of Jesus, suggesting divinity is involved in the relationship. It was only after writing the bridge that Swindell came up with the opening line, “You ever seen a prayer in person?,” tying the front and back of the song together.

They had champagne on hand for the game, but they broke it out early for an emotional toast. “We’re holding cups of champagne, hugging each other, and tears coming down — because we felt every line in that in that bridge,” James recalls.

They barely got to the stadium suite in time for the game, a Michigan blowout over Washington. Numerous celebrities wandered in and out, but the three writers kept going back to a corner and playing a work tape of “Forever.” James paid extra attention to the demo when he got back to Nashville, since the song was likely to be important to Swindell’s fiancée. The story made it one of Swindell’s most challenging vocals.

“It was a different kind of feeling — like, ‘Man, I can’t believe I’m singing this. I can’t believe I wrote this song,’” Swindell remembers. “I felt a lot of pressure to get it right.”

Little and the in-laws loved it, though another song eventually supported their ceremonial first dance. Meanwhile, Swindell struggled to record a final version of it. They made several attempts with different groups of musicians, but none of the results captured the song’s emotion the way the demo did. Ultimately, Swindell contacted producer Jordan M. Schmidt (Tyler Hubbard, Mitchell Tenpenny), who used much of Swindell’s vocal and some of James’ drum programming from the demo. Schmidt hired drummer Nir Z to mesh light human drum work into the synthetic percussion, and he had Jonny Fung redo the guitar parts.

Swindell still needed to rewrite the Dallas line, though, and he had a long phone call with Block and James to change the lyric. They turned the lines into “There ain’t no dancin’ around it/ When your whole world’s standin’ there.” It might be the only part of the song that Swindell re-sang during one last vocal session, held under more pressure, since the label had picked “Forever” as a single, and deadlines were imminent.

Schmidt “was a huge reason we were able to release it,” Swindell says.

Warner Music Nashville issued “Forever” to country radio via PlayMPE on April 12. It ranks No. 46 on the Country Airplay chart dated June 22, documenting his recent history as he steps into newlywed status.

“I’m literally in this season of my life,” he says. “I will never talk about it any more than I will now and this kind of goes along with what I’m going through. It just kind of fit.”

The new Darius Rucker single “Never Been Over,” featuring a convincing appearance by Jennifer Nettles, is easily heard as a celebration of a long-term relationship. The chorus employs a series of separation images – splitting up the household items, burning old letters or waving goodbye – that often appear in songs about a breakup, but it notes in the process that the couple has no experience with that stuff: “We’ve never been over.”

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It’s also possible, knowing Rucker’s history, to focus on the song’s road images and see it as a nod to his ongoing membership in the sometimes-active/sometimes-not Hootie + the Blowfish.

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Those interpretations are legit in Rucker’s mind, though it’s not how the song ended up playing for him. “When I started it, I think it was a love song,” he remembers. “But then as we kept writing it, I just realized that wasn’t a love song for me. It was more of a breakup song, and it was so therapeutic.”

People needed therapy at the time. It was May 21, 2020 – barely two months into the pandemic, days after the U.S. death toll passed 90,000. Songwriters were just getting used to composing via Zoom, and Rucker had a session that day with Brothers Osborne guitarist John Osborne and songwriter Lee Thomas Miller (“It Ain’t My Fault,” “You’re Gonna Miss This”). The process was clunky – if they sang, talked or played guitar, it muted the other participants and made it difficult to coordinate well.

Fortunately, Miller showed up with the “Never Been Over” title, and then some. “He walks into a room with a title that he knows can easily be written,” Osborne says of Miller. “He’s just really good at coming up with things like that, and he just said the title and threw out some concepts around the idea.”

“I had the trick, ‘We’ve been a lot of things, but we’ve never been over,’” Miller reflects. “It’s my favorite kind of song. It’s just the laundry list to make a point, you know, and so it was, ‘Okay, how do we do these contrasts?’: ‘We’ve been apples, we’ve been oranges,’ you know, ‘hot and cold’ and all the stuff.”

Osborne eased into a descending chord progression – not just a short one, but one that takes a long, leisurely journey.

“It starts up high, and it just walks down and keeps walking down and keeps walking, keeps going down,” Rucker says. “You rarely hear a song like this, that’s just descending the whole time. And then you get to the second verse, and it goes back and descends again.”

