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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.”
Perception is reality.
Not literally — reality is reality, and nobody’s perception of it is 100% accurate. But what people perceive sure feels like reality, and sales executives, politicians and lovers are prone to take advantage of that in the marketplace of ideas. Sorting through what’s real and what’s not is one of the trickiest aspects of life in the dating pool.
It’s also the foundation of Tigirlily Gold’s sophomore single, “I Tried a Ring On,” a gorgeously fragile account of a woman who recognizes the part she played in her own misperception of a relationship that didn’t pan out.
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“I love this song because it is open-ended,” Tigirlily’s Krista Slaubaugh says. “Whatever happened in the relationship, it obviously ended for a reason. At one point, maybe they were really in love — this is kind of my take on it — but I think people can fall madly in love, and then sometimes one person falls out a bit, and there’s not really a reason for it. It’s just a sad reality.”
The song’s reality took some time to unfold when Krista and sister Kendra wrote “I Tried a Ring On” in late 2022 at Stone Jag, a studio in Nashville’s Berry Hill neighborhood owned by producer-songwriter Pete Good (“We Don’t Fight Anymore,” “Y’all Life”). They tossed around ideas for roughly 90 minutes that morning with songwriter Josh Jenkins (“Tucson Too Late,” “Fancy Like”) without lighting a spark. Finally, Good brought up “I Tried a Ring On,” a title that played out a little like a movie scene in his mind.
“Think about somebody who has been in a relationship, even maybe walking with their mom through the mall — or by themselves or walking with a friend or something — then swinging into the jewelry store because they’re just kind of letting their mind go down that road a little bit like, ‘Hey, this could become that kind of thing,’” says Good. “It’s like, ‘Oh, I feel so stupid. I tried a ring on it, let myself buy into this thought.’”
His co-writers certainly bought into the title — “I don’t think Pete knew what he had,” Jenkins says — and the two guys started building a moody atmosphere on guitar. One of the Slaughbaughs had a piece of descending melody that became the opening part of the chorus, and Jenkins married it to a lyric about a relationship that “flew to the sun” before it burned out. The singer is more circumspect than angry.
“When we hit the line ‘I ain’t even mad about that,’ it feels like this girl is on her therapist’s couch,” says Jenkins. “It felt so human.”
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“I Tried a Ring On” evolved into an unconventional song. The chorus held a wispy quality that contrasted with biting verses, a reversal of the typical structure where the chorus has the most energy. A one-line pre-chorus — “Don’t mean nothing now” — appeared at the end of the second verse instead of at the close of the usual first verse. They added a post-chorus the second time through, doubling the length of that stanza, and they used it again on the third chorus.
“To me, that’s the climax of the song,” Jenkins says. “I see the girl, I see her put the ring on, she hears the song, she sees the dress — she sees all of it. That was a decision we made that we wrestled with: Do we just do that once? It felt satisfying to do it twice.”
They spelled out some of the relationship’s details in the verses, particularly the opening frame, where the singer admits she “jumped the gun” on the coupling. The phrase became a stark part of that first section after Krista introduced it. “I ran track in high school, so I literally thought about starting a race,” she says. “But also, when you fall in love, there’s no time line for that. You just kind of fall headfirst. You can’t really help how you fall and how quickly you fall.”
They decided, however, that they had jumped the gun on the verse melody and ended up setting a second writing session to do some more work on that aspect of “I Tried a Ring On.” “It was a little more pop-focused and a little more wordy,” Kendra recalls. “It just did not fit the vibe of what the song needed to be.”
During the demo session, Good and Tigirlily developed a bridge that relied on melancholy harmonies rather than a solo to enhance the song’s mood. “It’s supposed to be more atmospheric, in a sense, and ethereal,” notes Good, who produced both the demo and the final master.
