Makin’ Tracks
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What’s past, according to William Shakespeare, is prologue.
And what’s past for Lady A is prologue for the band’s current single, “Love You Back.” It’s a song about a memory – a persistent, aching memory about what could have been – and its reflective sonics fit nicely with the trio’s past. That proved itself during the 2023 Request Line Tour after the trio began playing it regularly on June 30 in Fort Myers, Fla.
“It was in between ‘American Honey’ and ‘I Run To You’ in our set list, and that feels right in line with each of those songs,” says Lady A’s Dave Haywood. “It’s kind of got some warmth and organic stuff to it, We’re able to tell both sides of the breakup, which is kind of like ‘Need You Now.’ It checks a lot of boxes for us.”
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While the band’s classic sound is the prologue for the tone of “Love You Back,” the prelude to its creation is a TV show. Songwriter Emily Weisband (“Looking For You,” “Can’t Break Up Now”) doesn’t recall exactly what show, but she does remember a piece of dialogue in which a character admitted to a friend that he couldn’t break free from something in his past.
“He said [something] like, ‘I’m wrapped up in the memory,’ and someone said, ‘Well, it can’t love you back,’” she notes. “I massaged the way that it was set up for the song, but it was just a striking comment. And I remember thinking that is such a simple thing to say, but there’s so much to unpack in that. It just felt really achy and longing, and there was just something there for me. So I wrote it down.”
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Weisband tossed that idea out in several writing rooms, though it never quite landed until she showed up at the home studio of Lindsay Rimes (“Whiskey On You,” “Cool Again”) with James McNair (“Glory Days,” “Lovin’ On You”) last spring. Her co-writers got it, and Rimes began singing a nostalgic melody that kicked off the chorus, layering it over chords that evolved into a rather complex progression for a country song. Instead of just three chords and the truth, “Love You Back” infuses minor sevenths and suspensions that create instability and dissonance in the sound.
“A lot of that stuff just happens instinctually,” Rimes says. “I’d like to think maybe my chord encyclopedia is good, and then, if you can, marry that with the emotion of the song. That’s what I love doing in the room.”
The fairly linear melody at the start of the first verse certainly captures the vibe. It consistently hangs on to a specific note, much the way the singer is hanging on to an old relationship. Meanwhile, the writers filled the storyline with small images that suggest big meanings – some of them capturing moments that took place between the couple and others documenting dreams that went unfulfilled. A “Sarasota sunrise,” inserted into the chorus, stands out by evoking all kinds of scenery with just two words.
“You’re getting four S’s out of that alliteration with ‘Sarasota sunrise,’” says McNair. “That’s why it’s so sticky.”
Another image – a wedding under an old oak tree – is a sweet moment that never took place. The protagonist can’t seem to get past the disappointment. “We just had that line in there to add an extra layer of maturity and kind of turn the knife again,” McNair notes.
Rimes produced a rock-edged demo with McNair singing lead, and they left with a sense of accomplishment. “It was a solid work day,” Weisband says. “It was like a few hours of sitting and chipping away. If it ever got hard, it was a good kind of hard, like we knew we were on to something really good. So it wasn’t like banging our heads against the wall as much as it was just really digging in, making sure that it was as big of a hit as we wanted it to be.”
Their publishers pitched “Love You Back” to a few artists, including Jason Aldean and Cole Swindell, who seemed to like it but passed. Meanwhile, Weisband had a co-write with Lady A’s Hillary Lindsay for a female Christian artist, and a morning or two later, Weisband started to see “Love You Back” as a potential song for them. She texted it to group member Charles Kelley, who responded immediately. He loved the song, but wanted Weisband to join him in the studio and redo the demo as a male/female duet.
They changed the key to fit Kelley’s voice better and rejiggered a melody in the chorus to smooth out the potential harmonies. His bandmates gave it a thumbs up. “When I first heard it, the lyrics took me obviously to relationships that were important early on in college, and timeframes around dating and figuring out life,” Haywood says.
Working with producer Dann Huff (Keith Urban, Thomas Rhett), they softened the rock tone from the demo and found an appropriately hazy sensibility. Bassist Craig Young, who’d played on the band’s earliest sessions, returned to work with them, and he added some slinky, mysterious runs that sound like a fretless bass from a Paul Young or Gino Vannelli record. “I think it’s his technique,” Huff says. “He has a really slippery kind of [touch]. He just has his own thing, and he doesn’t play like anybody else that I know.”
Huff sensed that the part was a bit unusual, but he didn’t shy away from using it. “I ran into Dann at a show for Kane Brown or something,” Rimes remembers. “I’d just heard the song, and he’s so humble. He goes, ‘Oh, I hope that bass line wasn’t too busy in the pre-chorus.’”
