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Alone in his house, surrounded by friends.
That’s the contradictory state presented in John Morgan’s first radio single, a collaboration with Jason Aldean titled “Friends Like That.” The two singers are pals at a professional level, for sure, since Morgan wrote three of Aldean’s recent hits and is signed to Aldean’s record label, Night Train, affiliated with BBR Music Group.
But the buddies in “Friends Like That” are a little more figurative: vices and voices telling the protagonist he’s better off alone than to be weighed down by the woman who just walked out on him. Broken hearts aren’t typically pleasurable, although the breezy melody and pulsing guitars on “Friends Like That” make loneliness sound attractive.
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“That was kind of the point,” Morgan says, “to make light of a heavy subject.”
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Mission accomplished — with a little help from some friends.
Morgan wrote “Friends Like That” during September 2020 – the height of the pandemic – at Cornman Music in Nashville, where songwriter Will Bundy (“Half Of Me,” “Brown Eyes Baby”) maintains an office. They were joined by Lydia Vaughan (“If I Didn’t Love You,” “Out Of That Truck”) and Brent Anderson (“Cab In A Solo,” “Lonely Tonight”), ostensibly a group of writers who’ve been interacting with each other in different combinations for several years.
The day started – as it did for so many Americans in that window of time – fairly directionless. No one had any ideas they were passionate about, so they chatted, puttered and brainstormed a bit until something caught their attention. That something was a mysterious-sounding guitar riff that sounded like it was leading somewhere. It was ideal for an intro, and interesting enough that Vaughan insisted they make it part of the melody later in the song. It became the basis for the pre-chorus, setting up the sound of the chorus, which they attacked before they even knew where they were going.
“A lot of times the pre-chorus is just a transitional piece to get from A to B,” Anderson says. “Having, to the best of my knowledge, started this song with that part is probably the reason that it stands out.”
His co-writers are convinced that Anderson spit out the “Friends Like That” title, though none of them know how they got there. It was apparent, however, that they were writing a breakup song, with the singer listening to his friends’ advice about pulling himself together and moving on. The song’s conversations, though, took place in front of a fire at home. The friends were music (Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings) and alcohol (Jack Daniel’s), and staying home with them spoke volumes.
“When something like that happens to you, a lot of people write about the bar,” Morgan says. But having the character stay home “was more real to me, because when I get pissed off, or whenever something happens, I just don’t want to talk to anybody.”
Buoyed by “Willie,” “Jack” and “Waylon,” the singer addresses his ex in absentia with a dismissive payoff at the end of the chorus: “Who needs you when I got friends like that?”
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As self-sufficient as the guy tries to sound at that point, he evinced a brooding outlook when the writers started filling in the blank spaces in the first verse. They established the setting with much of that opening stanza – it’s after sundown, with the ex’s keys on the table. When they reached that transitional pre-chorus, the lyrics refocused on his “friends,” changing the feel from lonely atmosphere to party central.
In verse two, the singer recalled the couple’s better days, reiterated that he no longer needed her, and – when the pre-chorus returned – boasted that he’s “got buds to get me through it.” It may take several listens to realize that while “buds” is short-hand for “buddies,” it might also simply be “buds.”
“It rides a nice line to me where it’s not like completely hidden,” Bundy says of the weed reference. “It’s sort of camouflaged in a cool way.”
The bridge gets ultra-cheery, with a call-and-answer component while the vices actually start talking to the protagonist, “telling me I don’t need you no more.” “It’s a great singalong moment,” Vaughan notes. “I just thought it was really catchy. I don’t know that it necessarily revealed anything new about the story that wasn’t already there, but we all just liked it.”
Aldean and two of his band members, bassist Tully Kennedy and guitarist Kurt Allison, produced “Friends Like That” at Nashville’s Sound Emporium with Kennedy’s adventuresome bass and Mike Johnson’s haunting steel adding some sonic burn to the track. Morgan played the opening riff and the guitar solo, but he was particularly impressed with the crew. He referenced a driving rhythm element on Tom Petty’s “Running Down A Dream” when they got to the bridge, and guitarist Rob McNelly locked onto it right away. “Seeing how pro those guys are is pretty unbelievable,” Morgan says.
Bundy produced Morgan’s final vocal session at Ocean Way. Morgan didn’t need much direction – the song had been written to fit his voice – but he definitely paid attention when Bundy gave him notes. “It’s sort of like getting to drive a Mercedes when you record John’s vocal,” Bundy says. “The great thing about John is we’re also such good buddies that I can criticize him and be tough on him, and he takes that and runs with it. You know he’s going to improve on it.”
Morgan’s solo version of “Friends Like That” became his most played song, racking up 23 million streams on Spotify following its Sept. 30, 2022, release. Aldean thought they should take it to radio. He also suggested that maybe he should add his voice to it, providing a little extra promotional incentive for programmers to add it.
Originally, Aldean wanted to just sing the second verse. Ultimately, Morgan persuaded him to do more – including the call-and-answer part on the bridge and a background vamp in the closing moments. Aldean also makes subtle melodic changes, adding a blue note here or there that creates a little extra grit. “That’s what’s so badass about him,” Anderson says. “He’s done that since the beginning.”
Night Train and Broken Bow released the Morgan/Aldean remix to country radio via PlayMPE on April 8 and set April 22 as its official impact date. “The song itself being called ‘Friends Like That’ — how fun is it now that it’s two friends singing on it together?” Vaughan asks.
In the end, “Friends Like That” will sink or swim on the lead voices, the breezy outlaw references and the self-deception that’s hiding just beneath the surface of the song’s relentless pulse. The freshly rejected guy in the song is a character everybody knows.
“There’s some bitterness in there, but also some sarcasm,” Morgan says. “Also, you know, [he’s] lying through his teeth.”
It’s a good time to be Kylie Morgan.
The EMI Nashville singer-songwriter picked up her first gold single, “If He Wanted to He Would,” on March 14; she’s begun performing in coveted opening slots at arena-level concerts; and she’s 16 months into a rewarding marriage to fellow artist Jay Allen. The cheer, the career advances and her romantic story all come together in “Two Night Stands,” released to country radio via PlayMPE on March 18.
Not that Morgan plotted it out that way. In fact, she hadn’t intended to reveal much about how she met her husband, but the tale fit the concept of a song she dashed off in a bit of a scheduling crunch, and she just let the narrative flow.
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“It definitely was a piece of our story,” she says. “It was a very organic thing that happened.”
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Upping the ante, “Two Night Stands” evolved as the kind of material she was hoping to create: “an anthemic, uptempo, fun love song.”
Though “Two Night Stands” ended up telling Morgan’s story, it started as someone else’s experience. A lifelong friend who’s witnessed Morgan’s rise from budding talent to national artist went out on the road as a weekend guest last fall when Morgan was opening for Old Dominion. During a conversation in the green room at one of the shows, the friend said she’d noticed that when she hooked up with men who’d not had a live-in relationship, they invariably had just one night stand next to the bed. She thought maybe there was a song idea with potential wordplay, about encountering just one night stand while on a one-night stand.