“I can’t remember who called it this, but it’s been dubbed the Bluebird walk-down,” Osborne says. “If you go to The Bluebird [Café Songwriters in the] Round, you’re going to hear somebody play those chords … And it feels emotional and evokes a feeling. And at the end of the day, that’s all we’re trying to do, is just evoke emotion.”

Miller’s initial structure included the song’s first two contrasts, “good and bad, hot and cold,” simple pairings that clued the listener in before they grew increasingly complex: “Desert quiet and rockstar loud,” “up and down like we’re built on springs.” By verse two, the images include “two pink lines, up all night” at the open and “18 years around the sun” at the end.

“We got pregnant, and we sent them to college in four lines,” Miller says.

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Since the Zoom setup prevented them from doing a collective work tape, Osborne did a vocal/guitar recording on his own and sent it to Rucker. Barely 50 days later, Rucker and Beth Leonard announced their separation. Miller figured it was a bad omen for the song. “I thought we just lost our shot,” he says. “I felt like, ‘Wow, maybe this [will be] pushed on the back burner for personal reasons.’ I didn’t know, I didn’t ask.”

But he also didn’t realize that Rucker was viewing it as a breakup song, rather than a love ballad. “It was the first song I wrote about [the divorce],” he says. “There was no way I wasn’t gonna cut it. It was such a great song.”

When Rucker eventually recorded it, he made an acoustic version at the Blackbird Studios with producer Ross Copperman (Dierks Bentley, Gabby Barrett) and just three or four musicians. Ilya Toshinskiy turned the signature riff that Osborne had originated on acoustic guitar into a mandolin hook. “It just cuts better as a mandolin,” Copperman says. “It feels more signature, and it kind of fits his ‘Wagon Wheel’ vibe, that rootsy thing. It really fits him.”

Rucker needed no more than three takes to nail the final vocal, which sounds almost as if it were being delivered in a quiet moment in front of a fireplace.

“John Osborne sang the demo,” Rucker says. “I toured with John. John’s a real good friend. I didn’t know John could sing like that, because John’s a guitar player, you know. He sings background, and you can’t really hear because T.J. is so great and so loud. John sang the demo, and I still listen to his demo, and every time I sing, that’s all I’m trying to do, is sound like John does on the demo, because it’s so great.”

During the first round of sessions, they discussed turning “Never Been Over” into a duet – “There was initial talk of Kacey Musgraves doing it,” Copperman remembers – though it remained a solo cut on the Carolyn’s Boy album, released by Capitol Nashville on Oct. 6, 2023. Despite his reticence to pick singles, Rucker lobbied for “Never Been Over,” and the label consented, even before management suggested they reach out to Nettles. After they added bass, drums and electric guitar, she overdubbed her part on her own — though Rucker’s team gave some loose suggestions, particularly asking for her to enter with the “two pink lines” phrase.

“Adding Jennifer Nettles’ second verse kind of elevates the thing to a whole new level,” Copperman notes. “Hearing the female side of the story here – like, I always wanted this song to be a duet, man. I was so happy when we finally found out it was gonna be Jennifer.”

Capitol released it to country radio on May 6, and while it can be viewed as a love song, a breakup song or even a Hootie song, it also works as a statement about his ongoing relationship with his ex-wife. Even after they split, they’ve never been over.

“We love our kids very much, and we’re gonna be in each other’s lives the rest of our lives,” he says. “I hope we’re both being adults. I think after you get through all the stuff you have to get through, you can be friends. You have to.”

Life is lived in duality. We drift between the sun and moon, grapple with right and wrong, walk the thin line between love and hate.
Brothers Osborne is likewise built on duality. John Osborne and T.J. Osborne use two different primary instruments – guitar and voice, respectively – to channel a sound that’s primarily country and rock, and the duo’s new single, “Break Mine,” similarly runs on two tracks. The basic premise, “If you’re looking for a heart to break… break mine,” wreaks on one hand of classic codependence.

“I spent many therapy sessions talking about my codependency,” John says with a fair amount of sarcasm. “I’ll write about it.”

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But, T.J. suggests, the protagonist could on the other hand be looking quite realistically at a potential relationship, willing to accept its inherent risk of success or failure. “You can take it either way,” T.J. allows.