The demo set the tone for the master tracking session, held again at Stone Jag with a band that featured drummer Evan Hutchings, bassist Craig Young, keyboardist Alex Wright and guitarists Sol Philcox-Littlefield and Todd Lombardo, who developed a slightly syncopated acoustic riff to create a sense of motion. Hutchings’ drum part evolved as the track progressed, adopting an almost militaristic attitude that added drama to the sound. Steel guitarist Justin Schipper slid a bundle of leading tones into the mix during overdubs that knit the production together.
The Slaubaughs recorded their vocals individually, though they were both present through the whole process. They primarily created two-part harmonies; however, Krista slipped a third voice in at key moments. And Kendra had little trouble with the lead, singing “I just feel stupid” during the chorus in a manner that captured the frustration that would accompany a stiff encounter with a disappointing reality.
“We had been singing this song live for probably six months to a year before we ever even recorded it, so we were pretty comfortable with the vocal parts,” Kendra says. “Sometimes when I sing it live, I get a little angrier with it. But for the record, I wanted it to be more of a bittersweet, sad, kind of confused feeling. I probably did five to 10 different takes, and then Krista came in and put her vocals on top.”
Tigirlily Gold had several options for singles, but when the act polled fans, “I Tried a Ring On” was a clear-cut winner. Monument released it to country radio via PlayMPE on Jan. 5, and it was the highest-debuting single on the Country Airplay chart dated Feb. 10, arriving on the list at No. 55.
“We had been singing ‘Ring’ at every show that we had played for country radio, every show we played outside — fairs and festivals — and we were singing it in bars and loud places,” notes Krista. “Everywhere we went, it still packs a punch, which, to have a ballad that still gets through to people in loud environments, this is something special.”
They’re rightfully hopeful that perception lines up with reality.
“At the end of the day, it’s out of my hands what the song does,” Kendra says, “but I believe in it so much that I would have regretted it if it never had gotten the opportunity.”
The history of the rodeo is closely intertwined with country music, to the point that it has played a role in a fair amount of the genre’s hits.
George Strait’s “Amarillo by Morning,” Moe Bandy’s “Bandy the Rodeo Clown,” Suzy Bogguss’ “Someday Soon,” Dan Seals’ “Everything That Glitters (Is Not Gold)” and Garth Brooks’ “Rodeo” and “Much Too Young (To Feel This Damn Old)” embraced the sport’s lifestyle for their storylines. And the rodeo provided a useful metaphor in Leon Everette’s “Midnight Rodeo,” Jake Owen’s “Eight Second Ride” and Vern Gosdin’s “This Ain’t My First Rodeo.”
Gosdin’s title, which was built on a familiar adage, gets reversed in Restless Road’s new single, “Last Rodeo,” applying images from the arena to a broken relationship.
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“I’ve always heard people talk about, you know, ‘This isn’t my first rodeo,’ ” says group member Colton Pack, “but I’ve never heard anybody do the flip and the play on words of saying, ‘It’s not my last rodeo.’ ”
That changed when Pack spotted some form of the “last rodeo” phrase in public, most likely on a T-shirt, and he logged it into his phone as a potential hook. He unpacked it on April 3, 2023, when the band had a co-writing session with Trannie Anderson (“Heart Like a Truck,” “Wildflowers and Wild Horses”) at the home studio of songwriter-producer Lindsay Rimes (“World on Fire,” “Love You Back”) in West Nashville. The appointment was a challenge. Anderson had a last-minute lunch with Lainey Wilson to celebrate “Heart Like a Truck,” and to accommodate it, they started at 9 a.m.
“In our world, that might as well be frickin’ 4 a.m.,” Restless Road’s Zach Beeken notes.
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They felt pressure, given that they had a tight three hours to make something happen, but Pack’s “this ain’t my last rodeo” suggestion gave them something strong to work with out of the gate. The phrase applied to someone rebounding after getting dumped, and it fit the perseverance the band needed to keep pushing forward after its formation in 2013 on NBC’s The X Factor.
“I’m not a cowboy at all,” says tenor Garrett Nichols. “I didn’t grow up around riding bulls or riding broncos, but every time we would spit out a lyric, I could definitely see into it. I related to the past heartbreak stuff, I related to ‘Back in the saddle, back on the road’ [or] ‘I might be bruised, but I ain’t broke.’ I just thought about all the different times that we’ve tried to do this and that, and it didn’t work out, and we just kept going.”