Morgan thought it had potential, and she brought it up as she wrapped a writing retreat last Halloween with Shane McAnally (“We Don’t Fight Anymore,” “half of my hometown”) and Track45 member Ben Johnson (“Bulletproof,” “Give Heaven Some Hell”) at McAnally’s house in Santa Barbara, Calif. Morgan had just a couple hours to write the song, which had morphed into a story about how a one-night stand led to a marriage and two night stands next to the bed. It needed to be playful, and Johnson led them in that direction with a shiny, busy guitar riff.
“It almost sounds like ‘It’s A Great Day to Be Alive’ or one of the ‘90s riffs,” Johnson says. “The song didn’t really end up sounding super-‘90s at all, just the riff itself.”
With that instrumental hook setting a caffeinated tone, they went to work first on the chorus, where the “two night stands” hook balances the front and back of the sing-along section, much as two night stands balance a couple’s bed. They first gave the chorus a busy melody, then affixed a string of lyrics to the notes.
“If you need to say a lot in a few words, [that] is way harder,” Johnson says. “It’s actually easier when you have more syllables because you don’t feel as constrained and can say everything you want to. This one, I don’t remember feeling constrained.”
The melody started in a descending pattern, but took a sharp ascent midway through the chorus. “That’s a Shane melody, for sure,” Morgan says. “He is a genius when it comes to that. Just when you think the chorus couldn’t get any better, he throws in another section that you’re just like, ‘Oh, yes.’”
They were fairly deliberate once they focused on the verses. For starters, they inserted more space between the phrases in a departure from the chorus. “You want contrast for all your sections – at least I always feel like that,” Johnson says. “So if the chorus is very wordy, the verse is going to be very sparse.”
The lyrics were intentional, too. They set up two people meeting at a bar in the opening frame, leading into the celebratory chorus. In verse two, Morgan insisted on explaining the one-night stand, saying “I never do things like this.” And after noting the couple shares the same mailbox and same last name, they characterized the hookup as the “best bad decision I ever made.”
“That’s the essence of the song,” Johnson notes.
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They added a bridge that cemented the couple’s current committed status – more importantly, it provided a musical break before the song returned to one final chorus. Johnson had built much of the demo as they wrote, but with the clock ticking away, Morgan had just a few minutes left before she needed to bolt for the airport. She sounded a little groggy as she laid down a vocal – unintentionally perfect for a song keyed to night stands – then headed home.
In November, she recorded the instrumental tracks with McAnally producing. He stacked multiple stringed instruments playing the signature riff and had drummer Evan Hutchings do several different tracks so they could experiment with a variety of rhythms during mixing. Morgan recreated the groggy morning voice as Johnson produced overdubs, though that wordy chorus presented a challenge.
“There’s no room to breathe, like at all,” she says. “There’s so many words, and so I originally had to do the chorus in two separate parts when we recorded it. When I do it live, I have to really focus when that chorus hits to get a really big breath, because there’s nowhere for me to breathe.”
“One Night Stands” had the kind of energy and upbeat attitude that made it a likely radio single, but Morgan also came to realize it had some unexpected relevance to her home life, too. She bought a couple of wooden night stands that were a little unusual, but perfect for the space in the bedroom she shares with Allen.
“It looks so great,” she says. “Well, guess what!? They’re actually barstools, and they have a curve to them. We love them so much, we still use them, so now I just have to make sure when I set a water on it, I have to put it in exactly in the middle of the nightstand.”
Barstools becoming nightstands is symbolic for her relationship with Allen, which started over drinks and led to two nightstands. She hopes the parallels are a good omen for the future of “Two Night Stands.” Especially since the song fits the sound she was aiming for this time around.
“I wanted something a little easier when it came to the second stab at radio,” she says, “with a little more sway, and you don’t have to overthink anything. You know exactly what the song is about.”
Indeed. It’s about Kylie Morgan.
The newest Carly Pearce music — “My Place,” a track released April 5 to tease a forthcoming album — is an unsettling experience.
The melody is slow and languid, filled with lengthy notes that highlight her smoky vocal tone. But the defining instrument is a relentless resonator guitar. Ilya Toshinskiy plays a dark parade of 16th notes, a foreboding part that casts a gloomy melancholy over the whole proceeding. It appropriately backs a post-breakup piece in which a woman sifts through the emotional clouds that still linger and pricks at the difficult sense of incompletion that dogs her as she obsesses, momentarily anyway, about an ex.
“It’s hard to pick favorites on records,” Pearce says, “but I do think that this is my favorite.”
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That evaluation is easy to understand. The song is personal, its sound is unique, and its story has plenty of depth while still drawing from familiar country precedents. It does what the most successful commercial country songs do, ferreting out its own space in the genre while sounding like it fits instantly within a segment of the existing format.
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“In country music,” co-writer Jordan Reynolds says (“Speechless,” “10,000 Hours”), “you can use a similar feeling and a similar device over and over again, because it’s just true.”
Reynolds hosted the writing session for “My Place” at his place, a studio in East Nashville, on Feb. 21, 2023. Pearce was scheduled to play the Grand Ole Opry that night, and the appointment started late, putting a certain amount of pressure on the writing trio, which included Concord Music Publishing signee Lauren Hungate. Fortunately, Hungate was ready for any worst-case scenario.
“I’m like a song doomsday prepper — I prep sometimes a month before the session,” she says. “I had prepped a bunch of ideas for her and sent them to my publisher, and my publisher picked ‘My Place.’ She was like, ‘I think this is your best one for it.’ And so that was the one I led with when I went in there. But I was so nervous that I had, like, five other ideas just in case.”
Hungate’s “My Place” idea emanated from her husband, who she characterizes as “super-super country.” She recalls a conversation when he took issue with something — “You know, baby, that ain’t your place” — and she thought “It ain’t my place” had song potential if it used a bit of wordplay.
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Pearce, meanwhile, arrived at the appointment having recently dreamed that she had split with the man she was dating. As they talked about the breakup in the dream, Hungate presented her “My Place” idea, which included the hook and half the lyric for the first verse. Reynolds began playing a haunting passage, and Pearce came up with a syncopated verse melody.
Lyrically, that stanza walked a line between Rhett Akins’ “That Ain’t My Truck” and Toby Keith’s “Who’s That Man,” noting a series of items on the outside of her ex’s house with a “that ain’t my…” lead-in, while recognizing that someone else has taken her place. The melody took a turn at the chorus with the phrases landing more on the beat.
“It ain’t my place/ To question if there’s someone filling my space,” it went, with that second line leading the listener to think of the social media site Myspace, which is an “ex” in its own way. “Trust me,” Pearce says, “we were like, ‘Well, we just got to say it. We got to do it.’ ”
In verse two, the singer’s drive-by goes inside — first imagining a few items inside the house, then projecting into her ex’s mind.
“You’re questioning, you’re battling these insecurities of all the ‘what ifs’ and the realization that this person has moved on,” Pearce says. “Does he ever think of you? And what does she look like? And what do they talk about? It’s just kind of that laundry list of all these really vulnerable insecurities that go along with somebody moving on.”
After the second chorus, they slipped in a bridge, pondering whether the new woman is enough to erase the singer entirely from the guy’s memory. “I think we wanted one more angle to twist it [and] dig the knife in just a little bit deeper,” Hungate says. “That’s another question that you don’t get to answer, just another painful thing.”
It speaks to the deepest pain of rejection. Making a difference is one of the strongest motivations most people experience. To disappear from his mind is to make zero impact. “You don’t want to be forgotten,” Pearce says. “You do want to matter.”