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“Break Mine” appropriately required two writing sessions. The first took place with co-writer Shane McAnally (“I Was On A Boat That Day,” “Body Like A Back Road”) at the home studio of Pete Good (“We Don’t Fight Anymore,” “I Tried A Ring On”) pre-COVID, circa 2019. McAnally, most likely, brought the “Break Mine” idea, Good introduced a foundational groove, and John landed on an almost-haunting chord progression. T.J. started singing a melancholy melody that peaked on successive lines on a different, unexpected beat.

“When he started singing that melody, I was like, ‘Oh, here we go,’” Good recalls.

With that start, they began working on the opening verse, rather than the chorus. “Which is, honestly, the kiss of death,” John says. It started fairly well. They fashioned that first verse as an invitation for a sleepover. As the singer waits for a response, he ends that stanza in limbo: “Baby, bring it on and on and on and on and on and on.”

“For me, it feels like another hook, as simple as that is,” Good says. “It kind of sets you up for the chorus, I think, in a beautiful way.”

That chorus comes in with a change in phrasing, the melody moving forward with the emphasis at the front of each line. But before finishing, and the four writers seemed to run out of gas. “We got about halfway through the song and just couldn’t get through it,” John says.

That might say less about the song than it says about the Osbornes’ compatibility with McAnally, who they typically see only once or twice a year. “A lot of times when we get together, because he’s so fucking funny, we end up just spending a lot of time catching up with each other and just shooting the shit,” T.J. says. “We probably just ran out of time because we couldn’t shut up.”

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They made a work tape of their progress and called it a day, which left “Break Mine” in limbo, where it remained for perhaps two years. But it came up again when McAnally proposed a second writing session. Going through unfinished songs, he came across the work tape and sent a text to T.J., who found it sounded better than he remembered. “When I write, there’s sometimes – I call it my checkout lines, where I’ll hear a lyric, and I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’m over this,’” T.J. says. “I remember this song having one or two of those.”

One of them – the “on and on” section – was fixable by simply changing a lyric at the front of that line the second time it appeared, at the end of verse two. Meanwhile, the set-up line at the end of the chorus, “Get here in a straight line,” seemed fresh.

They met up again at Good’s studio in a new house and buttoned up the remaining issues with “Break Mine.” Good produced a demo, and the Osbornes decided it should be the first song they attacked when they wanted to test recording with producer Mike Elizondo (Twenty One Pilots, Eminem), who’d moved to Middle Tennessee from Los Angeles. Elizondo played bass and pulled together two more players the Osbornes hadn’t worked with previously, drummer Nate Smith and keyboardist Phil Towns, for a session at his Phantom Studio.

Elizondo’s bass, in particular, had such power that it felt like it could rattle the amplifier cabinet, though it never quite overpowers the rest of the performance. The bass’ weight came in part when Elizondo doubled it with a synth bass. “Quincy [Jones] would do that a lot on Michael Jackson records,” Elizondo says. “It’s something that, when it seems appropriate, I’ll try it out.”

John developed a cheery signature guitar riff for the intro, and it got doubled as well, with T.J. doing a vocal on top of it. John also took off on a guitar solo after the second chorus that worked like a scenic detour, changing the chords and creating a sense of fresh forward motion. “It’s a weird part,” he says. “It’s one of the hardest solos I play in our set, because it doesn’t physically feel the best on the guitar. There are certain things that just didn’t work out physically, but when I change the solo up, I miss it. So I’m always trying to adhere to that solo as much as I can.”

They tagged it with a one-minute instrumental finale, though Elizondo also had them cut an ending that capped it without the extended minute, knowing it would require an edit if it became a single. “That wasn’t hard to guess,” he says.

A day later, Elizondo threw on some bell-like keyboard parts – “twinkly things,” as T.J. refers to them. Those high notes form a subtle contrast with those deep bass lines, mirroring the duality of sweet surrender and darkness in the “Break Mine” lyric.

“That’s one of the things I love about Brothers Osbourne,” Elizondo says. “There are a handful of songs where there’s this mix of dark and light, whether the melody is brighter, but then the undertone of the music and the chord changes can be a little darker, or vice versa. I feel like ‘Break Mine’ really encapsulates that as far as the lyric, and even though it’s kind of got this sort of bounce, there’s this undertone of a mood that we wanted to make sure was always going to be there.”