They dove into the chorus first, bookending the stanza with the hook at the front and the back. They filled it with an anthemic melody designed to showcase their harmonies, with Nichols on the high end and Beeken in the lower register.
“One of our biggest challenges, being a trio and doing what we do, is finding a key for the song that works for everybody’s voice,” Beeken says. “We’ll find the key we can push Garrett to, to where it’s like, ‘This is as high as it can go, I can’t go any higher,’ trying to find the range for him because the chorus is the part of the song you want to soar and smack the hardest.”
Once they had a good overview of the chorus, they were better able to start solving pieces of the puzzle in other sections, too. “We kind of worked on different sections,” says Anderson. “I remember getting the chorus structure kind of figured out and filling in most of the lines, but then singing the verse for a while. I remember popcorning a little bit.”
They loaded the text with rodeo and cowboy allegory, though the words fit so easily that the references aren’t always obvious.
“It needed rodeo language, but not so much that it took the raw emotion out of it,” Anderson says. “And there was a lot of raw emotion in the room writing the song because of what they’ve been through as a band, but also, Zach had just gone through a breakup and was able to write through that [experience], too. Finding the balance of raw emotion and playing on the metaphor was a pretty natural thing.”
Once the verses became clearer, they popcorned back to the chorus to tie up some of the loose ends, but a mistake actually improved it. That section originally began on the downbeat of a measure, but they sang the hook this time as a pickup to the next line, and it changed how the rest of the chorus unfolded.
“This drops harder in the chorus, [with] the music cutting out and then hitting the chorus [hard],” Rimes says. “We had some of the lyric in there, but we had to add stuff in, in the middle of the chorus. We kind of had a bit more space because it was starting earlier than before.”
Rimes filled that space with an obvious audience-participation part, threading an easy-to-remember “ride, ride, ride” lyric, ideally designed for pumping fists in the air on an arena floor.
They wrote it quickly enough that Anderson made her lunch with Wilson, and Rimes continued working with Restless Road on a demo. Beeken sang the first verse; Pack took the second, one octave higher; and the full force of the harmonies raised the impact even more on the chorus.
The band joked about adding a neighing horse to the intro, and Rimes quickly inserted that sound from his plug-in collection. When the group prodded further about having a horse galloping off in the closing moments, Rimes pulled up that effect, too. They never expected to keep those sounds, though they provide another means of separating “Last Rodeo” from the pack.
“We just thought that was hysterical when we made the demo,” recalls Rimes. “But it stayed in there, and then we got used to it. It’s actually pretty cool.”
The band had a 3 p.m. appointment with the label, and when the group left the studio, Rimes finished the demo and sent it in the middle of the meeting. As a result, RCA approved it for the next session within hours of being written.
They recorded the final version at Nashville’s Soundstage, mixing in new parts from studio players with some of the remnants from Rimes’ demo, including arena-level drums. Restless Road likewise bolstered its original demo vocals with additional takes, filling out the chorus harmonies by doubling all three guys’ voices. Beeken also slipped in a unison part one octave below the melody, thickening the whole sound.
Nichols, in addition to singing high harmonies, contributed a signature whistle — with shades of ’60s Sergio Leone western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. “I don’t know why, but I’m just really good at whistling,” Nichols says. “We did it a couple times, put some reverb on it and then just slapped it in.”
RCA Nashville released “Last Rodeo” to country radio via PlayMPE on Dec. 11 with an official add date of Jan. 29. Its message, filtered through an image of a cowboy getting back in the saddle after being thrown, is fairly universal; resilience is a highly admired quality, for Restless Road and for everyone else.
“The chorus can apply to anything in life,” Pack says, “whether that be a relationship, whether that be somebody standing in the way of a dream, whether that be telling yourself, ‘You know what? I can bounce back.’ ”