Reynolds built a significant part of the demo before the two women left, and he came up with 16th notes on a resonator guitar as a means of creating some movement in the song. But the effect also created a contrast with the legato melody. “You’re still thinking about the voice, but it keeps the verse really interesting,” Reynolds says. “There’s space in it, but it’s like there’s two voices kind of talking to each other.”
When Pearce met with co-producers Shane McAnally (Old Dominion, Kacey Musgraves) and Josh Osborne (Midland) for preproduction, she insisted on framing the final recording around the arrangement that Reynolds had developed.
“It reminded me of Lee Ann Womack-y type of stuff, and I was like, ‘Nobody ruin this, because this is such an interesting time signature and interesting thing that we’ve got going on,’ ” Pearce remembers. “I didn’t want it to get too big. I wanted it to live in the world that it lives in.”
Dobro player Josh Matheny and fiddler Jenee Fleenor shaded the track primarily with long notes, many suspended at the end of phrases without resolution. Other instruments pop out with a note here or there, lending more color to the sound without creating further weight. Osborne provided harmony during overdubs, enhancing the bite and lonesomeness in the lyrics.
“He covered such a special part,” Pearce says. “It felt almost like what Don Henley did for Trisha Yearwood on ‘Walkaway Joe.’ It’s not overcomplicated.”
Pearce’s collaboration with Chris Stapleton, “We Don’t Fight Anymore,” remains the radio-focused single and is ranked at No. 17 on the Country Airplay chart. But “My place” provides an extra hint at the quality of her next Big Machine album, hummingbird, due June 14. And after seeing the reaction from the handful of times she has played it live, “My Place” is considered a potential future single as well.
“I think it has that kind of universal appeal — we’ve all been there,” Pearce says of “My Place.” “As a songwriter, there’s nothing I could possibly hope for more than to give people a song and watch them react so positively. This is such a special song, and I am just so excited to have it out and see where it goes.”
Heard as a song about a random woman, Ashley McBryde’s new single, “The Devil I Know,” seems to capture a headstrong personality who embraces her imperfections, although it’s unclear whether that’s because she’s emotionally healthy or she’s just intellectually lazy.
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But heard as it’s intended – as a reflection of McBryde’s own rebellious path to self-determination – “The Devil” is more like Hank Williams’ “Mind Your Own Business,” an aural middle finger to the peanut gallery.
“It doesn’t matter what you do,” McBryde says, “somebody’s gonna have something to say about it.”
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Few people receive as much feedback as an artist – from managers, label executives, family members, music critics, fans and radio stations, all of whom have a vested interest in getting a reaction.
“It’s just tricky,” says songwriter-producer Jeremy Stover (Justin Moore, Travis Denning). “Even though those outside forces are around, you gotta keep plowing, and trusting yourself, and trusting the people that you trust the most.”
Two, maybe three, years ago, McBryde put some trust in Stover and fellow songwriter Bobby Pinson (“Burning Man,” “All I Want To Do”), writing “The Devil I Know” at Stover’s second-floor office on Nashville’s Music Row. Pinson had the set-up line and the hook – “Hell, there’s hell everywhere I go/ I’m just stickin’ with the devil I know” – and it naturally resonated with everyone in the room, though they had to figure out exactly what it meant.
“We were in D, the people’s key, and just kind of throwing things out,” McBryde remembers.
All three writers banged around on their guitars as the song found its direction, both musically and lyrically. Pinson, as McBryde recalls it, took the lead with the melody and chords, and he was determined to overcome having the devil in the title. “I like to have a melody mapped out that sounds like a hit,” he says. “It doesn’t matter what good words you put in if the melody is not a hit melody, especially in a song like this, where the title can work against you in a world where we hope there’s more God than devil.”
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McBryde recalled the negative reactions she received as a female playing a bar in Bardstown, Ky., as a teenager, and how she was determined to follow her own course. She changed the city to Elizabethtown – “I thought it would sound a little nicer and float along a little better,” she explains – and by the end of the first verse, she demonstrated how she grew to “like my brand of hurtin’.”
As they jumped into the chorus, the rebel spirit really took over: “Mama says get my ass to church” is a phrase that scoffs at religious conventions. “Daddy says get my ass to work” was the natural sequel. “When you got ‘Mama,’ if you follow it with ‘Daddy,’ you can’t say the same thing,” Stover quips. “That’s kind of hillbilly logic.”
That chorus continued to acknowledge the outside voices until it reached its self-guided premise, “I’m stickin’ with the devil I know.”
“For me, living and getting it right is kind of like skiing,” Pinson says. “You can have a professional skier tell you how to do it, you can have your friends tell you how to do it, you can have your loved ones tell you how to ski, but at the end of the day, you take a little cart up the hill, and if you get down unbroken, you skied. And that’s kind of what living is. It’s like how do I want to fall? Do I want to fall going down this mountain? Or do I want to fall going over this cliff? I’ll stick with the devil I know.”
The second verse shifted from professional pursuits to romantic choices, embracing a rocky relationship that ultimately matches two fiery people who understand each other at their foundation. Before the day was over, they fashioned a guitar/vocal work tape with a fair amount of finger picking, though McBryde had no intention of keeping that quasi-folk sound.
“I knew that the song had more teeth than that,” she says, “so when the band and I got together in pre-production before going to the studio to play the song, we knew that at least in that chorus, we wanted to do those big [heavy notes]. And we weren’t sure how much else we could get away with. Luckily, our producer is Jay Joyce (Eric Church, Brothers Osborne). And so he said, ‘Not only can you get away with that, you can get away with way more.’”
They referenced Steve Earle’s “Copperhead Road” as the level of power and rawness that they could infuse into “The Devil,” and when they set about the actual recording date at Joyce’s Neon Cross Studio, they were ready for a production that evolves from easy-going to raucous. “We spent quite a bit of time hammering out that arrangement,” Joyce says. “It didn’t come together easily, but it was worth the journey.”
At least two acoustic guitars create a rhythmic soup for the intro, and as the sound becomes increasingly tough, McBryde came up with a five-note segue for the chorus that emphasizes that change. It’s a quiet, acoustic background figure in the opening chorus, though it becomes a vocal-and-rock-guitar unison thing in later moments. Guitarist Matt Helmkamp enhanced the performance with a brief-but-searing solo.
“Matt does with guitar solos what we do with lyrics,” McBryde says. “It’s not like he’s playing what the lyrics are in his solo. He’s playing what it felt like when we wrote the lyrics. The ‘eeergh’ and the ‘dammit’ that you feel when you’re writing – that frustration – he can capture that in his solos. And I’m glad he doesn’t know how good he is.”
When McBryde tackled her final vocals, Joyce surprised her by having her do a pass 10 feet away from a telescope microphone. She thought it would be a background effect. Instead, it became a filtered, distant lead voice that dominated the first chorus, pulling the intensity back at a spot where the tendency for most producers would be to amp up the energy.
To McBryde, it makes that chorus feel like an internal monologue. To Joyce, it was just a different texture with no specific interpretation. “Usually, if you change the scenery, the listener will put it together in their own sort of way,” he reasons.