The Osbornes originally planned to make “Break Mine” the first single from their self-titled 2023 album, but it didn’t quite fit sonically with the rest of the project. They eventually made it the title track of a four-song EP, released by EMI Nashville on March 21. The edited version of “Break Mine” was issued to country radio on April 15, finally rewarding the duo for sticking with the song through two writing sessions and a five-year journey.

“It’s still one of our favorite songs,” John says. “We’ll see what happens.”

When The Texas Regional Radio Report handed out its annual awards in Arlington on March 25, Wade Bowen was the most-honored winner, taking home three trophies, including male vocalist of the year.

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Three nights later, he hit Global Life Field – again in Arlington – for the Texas Rangers’ season opener. It was a big deal: Bowen has a lifelong obsession with the team, and attending that game meant he got to witness as they hoisted a flag to recognize the Rangers’ first-ever World Series victory in 2023. Bowen delivered “The Star-Spangled Banner” that day, but the team also played another anthem on the stadium sound system: Bowen’s “Nothin But Texas.”

“Of all the times I’ve listened to it,” Bowen says, “it’s never been better.”

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The New Braunfels resident is one of the leading red-dirt artists, grounded in a country bar-band style that fits the club-heavy listening habits in the state. But the area also boasts a notable blues/rock current, and “Nothin But Texas” leans on that under-represented part of Bowen’s musical personality.

“Obviously I listened to Stevie Ray Vaughan and ZZ Top and Delbert McClinton,” he says. “I listened to them a lot, you know. It’s around me all the time, so it’s like, ‘Okay, I need to show some of this.’”

“Nothin But Texas” came in Bowen’s first collaboration with songwriter Leslie Satcher (“Troubadour,” “When God-Fearin’ Women Get The Blues”), whose default goal is to write something energetic.

“I’ll leave the ballads to the other guys,” she says. “I want to write the uptempo, let’s-turn-up-the-radio-and-drive song. And I’ll say, ‘Let’s do something that will have your crowds with their beer in the air.’”

They didn’t have a particular title or musical approach in mind when they started writing, but both are from the Lone Star State, and Satcher had just gotten back to Nashville after visiting Texas. Somewhere in their introductory conversation, one of them said that when they were able to retire, it’d be “nothin’ but Texas for me.” That sounded like something they could turn into a celebration, and Satcher started playing a blues-laced groove in an open tuning, starting the chords on the afterbeat and cutting them off on the downbeat. It had the same propellant feel as The Ozark Mountain Daredevils’ “If You Wanna Get to Heaven.”

Most Nashville songwriters would focus on the chorus first, but that’s not how it worked here. “I always start at the first line,” Satcher insists. “It was just sort of building blocks as we went – sort of Jenga, you know. It’s like you just keep stacking until something falls down.”

Figuring the song out was almost too easy. They turned the opening verse into a travelogue of American party cities, leaning into Las Vegas, New Orleans and Los Angeles, with the singer reflecting that he’s been “pedal down in L.A.” That, of course, is quite the accomplishment – anyone who’s driven on the 405 during daylight hours knows the brake is down as much as the gas pedal.

“I guess we shouldn’t should have said that,” Bowen says. Nonsense, Satcher counters: “There’s lots of ways to drive fast in LA., you know. It’s a party life, and it’s a fast life.”

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Those cities set up the chorus’ payoff: Those towns are great, but “It ain’t nothin’ but Texas for me.” That opinion gets stronger when it’s repeated in line two, and after a melodic detour that applies blue notes at the end of lines three and four, they said it again to end the chorus. Thus, the title appears hree times in five lines.

They both second-guessed it – the repetition is quite stark when it’s written down on paper – but the questions quickly disappeared. “Anthems need to be simple,” Bowen quips. “That’s what makes them anthems.”

The second verse seemed easy, too. After playing up the state in the chorus, they needed to explain what makes Texas so great. Or, since it was a song for Bowen to sing, what makes it such a great place for him.

That meant putting a country-band perspective on partying in the Lone Star State. They latched onto I-35, “straight to the river” – it cuts across the entire state, north to south, from Denton to Dallas, Austin, San Antonio and to the streets of Laredo, linking with a Mexican boulevard at the edge of the Rio Grande. “I-35 is obviously a huge part of my life,” Bowen says. “Like, I live on 35 more than [in] my damn house.”

By the end of the verse, the singer promises to clap back at “any law dog that tries to run me off” for playing the music too loud. The “law dog” is a phrase Satcher has used previously – “It’s just so fun,” she says – though it’s probably false bravado.

“Anybody knows me knows that I’m gonna keep my mouth shut,” Bowen admits, asked if he’d really confront a cop. On the other hand, he offers, “I’ve got a drunk alter ego named Paul that might do it.”

Satcher slipped in a reference to “cowboy beers” – a phrase she and her husband use for his Coors Light habit – during a bridge that’s so subtle it could pass without the listener recognizing the change of pace. “People who are dancing in Texas, dancehall people, they don’t particularly care for a song that busts up the groove or has a weird melody or something like that,” Satcher offers. “They’re dancing, and so they want to keep going round the circle.”

Bowen created a sparse work tape, but when his crew had some down time on tour in Colorado, they did a more extensive demo that laid out the basic arrangement. Bowen recorded “Nothin But Texas” during three days of sessions for his album Flyin’, Nov. 15-17, at Curb Studio 43, a Music Row facility with Spanish-flavored arched entrances, an architectural touch that’s familiar in Texas.

An eight-piece studio band firmed up the demo’s blues/rock foundation, approximating the sound of Vaughan’s recordings, particularly through Jim “Moose” Brown’s earthy Hammond B-3 tones and Tom Bukovac’s assured guitar licks. The band members entered informally during a 25-second intro that toughened the original rhythms, and they kept going for at least a minute after the song had survived its Jenga course. Bowen, self-producing the track, asked after one take for Bukovac to expand the solo, giving it even more of a live sound.

A day later, Satcher came in to layer in soulful backing vocals, offering R&B-flavored ad libs and churchy three-part harmonies. “This track is not near as good,” Bowen says, “if Leslie doesn’t sing the parts.”

“Nothin But Texas” was a key focus track leading into the May 10 release of Flyin’, while another cut, “Rainin On Me,” plays on red-dirt stations, ranked at No. 9 on the May 24 Texas Regional Radio Report chart. It’s a statement about the musical identity of both Bowen and his homeland.

“Texas is not just country music,” Bowen notes. “This kind of music is a huge part of our state: blues/rock. It’s a huge, huge aspect of where I come from.”

With Mother’s Day in the rearview mirror, Gabby Barrett is learning to better appreciate the parent/child relationship the holiday represents.
In successful child-rearing, Mom and Dad essentially make themselves obsolete — after doting on the kids, sinking time and money into them, those children grow up, move away and create lives of their own. It makes things complicated, but there’s a sweet full-circle experience when the grown-up offspring come to understand the sacrifice that was involved in raising them as they, in turn, parent the next generation.

“I never understood that before I had kids,” Barrett says. “I’ve seen those relationships where it’s really difficult for parents to let their children go, you know, but they’re going to be adults longer than they’re going to be children, and having your mind set up that way will hopefully make it a little bit easier whenever that day comes.”

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Barrett isn’t the only person thinking about circle-of-life inevitability. So is Luke Combs, who had an idea in 2022 to write about how letting go plays out in a father/daughter relationship. Combs was trying to widen his creative relationships at the time, setting appointments with some of his frequent collaborators’ co-writers. And it was in that spirit that he proposed a writing appointment with regular co-writer James McNair (“Lovin’ On You,” “Glory Days”) and one of McNair’s professional partners, Emily Weisband (“Can’t Break Up Now,” “Looking for You”). When Combs extended the invitation, it fell during a week Weisband had intended to take off to prep for her wedding, but she couldn’t pass up the opportunity. 

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“I’m a huge fan of Luke,” she says. “And I’m a huge fan of the way that he does business and the way that he stays so connected and loyal to his friends.”

Combs, McNair and Weisband met on Sept. 26 at Sony Music Publishing’s Fire Hall, spending about an hour chatting before Combs mentioned “Dance Like No One’s Watching,” an idea he had about the sweep of a father/daughter relationship. The setup for the day was perfect because a song about a daughter needed to have a female involved in its creation.