“The Devil I Know” became the title track of McBryde’s latest album, and she lobbied for it as the lead single, though Warner Music Nashville opted for “Light On In The Kitchen” instead. She fought again to make “The Devil” the follow-up, and she ultimately won. The label released it to radio via PlayMPE on Feb. 26, though she had to compromise. A major broadcast chain complained that it used the word “ass” too many times – she pressed for an acceptable number, she says, but didn’t get one. Ultimately, she and Joyce came up with three “clean” alternatives, and agreed on changing “get my ass to church” to “get on back to church.”
It’s not clear if it will make a difference, but McBryde says that her radio successes thus far have made many fans think she does “finger-picky ballads,” so they’re surprised at the heat she brings in concert. Thus, “The Devil I Know” should help the uninitiated begin to see her as the artist the industry knows.
“We had to put a single out that is palatable, that is very country, that is very representative of what our live show is like,” she says. “I’m so glad of every tooth and nail I lost having to fight for it. I think I think we made the right decision.”
When Riley Green played football for Jacksonville State in Alabama from 2007-2009, he was known to hang out with a fellow quarterback he found amusing.
“We were in football practice, and we’d be real hot,” Green remembers. “We’re miserable, and he’d say, ‘Man, I can’t wait to get out of practice and get down to Weiss Lake in Centre, Alabama, down the road and sit down on the pier and have a cooler of Keystone next to me.’ I always thought that was so funny because that’s really cheap beer, and it’s not like you would brag about drinking Keystone. I just love that character in songs, being specific about things that you would almost be proud of that aren’t that nice.”
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That character is the protagonist in “Damn Good Day to Leave,” an energetic heartland-rocker that turns a breakup into a shoulder shrug and a day well-spent. It fit the mood of the day when he wrote it in March 2022 at 50 Egg Music with Nick Walsh, Erik Dylan (“There Was This Girl”) and Jonathan Singleton (“Beer Never Broke My Heart,” “Out in the Middle”).
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Green brought the “Damn Good” title and set the tone for a breezy day of work. “It was a really easy song to write, because we all kind of got the idea right off the top,” he says.
They kicked in from the beginning, writing it in a linear fashion over a classic arena-rock chord progression. They also wrote it with classic instrumentation. “No laptops, none of that,” says Walsh. “Four guys, four guitars. Just made it happen.”
“Damn Good Day to Leave” cast the end of a relationship counterintuitively in the opening verse, recounting the darker textures that one typically associates with a split: rain, getaway taillights breaking for the horizon and Hank Williams singing train songs. That’s Hank Senior, not Hank Jr.
“That was the epitome of the sad, I’m-blue-and-lonely, he-left-me type song,” Green says. “Everything he did had that kind of vibe to it, you know, so I thought that was a good little reference in the song.”
But the text quickly set those dark images aside. As the woman leaves, the protagonist sees nothing but blue skies: “You picked a damn good day to leave me,” he sings in a line that overlaps two sections.
“It feels like the end of that verse and also feels like the beginning of the chorus at the same time,” notes Walsh. “It just bleeds together so perfectly that you can’t really tell, which is kind of a cool thing.”
The chorus employs the cooler of Keystone and a fishing trip while the guy adjusts to his newfound freedom. In the process, his enjoyment in the split feels reminiscent of Brad Paisley’s “I’m Gonna Miss Her (The Fishin’ Song),” Old Dominion’s “I Was on a Boat That Day,” Luke Combs’ “When It Rains It Pours” and Mike Ryan’s current “Way It Goes.”
The writers didn’t see the subject matter’s similarities at the time, but they wouldn’t have shied away from them either.
“We’ve got four or five country song [topics] that work over and over and over again,” Singleton says. “They work for a reason: because that listener believes that every time.”
Verse two introduced a familiar male/female argument over the TV. The protagonist recognizes his ex-girlfriend won’t be interrupting the big game anymore, and it set up one extra piece for the bridge, where they returned to TV watching — no more episodes of The Bachelorette. Green now has the freedom to watch John Wayne marathons.
“The toughest part of trying to write for radio is to write something that’s universally personal,” suggests Dylan. “And I feel like this song is universally personal because everybody has went through a breakup of some sort, female or male. I think women are going to love this song, too. Because we did make it funny enough, and there’s some moments in the song, I think a girl will roll her eyes and laugh.”
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“Damn Good Day to Leave” was ideal for Green. It incorporated an interesting melody that stayed within a short span. “I don’t live in a place that’s very rangy,” he says. “I try to sing things that sing well and sing easy.”
“Damn Good Day” was also written in a way that let Green establish his personality in the performance. “His delivery is very interesting,” says Singleton. “If you’re not giving him a chance as a songwriter to kind of sort that out on his own — even if you kind of have a lyric going on and you know how it goes in your head — because he’s such a stylist, when he does it, it kind of comes out different. Even if you play it a certain way, he’ll go ‘Oh, you mean like this?’ And every time, if you’re not saying, ‘Yeah, that’s it,’ then you’re doing the wrong thing.”
They made a guitar/vocal work tape — Green intentionally stayed away from a demo, leaving space for producer Dann Huff (Keith Urban, Kane Brown) to interpret it later. They ultimately decided it needed a strong slide-like sound, and Huff brought in former Southern California studio musician Dan Dugmore to play lap steel during the tracking session rather than waiting to overdub him later. Dugmore had a prominent place in the sound of the performance, and he gave it a little extra personality, punctuating the Hank Senior reference with a train-whistle sound. He also gave a unique lift at the end of the intro, just before Green starts singing.
“There’s a little reverb on it and a little delay, but he’s just taking the bar, just going, ‘Whoop!’ ” says Huff. “It’s kind of the opposite. Guitar players [usually] slide down the neck; he’s sliding up the neck.”
Drummer Jerry Roe provided spacious punch, much like Kenny Aronoff on John Mellencamp’s 1980s recordings or Max Weinberg on ’80s Bruce Springsteen cuts. Green delivered the lead vocal later in just two or three takes, and when he sings, “I guess I’ll miss The Bachelorette/Well, what a shame,” on the bridge, it’s OK if it sounds more like “I guess I’ll miss the bass, the red whale/What a shame.”
“You need to go to North Alabama,” Dylan quips. “You’ll understand all the words.”
Huff had Green change “Damn good day to leave” once near the end of the vocal, just to do something different. That move came in handy later. One radio station wanted “damn good day” changed to something else before they would play it, so Nashville Harbor president/CEO Jimmy Harnen asked Huff if there were options.
“I thought he was punking me,” says Huff. Fortunately, that one alteration near the end of the song worked, and Huff flew it into the rest of the single. “So,” Huff notes, “there’s one station in America playing, ‘It’s a mighty fine day to leave.’ ”
Nashville Harbor officially released “Damn Good Day” to country radio via PlayMPE on Feb. 14. It debuted at No. 57 on the Country Airplay chart dated March 30.
“We definitely thought it had tempo and felt like it could be radio, but it really wasn’t decided as a single until Jimmy started playing it for some radio PDs and folks,” Green says. “Everybody was like, ‘Hey, when can we play this?’ As an artist and songwriter with a record deal, that’s something you kind of dream of.”
It even beats a cooler of Keystone.
When Kellie Pickler’s husband, producer-songwriter Kyle Jacobs (“More Than a Memory,” “Rumor”), died in February 2023, Kyle’s longtime collaborator, Lee Brice, hurt — not only for his own loss and for Pickler, but also for Kyle’s father.
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“Every morning at five o’clock — every single morning — Kyle called his daddy,” Brice remembers. “And so a big part for me when Kyle passed was I was just thinking about his daddy, going, ‘What is his daddy going to do every morning at five o’clock?’ ”
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Brice thought about Kyle often when he came across “Checking In,” a newly released collaboration with contemporary Christian duo for King + Country. The recording appears on a forthcoming movie-related album, Unsung Hero: The Inspired By Soundtrack, due April 26. “Checking In” captures the regret of a son longing for a conversation with his late father. And while neither Brice nor the for King + Country brothers — Luke and Joel Smallbone — have had that experience, the threat of it hits deep.
“Every single time I listen to it, I call my mom and daddy,” Brice says.
It’s a good sign that “Checking In” is working.
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Things weren’t working all that well when Michael Farren, Garrett Jacobs and Ken Hart wrote it on Oct. 15, 2022, at Farren’s Curb | Word office in Nashville. Farren was feeling under the weather — so much so that he almost canceled the appointment. The three writers spent two hours kicking around ideas but came up empty. Finally, Garrett proffered “Checking In,” a title inspired by his own father.
“Anytime my dad calls me, he always ends the call with, ‘Just checking in to see how you were doing,’ ” Garrett recalls, “so I wrote that down in my notes.”
When he brought up the title, Farren related well to the scenario. His father often leaves messages with the same “just checking in” verbiage, and he started reciting one of them with a melody attached to it.
“I’m a stream-of-consciousness writer, so I spit out the first verse and chorus in one pass,” he says. “It was just because it was so real to what I hear my dad say all the time. I have so many of those voice messages saved.”
But it wasn’t an exact replication. The story flipped at the chorus as the stanza’s opening line, “I don’t know many times I’ve let that message play,” is the first time the listener realizes the opening verse isn’t a current conversation, but a recording. And as the chorus ends, it’s clear that the singer is playing it because it’s the only way he has left to check in with his dad.
The father/son emotions in that topic were strong, but they were particularly hard for Hart, whose relationship with his dad is decidedly strained. He felt like bolting.
“I was kind of not wanting to participate because of the subject matter,” Hart says, “but Michael knows me well enough. And he’s one of the few people that has permission to call me out when I need to be called out. He’s got this look that he gives me that says, ‘OK, dude. Get your head out of your butt. It’s time to participate.’”
Hart did stick around, and they were able to process the song — and its difficult emotions — in short order. “It probably took less than 45 minutes to get it done,” he remembers.
They finished the chorus with the protagonist noting that he even calls his dad back sometimes when he listens to the message. From there, verse two pretty much dictated itself. “The obvious next step,” Farren notes, “was ‘What would I say [to] that voicemail that he’s never going to hear?’ ‘I’m doing all right, work’s been a little hard, but you know, the kids are good. You’d be proud.’ It was just that conversational.”
As they worked through the rest of it, they decided a bridge was unnecessary — they had said everything they needed to — so they left a four-bar spot for an instrumental after the second chorus, “just to let the song sit and breathe,” Garrett says. They played the chorus a third time to finish the song.
Farren played it publicly for the first time that night at The Listening Room in Nashville. After the show, his wife confirmed what he had felt from the stage: “There were a lot of grown-up men crying.”
The next morning, Farren performed “Checking In” with acoustic guitar on a TikTok, and by the next morning, he had gotten over 300,000 views. (To date, the video has amassed more than 452,000). “That kind of got people’s attention a little bit, to be like, ‘The song might be special,’” Garrett suggests.
Farren had Curb vp of country and creative Colt Murski send the link to Brice; in less than 10 minutes, Brice put it on hold. Months later, Luke Smallbone saw the same TikTok. While for King + Country isn’t a country act, “Checking In” moved him, and with the Unsung Hero movie in production, he thought the act could pull it off for the Inspired By Soundtrack. He mentioned it to the duo’s producer, Ben Glover (Chris Tomlin, Anne Wilson), who also produces Brice. The artists decided to collaborate, a development Glover had not expected from the Smallbone brothers.
“The one thing that I never would have thought was that they would do anything country because that’s just not their wheelhouse,” Glover explains. “They’re not trying to turn country — that’s not their thing at all. I think it was more like, ‘We want to do it because we really like the song.’ ”
The brothers let Glover produce it without their input. “I had called Glover and kind of given him my vision for the song, but it still was essentially country,” Smallbone says. “He was like, ‘Hey, man, I’m just going to go do this. If you guys want to come by, you can, but I know exactly what I need to do.’”
Glover got drummer Aaron Sterling and guitarists Todd Lombardo and Nathan Dugger to add their tracks individually over a piano guide. Glover eventually muted the keyboard but played the additional instruments, with the arrangement building slowly as the song progresses. “The mark of a great song is how easy it is to produce, I would say 85% of the time,” Glover notes. “It kind of tells you where to go.”
Brice did his vocal first, with Kyle’s memory informing his emotional performance. Though it’s a for King + Country recording with Brice the featured artist, Smallbone took the second verse and let Brice provide the song’s first voice, appropriate for a country production. The siblings found a two-part harmony moment, then supported Brice with three-part harmony on the third chorus, creating a sort of communal gathering of the principals for the finale.
“That song has messed me up in some cases, in a good way, because every time I talk to my dad, I’m aware,” Smallbone says. “He’s 74. He could have another 20 years or he could have another day. You just don’t know.”
That reality makes “Checking In” an emotional experience for many listeners, whether they’ve lost their father or just wonder when they will. Given that universal potential, Curb released it to country stations in secondary markets on Feb. 16. The creatives are less concerned about the audience numbers the song generates than the impact that it might have on those who do hear it and take its message to heart.
“You never know,” Brice says, “when it’s going to be too late.”
Nate Smith had an enviable start to his career when “Whiskey on You” worked its way to No. 1 on Country Airplay in 2022.
So when his sophomore single arrived, it pretty much required the country universe to pay attention. That song – mirroring its title, “World on Fire” – blew up, outstripping the previous release’s reach by tying the record for the longest run at the top of the Country Airplay chart since that list’s 1990 inception.
“Talk about a shocker,” Smith marvels. “Ten weeks? I just can’t even believe it.”
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“World” had a brawny sound, and its successor, “Bulletproof,” operates a bit like a boxer following the previous single’s body blow with a fierce left hook. The “Bulletproof” chorus employs big, snarling guitars beneath a catchy melody, and it helps define expectations as Smith moves forward in his career.
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“We’re obviously going to evolve,” he allows, “but I think that what can’t stop is anthems. They have to be anthems. They have to be sing-alongs. They have to be something that feels visceral, emotional and has to connect to people on an emotional level.”
“Bulletproof” was kind of waiting around for Smith to find it. He co-wrote the bulk of the material on his eponymous debut album, but after his first two singles created demand for his talents, he spent most of 2023 on the road, often visiting radio stations during the afternoons, then wedging in meet and greets before his concerts. It wasn’t ideal for writing songs, so he put out the word that he was looking for outside songs. Music Row was happy to oblige.