“I think in his brain it was this big, iconic wedding song,” recalls Weisband. “He was like, ‘If you can write one of those, they’re huge.’ And so we took on the challenge.”

They fell into a waltz time — not because the hook involved dancing, Weisband says, but because it felt “big and dramatic.” That’s certainly the tone they gave the chorus first, fitting the title to a languid melody with long notes. 

“The big drawn-out melody, ‘Daaaance liiiike noooooo ooooone’s watching,’ it just felt like this is a singer’s song,” explains Weisband. “So [we] let the notes last a long time, let it just kind of flow out. It doesn’t have to be too wordy. It just has to be pure emotion. I definitely think we had to get that part right first.”

That chorus included her father’s encouragement to accept the risk of love if it appeared, unwittingly mirroring the encouragement in Lee Ann Womack’s “I Hope You Dance.”

When the chorus was mostly finished, they started building the rest of the story. Verse one relied, in part, on Weisband’s memory of a father/daughter Valentine’s dance at elementary school, when her dad guided her through her insecurities about dancing in front of her classmates. Verse two zoomed ahead to Dad helping pack the trunk as the protagonist heads off for college — shades of The Chicks’ “Wide Open Spaces.” 

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Weisband had mentioned as they wrote the chorus that she and her father had taken lessons for the first dance at her wedding — “Well, that’s the bridge,” Combs told her — and they reversed the emotions from the Valentine’s dance for that section, with the daughter coaching Dad during the wedding dance to stay cool: “Just don’t look at Mom.” Though they consider it a bridge, it’s literally a third verse, using the established verse melody.

“When I say ‘bridge,’ it was just that last thing that’s going to really put the dagger in the heart,” she notes.

Weisband played “Dance Like No One’s Watching” for her dad later that week, and he managed to hold it together. “I remember he went, ‘It’s good,’ and just turned away,” she says. “He had to wait till after my wedding to be like, ‘That song’s amazing.’ ”

Between her Oct. 1 wedding, the honeymoon and moving into a new home, it was weeks before she finished the demo. The day she sent it to Combs, he texted it to Barrett, whom he had always envisioned as the beneficiary of their work. Barrett was taking a leisurely bath when the phone pinged, and she held the cell tightly as “Dance” connected with her on an emotional level. “Fortunately, I did not drop it in the water,” she says.

“Dance” resonated with Barrett as a mom — she delivered her third baby, Ivy Josephine Foehner, on Feb. 17 — but it also spoke to her of her own transition into adulthood.

“The lyric ‘Girl, it’s a big world/ And it’s so easy to get lost in’ — that lyric hits me and just brings me back to the memories of really starting to do things all on my own,” she says.

She joined a band of session players at Nashville’s Blackbird Studios to record “Dance,” the first time she had been able to do that. Her first album’s vocals, recalls producer Ross Copperman (Dierks Bentley, Darius Rucker), were either from her songwriting demos or done remotely during the pandemic. The band responded to her emotions, dressing her performance with a quiet fragility. 

Barrett returned to Blackbird at a later date to do the final vocal, delivering the parent/child storyline with all the right emotions, though she remained almost motionless in the process.

“She was so pregnant,” says Copperman. “She was sitting on a stool, and it just kind of flies out of her mouth. You’re like, ‘Wow, how did that just happen?’ ”

McNair orchestrated Combs’ participation on background vocals. Combs never steals the show — there are moments that it sounds like him, though he’s mostly tucked in behind Barrett, acting very much like a support singer. In the final seconds, though, he lines his harmonies up tightly with Barrett’s curly melodic ad-lib.

“This guy is such a good singer,” Copperman says. “I would not have followed that trill. I would have just kind of fallen off that note. But it’s cool, and it’s also cool just how intentional he was with singing the harmony. Most people wouldn’t have gone that deep on a harmony.”

Warner Music Nashville released “Dance Like No One’s Watching” to country radio via PlayMPE on March 8. The plot is timeless, but it should make a particular impact next month as the calendar reaches Father’s Day.

“It’s becoming a song to create new special memories like Daddy/daughter dances or at-school events or weddings,” says Barrett. “I’m receiving all these sweet clips of fans sharing that moment with me, and I’m seeing my fans make core memories. It’s just so amazing they think of me to share their forever moment.”