“Bulletproof” is actually a three-year-old composition, owing its origins to an April 2021 appointment at the office of Track45 member Ben Johnson (“Truck Bed,” “Take My Name”). Johnson worked that day with Ashley Gorley (“Last Night,” “You Should Probably Leave”) and Hunter Phelps (“wait in the truck,” “Cold Beer Calling My Name”) on “starts,” assembling short foundations they could use to compose songs at a later date.
“We’ve done that forever,” Johnson says. “It’s basically just getting ready for a write, you know. You want to make sure you’re armed with ideas and vibes and melodies.”
After crafting about five starts, they tore into another and found they couldn’t stop. “We were supposed to just do a start, and we end up writing the whole song,” Johnson says. “So that was a happy accident.”
Johnson got the “Bulletproof” title from a synth-heavy 2011 dance record by female singer La Roux. He imagined it receiving some country-style wordplay – “take shots at me, but I’m bulletproof” – and plugged the new idea into his phone. When he brought it up, Gorley and Phelps kicked into what became the opening lines of the chorus.
“This one was faster than most of the songs I would say that we’ve ever written,” Phelps says. “It was quick, because I remember instantly him going ‘I’ve tried Jack, I’ve tried Jim.’ I was like, ‘Man, we’re off to the races right now. That’s it.’”
They injected some solid drinking imagery into that chorus – particularly “heartbreak bottles up on the shelf” – and Gorley tossed in some repetition. “I remember Ashley singing the ‘shots, shots, shots,’ and we’re like, ‘Oh, yeah,” Phelps says.
It’s safe to say that by that time, it was no longer a “start,” and they were intent on taking it to the finish line. They headed back to the front, where they used the first verse to set a bar scene with the protagonist trying desperately to drink away the memory of an ex. And when they made it to the second verse, they cut that section in half, with specific purpose. They’d developed a post-chorus – an extra add-on that they planned to tack onto the end of the second chorus. Halving the second verse helped them get there quicker.
“If you have a big post-chorus,” Johnson reasons, “you don’t really want a long second verse, because you want to leave a lot of real estate for that post-chorus to come around.”
Johnson built the demo, inspired by 2000s-era rock, particularly thinking of the percussion sounds and guitar tones in Green Day’s “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” though he came up with guitar chords for the intro that feel more like Tom Petty’s “Mary Jane’s Last Dance.” Gorley gave the demo a cursory vocal, and Phelps re-did it at a later date; then “Bulletproof” sat for a while until Smith put out the word that he needed material. Gorley assembled about 10 songs and forwarded them to Smith, who was intrigued from the second he heard the “Mary Jane” chords. The demo felt like a club-level rock performance, but Smith believed it could bear a heavier interpretation suitable for arenas.
“It had the bones there, but I was like, ‘Let’s really rock it up’ so it gets you into that later, that Nickelback, country/rock sort of thing,” Smith says.
Producer Lindsay Rimes (LOCASH, Tyler Rich) recruited drummer Evan Hutchings, bassist Tony Lucido, guitarists Sol Philcox-Littlefield and Tim Galloway, plus keyboardist Alex Wright for a tracking session at Nashville’s Blackbird Studios. They played the demo for the band, and encouraged them to rock it harder. By the time they got to the instrumental break, Philcox-Littlefield went a little farther than they had in mind, playing what Smith called a “super-rippin’ guitar solo.” Smith asked him to dial it back.
“One thing that I’ve learned from John Mayer, like listening to his music, you could sing any guitar solo that he records,” Smith says. “I think that there’s something about that. It has to be catchy, and it can’t be an afterthought.”
Smith’s vocal track was relatively easy. The biggest issue was picking the right spots to beef up further, doubling his performance in key spots to make the lead voice thicker, and adding vocal delays that made the words echo in spaces and fill the track out more. “Holy cow,” Phelps says. “They made it sound massive.”
The country hitmaker didn’t waste much time to get the song into his set list. He was playing it in concert by November 2023, and RCA Nashville decided to send it to programmers as soon as “World on Fire” slowed down.
The label released “Bulletproof” to country radio via PlayMPE on Feb. 8. It’s already hit No. 27 on Hot Country Songs in its four weeks on the chart. In the meantime, consider its heavy sound and engaging melodicism a template for Smith’s future.
“Stylistically, things will evolve in different ways and stuff, but I feel like if you have that catchy chorus, that really connects to you on emotional level, that’s so important to me,” Smith notes. “You have to be able to sing along with my songs. You have to.”
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Country careers are built, as The Oak Ridge Boys like to say, on “three minutes of magic.” And the next most important ingredient for career longevity, as The Oaks also like to say, is “three more minutes of magic.”
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George Birge found his first three-minute life-changer with “Mind on You,” a mysterious-sounding 2022 release about romantic obsession that peaked at No. 2 on Country Airplay on Jan. 6, 2024.
Of course, the three-minute creations don’t usually appear through magic. Songwriters typically spend hours – months sometimes – working on songs that never get heard outside the publisher’s office. And even when they do get into public circulation, a song that feels seamless may not reflect the amount of time that went into its creation.
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“As songwriters, we go into the deepest, darkest corners of these things, trying to create magic and trying to create stuff that people feel,” Birge says. “You never know if that extra two hours or three hours you spend on a 10-second part of the song, or direction, is even going to resonate, or if people are ever gonna catch it.”
That provides a solid framework for what’s likely to become Birge’s second “thee minutes of magic.” “Cowboy Songs,” released by RECORDS Nashville to country radio via PlayMPE on Feb. 22, is – like “Mind On You” – a mysterious-sounding song about romantic obsession, but its 187-second script required perhaps 17 hours to write on its date of creation, and then another six months or so to fully develop its final sonic persona.
Birge leaned into it with three fellow writers on Feb. 3, 2023, in a retreat at a Tims Ford lake house, between Lynchburg and Winchester, south of Nashville. By leaving town, Birge says, “I can turn the real world off for a second [and] have a lot more fruitful songwriting.”
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The time of year helped that effort.
“It was dead of the winter, and I think that was the best thing for us,” says co-writer Michael Tyler (“Somewhere On A Beach,” “Girl Like You”). “All we did the whole time was write. I think we wrote three or four songs in two days. And we knew instantly that this was the one. If it was during the summertime, I don’t think we would have wrote any of those. We would just be out on a boat.”
“Cowboy Songs” originated with songwriter/producer Matt McGinn (“Bury Me In Georgia,” “7500 OBO”), who had the hook – “she only dances to cowboy songs” – but thought it would work best if the music was somewhat antithetical to the lyrical theme.
“We wanted it to be something you wouldn’t expect,” Tyler says.
Songwriter/producer Lalo Guzman (Sammy Arriaga, Dylan Schneider) whipped out a track he’d created that he believed would be too far afield, but he liked it and figured it would at least give them a starting place to explore the sound’s direction. His co-writers all jumped in on that very track.
“I was like, ‘For real?’” Guzman recalls. “It was just wild.”
Tyler sang what became the hook at the start of the chorus, and they knocked out a good part of that stanza before jumping to the opening verse, where they set up the scenario. The protagonist had staked out a place in a bar, where he’d ordered a mystery woman’s favorite drink and brought a lighter to attend to her smoking needs. The guy didn’t know her name or if she’d even show up, but he was prepared if she did.
“As a younger kid, when I first started going out to bars and stuff with a fake ID, you would see this girl that’s just like magic,” Birge remembers. “She’s captivating a room. Everybody’s looking at her – and this is back when Austin had these cash-only bars and it was smoking, and edgy, and jukebox. I was immediately transported back to that scene, and I was like, ‘Okay, how do I capture that in a song?’ and like, ‘Who is she? And who’s watching her?’”
When they got back to the chorus, they revised the foundation a bit to change things up. “We were singing the chorus over the same verse chords for a second,” Tyler says. “I can’t remember who it was – maybe it was Lalo, the producer – that was like, ‘What if we went somewhere completely different for the chorus chords?’ It really lifted and took that chorus into a different space, and made it made it a lot more hooky.”
Birge dropped in a Waylon Jennings reference – “I definitely was very heavily influenced by Waylon, so it’s probably not an accident,” Birge says – and they kept a Texas-based narrative in verse two, with a note that “She makes love like an Amarillo rain.”
“In Texas, rain is very hard to come by, and you’re always praying for it,” Birge explains. “You’re begging for it to come, and then when it does rain, it’s long and steady, and it lasts forever. That was the vision I had.”
Much of the 17 hours on the retreat was devoted to the demo, which included enough steel guitar and Dobro to insert a little Western flare into the mysterious sound. They worked on the master multiple times, with Andy Ellison providing steel at the beginning and Birge spending three hours on the vocal track, drinking tequila to set the barroom mood and focusing on specific inflections. They blended three different basses to get the low end sound, but they kept going back to the studio in an attempt to get the drums right. Originally, it had no live drums, then Guzman oversaw a session that took the percussion too far afield. Finally, McGinn worked with drummer Phil Lawson, who held back during much of the three minutes, but pounded the snares when it fit.
“Matt took it to where it needed to go to,” Guzman says. “I was almost envisioning it a little too pop – like The Weeknd kind of drums. For some reason, the groove wasn’t clicking. Matt brought in that space that I wasn’t hearing.”
Sometime after the song’s completion, McGinn was arrested Oct. 31 on a domestic violence charge. He has, Birge says, dedicated himself to recovery.
Meanwhile, Birge began playing “Cowboy Songs” live during the fall, planning it as his next single. It debuted at No. 55 on the Country Airplay chart dated March 9, two weeks ahead of the label’s impact date. “I’ve never had a song that we play live react like this,” he says. “I go to the meet and greet line, and every single person in line would be like, ‘This song, “She only dances to cowboy songs,” when does that come out?’”
Thus, early indications suggest that the 17-hour writing session and the months of agonizing over drums sounds may have given Birge what he most needed from “Cowboy Songs”: three more minutes of magic.
To a lot of country fans, the early 1990s was the golden age of the format.
Garth Brooks, Brooks & Dunn, Mark Chesnutt, Vince Gill, Reba McEntire and George Strait were among the talents who cut unabashedly country material that was melodic, hooky and frequently energetic. And, it can be argued, 1994 was the last really good year before the era started to implode as the labels — and, in some cases, the artists themselves — began to sound like caricatures, trying to strike gold by copying what had worked before.
New Leo33 artist Zach Top didn’t experience that time frame firsthand — he wasn’t born until 1997 — but the artists from that era were in steady rotation in his household, so the ’90s formed a foundation for his own work as an adult.
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“It’s probably the peak of country music in my book, you know, the stuff that I was growing up on and the stuff that made me fall in love with country,” he says. “It was a lot of that ’90s stuff, and then I went back earlier to when [Merle] Haggard, [George] Jones, all that was kind of the rage. I love all that old stuff.”
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Thus, the grinding, ’90s country sound and nostalgic lyrical tone of his debut single, “Sounds Like the Radio,” is an appropriate vehicle for Top to rock the jukebox. Fortunately, he has a solid connection with someone who lived it.
Songwriter-producer Carson Chamberlain (Billy Currington, Easton Corbin) played steel guitar with late-’80s icon Keith Whitley and fashioned ’90s hits for Alan Jackson. And while brainstorming on his own a few years ago, he came up with a phrase that played up that era: “Sounds like the radio/ Back in ’94, you know.” He coupled that with an aggressive guitar line that harkened to a boot-scootin’ line dance, and every once in a while, he would bring up “Sounds Like the Radio” at a co-writing session.
One particular co-writer, artist Wyatt McCubbin, passed on it, mostly because it didn’t fit him. But McCubbin was in the room when Chamberlain pitched it again at his kitchen table to Top during a writing session on Sept. 25, 2020. Top bought in immediately, and this time around, so did McCubbin. “With Zach’s voice, night and day, man, it was a world of difference,” McCubbin recalls.
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They buckled down on the chorus, writing a quick, four-line section that started and ended with the title. It felt so good, they wrote a second half and more than doubled the stanza’s length. And when they finally determined a setup line, they had the right payoff: “My whole life/ Sounds like the radio.”
Not only did “My whole life…” set up the end of the chorus, it also paved the way for the opening line. The start of “My whole life” begins at birth, and as they toyed with that idea, McCubbin popped out a hilarious opening line that introduced the entire ’90s theme: “Well, the day I was born the doc couldn’t believe/I came out cryin’ ‘Chattahoochee.’ ”
“I was just trying to think of the dumbest thing,” McCubbin notes, “just to catch people off guard.”
They slid straight into a mullet joke — very ’90s — and then into another wry reference. “Zach really loves the tongue-in-cheek things,” says Chamberlain. “Even the back end of the first verse — you know, the pickup and the girls and all that stuff — was a tongue-in-cheek, little tip of the hat to ‘Pickup Man’ Joe Diffie.”
Other phrases sounded like ’90s references, too: “Neon light” has a “Neon Moon” vibe, “walkin’ talkin’ jukebox” approximates “Walkin’, Talkin’, Cryin’, Barely Beatin’ Broken Heart,” and even “a little bit of fiddle/ And a whole lot of country gold” is constructed like Jackson’s album title A Lot About Livin’ (And a Little ’Bout Love). Most of that was an unintended function of coupling ’90s topics with era-appropriate sonics. “All that stuff influenced me, so I don’t mind paying tribute to it,” Top says. “But I don’t want to just copy what they’re doing.”
After they finished the second verse, they decided “Sounds Like the Radio” needed a bridge to bring the story full circle. They had started with a birth and addressed “my whole life” in the chorus. It kind of needed an end-of-life moment. They accomplished it all with a two-line section that again felt like familiar songs: “When I die, lay me down in the ground” is kind of close to “Prop Me Up Beside the Jukebox (When I Die),” and “Next to an old beer joint with a party crowd” resurrected thoughts of David Lee Murphy’s “Party Crowd.”
They used a microphone app for iPhone to record a demo with three guitars at the end of the day, and Chamberlain made sure that it laid out his vision for the final product. “I’m just kind of a stickler for getting the arrangement the way I want it,” he says. “I want the whole thing arranged to where the guys, all they have to do is listen to that, write the chart and go, ‘OK, we get it.’”
“Sounds Like the Radio” was key to Top’s emergence over the next few years. When he met with Major Bob Music, he led off with “The Radio” and got both a publishing deal and a managing contract. More than a year after they wrote it -— on Nov. 23, 2021 — he recorded it at Nashville’s Backstage studio with a band that included guitarist Brent Mason, bassist Glenn Worf, drummer Tommy Harden, steel guitarist Scotty Sanders, pianist Gary Prim and fiddler Andrew Leftwich. Top sang a scratch vocal and played acoustic guitar, taking advantage of his rhythmic sense.
“He’s such a good guitar player,” says Chamberlain, “and his right hand is really cool and different on some things.”
The musicians knocked it out with ease, and Top sailed through the final vocal part, too. “It’s not like I’m learning the melody to somebody else’s song and trying to figure it out,” he says, “so I already knew the song, basically. There was nothing too challenging about laying down those vocals.”
It helped secure his recording deal with independent Leo33, and “Sounds Like the Radio” was an obvious choice for a single. It sounded great, ’90s country is trendy, and the title would certainly get the attention of radio programmers. “A little pandering never hurts,” suggests Top.
Leo33 released it to country radio via PlayMPE on Jan. 10, and it’s at No. 43 on the Country Airplay chart dated Feb. 24 after six weeks.
“Literally the day we wrote it, it was like that was meant to be my first single,” Top says. “It seems like an awesome introduction to me and the type of music that people are going to be getting from me. If you like it, great. If not, don’t expect nothing different.”
“You are not enough.”
That’s the indirect message people often receive on social media, according to a recent study led by Dr. Phillip Ozimek at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany. Thanks to the personalized ads and the endless posts featuring people at their best, the project found that the more participants consumed social media, the more unhappy and inadequate they tended to feel.
Unwittingly, Ozimek’s work provides scientific support for the newest Dan + Shay single, “Bigger Houses.” Since their 2013 arrival in the national spotlight, they’ve been able to change their lives in a material way. But that success also gave them a dramatic ability to recognize that money can’t buy happiness.
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“We get caught up in this rat race,” says the duo’s Dan Smyers, “of always wanting more, always feeling insignificant, looking at what everybody else has gotten and thinking ‘They’re doing so much better than me.’ ”
Country, of course, has frequently reminded listeners that it’s better to be rich in character than in financial assets. It’s a message that’s present in Dolly Parton’s “Coat of Many Colors,” Porter Wagoner’s “Satisfied Mind,” John Anderson’s “Money in the Bank” and Tim McGraw’s “Last Dollar (Fly Away).” And Smyers’ wife, Abby Law Smyers, provided similar advice when songwriter Andy Albert (“Thinking ’Bout You,” “Rednecker”) and his wife, Emily, were showing Abby the new house they had bought to accommodate their growing family. They repeatedly mentioned the things they wanted to change, and Abby periodically noted that the place was already beautiful. And then she made an offhand comment that everyone in their circle was buying bigger houses.
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Albert wrote the title “Bigger Houses” down, and he put more thought into it ahead of a writing session with Smyers and Jordan Minton (“Good Time,” “Your Place”) on April 5, 2023, at the home of songwriter Jordan Reynolds (“10,000 Hours,” “Speechless”).
“I kind of started unpacking it,” Albert says, “how everyone’s always just chasing the next thing and how sometimes happiness is right in front of you. You just have to choose to slow down and accept it.”
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As it happened, the writing session was a low-pressure situation. Dan + Shay had wrapped their next album, though it was still untitled. So the guys were free to write whatever they wanted. And when Albert served up the title and the all-important setup line — “The thing I’ve found about happiness is/ It don’t live in bigger houses” — they had something that resonated with all of them. Smyers had a line, “There’s always gonna be a higher high,” that he had planned to use in another song, but they repurposed it as the opener for a chorus that led to the “bigger houses” payoff.
Reynolds, on guitar, and Smyers, on piano, developed the musical framework; Smyers, in particular, oversaw the melody since he knew lead singer Shay Mooney’s voice best. That said, Mooney’s range is wide enough that they weren’t likely to make a misstep.
“Dan really has it all dialed in,” says Albert. “He’s such an amazing melodic writer. I think he just had a vision for it and just played through it for a half hour or whatever, and then all of a sudden, it sounds just exactly right. ‘Now we get to kind of sit down and fill in the words.’ ”
Many of the phrases they built into it — such as “greener grass in the yard next door” or “never gonna fill an empty cup” — played on clichés without exactly using them.
“The line that I remember the most is when we were writing the verse,” Minton notes, “And Andy said, ‘I’m not worried about keeping up with people named Jones.’ That is the coolest way I’ve ever heard someone say that phrase, and it made that phrase feel like I’ve never heard it before. That should be the name of a song: ‘People Named Jones.’”
In the second verse, they laid out a series of classic home-ownership sights and sounds: kids playing upstairs, dogs romping in the backyard and a couple rocking a porch swing. The only thing missing was a white picket fence.
“We tossed around throwing that in there,” recalls Minton. “It was kind of trying to dance around that picture as much as we could without going all the way. There’s plenty of clichés that we tried to twist in different ways, and it felt like that was going to be hard to put in a fresh way.”
At the end of the session, Smyers moved from piano to guitar, and Reynolds sang lead as they built a demo with mandolin and Dobro. Smyers subsequently sent it to Mooney, who was visiting his parents in Arkansas. It was the perfect scenario to hear a song about prioritizing family. “From the very first chorus, man, it was a strange experience because it felt like I was in the writing room,” Mooney says. “It’s so personal, it felt like words that I had in my spirit, almost just like this is exactly where I am in my life right now.”
Dan + Shay, along with the label and their team, thought “Bigger Houses” needed to be on the album — it needed to be the title of the album — so they set up a recording session at Nashville’s Backstage. They only hired one musician, guitarist Bryan Sutton, who played live as Mooney sang in the studio. Sutton also overdubbed new mandolin and Dobro parts, and outside of Smyers layering on harmonies, that was the whole thing.
“I fully thought that Dan was going to produce it out bigger,” says Reynolds, “but it stayed pretty stripped. We kept referencing, you know, Adele is one of the only people who can get away with super-stripped moments, but when it happens, it’s massive. And we always talk about how Shay has the capabilities of tearing the house down with just him and a piano.”
Mooney took an extremely restrained approach to the “Bigger Houses” vocal, determined to keep the focus on the words. “There’s not a lot of embellishment,” he concurs. “Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.”
Smyers apologized to his co-writers for not making “Bigger Houses” bigger, even though he thought the spare arrangement was right creatively. “There was probably no way it was ever going to be a radio single with this production approach,” he says.
But while in Los Angeles to work on The Voice, Dan + Shay began fantasizing about it as a follow-up to “Save Me the Trouble.” As fate would have it, Warner Music Nashville had the same thoughts. Warner released “Bigger Houses” to country radio via PlayMPE on Jan. 9. It debuted at No. 54 on the Country Airplay chart dated Feb. 17. Even though the song advocates an acceptance of life as it is, Reynolds can’t help but hope it gets big.
“The higher it gets on the charts, the more I’m encouraged by culture and where people are,” he reasons. “That’s honestly been so encouraging [that] other people relate to this because I think it’s easy to [think] we’re the only people who feel this way.” Regardless of how it performs publicly, “Bigger Houses” has made a huge impact on its creators.
“I think my competitiveness and drive was a big part of the reason I have gotten where I am,” says Smyers. “But I think it also caused me to miss a lot of great moments and cool things along the way. [“Bigger Houses”] changed that. I’m going to kind of move to a new mindset.”