Haywood noodled around with the track in his home recording studio, ultimately developing a mandolin riff that keyed off the melody, creating a sort of melancholy pastiche. And all three Lady A members ended up at Huff’s home studio to work on vocals with Kelley and Scott each taking lead on a verse, Scott singing lead on the choruses and Haywood filling out the vocal stack with a harmony part that sometimes usyed the dissonant notes in the chords. The unresolved sound of those harmonies mirrored the unresolved prologue in the text.
“None of them are what I would call traditional harmony singers,” Huff says. “Hillary is a little more traditional, with her gospel, bluegrass kind of background. But Charles always comes up with different harmonies, and Dave, certainly same thing.”
BMLG Records released “Love You Back” to country radio via PlayMPE on Nov. 27, and it rides at No. 47 on the Country Airplay chart dated Jan. 27. The past is prologue to a song with real potential.
“We’ve had so many people talk about a memory of a parent, the memory of a loved one they lost, and the sadness and the grief around that,” Haywood says. “When people start plugging in their own story, that’s where I go, ‘Okay, I think the song is somehow touching people’s hearts.’”
Justin Moore’s current single, “This Is My Dirt,” is a three-and-a-half-minute musical evolution.
It starts with acoustic-guitar finger-picking, as a quasi-folk song that transforms into a country piece and eventually finds Moore in a big-voiced, arena-level anthem that reinforces family values and personal history. It also subtly explores the modern urban/rural battle over America’s very identity.
Moore wasn’t thinking about that last part when he wrote it last spring, and neither were his co-writers: Randy Montana (“Beer Never Broke My Heart,” “I Hope You’re Happy Now”), Paul DiGiovanni (“How Not To,” “The Ones That Didn’t Make It Back Home”) and producer Jeremy Stover (“Why We Drink,” “You’re Like Comin’ Home”). They were instead gearing it toward Moore’s own circumstances. He lives on a 50-acre plot of Arkansas land that’s been in his family since the mid-1800s, and it provides a sense of security, of privacy and of identity.
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“We had horses and cows and animals, and we always had gardens,” Moore says. “The cows and stuff was just more of a hobby. It wasn’t really my grandpa’s main job – certainly it’s not mine, my parents’, either – but it’s special to be able to have it and be able to pass it down to my crew.”
Not everyone stays where they were raised, as Montana knows. He purchased some land in Tennessee and built a house, and when he visited the property during its construction, he recognized how much of the area’s farmland is undergoing a renovation.
“It’s just what’s going on in Nashville,” he says. “It’s growing so quick that a lot of these places are getting bought and turning into big subdivisions. And I get it. I love the growth. I love that people love this city. But I also have that nostalgia side of me. [The farms] are so aesthetically pretty that I wish they would stay that way.”
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On a two-hour drive with his sons in the spring of 2023, Montana contemplated how that transformation happens – how someone pulls into a driveway, approaches the owner with an offer and, suddenly, 100 acres becomes 150 homes. He pictured a farmer passing on the deal, and he came up with a title: “This is My Dirt.” Montana worked on it in Nashville with DiGiovanni and Stover, creating a verse and chorus, and he finished it in a Zoom meeting from DiGiovanni’s studio with Moore and Stover, who were in Destin, Fla.
Some of the original phrases got reworked in the process. Montana’s initial opening line, about “Arkansas dirt on his overalls,” became “hard work caked on his overalls.” And the set-up line before the hook shifted from “You can’t put a price on what it’s worth” to something less common.
“I’ll never forget it,” Montana says. “I remember Jeremy going, like, ‘Dude, I just wish it was something a little odd.’ And then he literally goes, ‘What if it’s like, “You can’t put a greenback dollar…”’ And I thought that was so cool, because it’s an old-school way of describing a dollar.”
Moore personalized “This Is My Dirt” a bit beyond that, replacing several words and jacking the chorus melody into a higher range. “Justin, with his voice, he can do things most other singers in town maybe wish they could do, as far as like range and hitting those high notes,” DiGiovanni says. “He really wanted to pick it up an octave in the chorus and really make that soaring melody.”
They tailored it further to his situation in a short, two-line bridge, the first line devoted to the five generations of Moores that have occupied his land. The math is correct – his kids are the fifth generation – and if the bridge’s last line follows his plans, Moore will be buried on the property, too. “My 14-year-old knows, ‘Hey, you guys are gonna be taken care of, and you can sell trucks and boats and this and that, but there is no selling this [land]. Ever. Period,” Moore says. “That will be written into our will.”
DiGiovanni produced a demo in Nashville around a light, but incessant, drumbeat, and Montana laid down a vocal, challenged by the enhanced melody that Moore had created. “He’s got incredible range, and so it was kind of a stretch for me as a singer,” Montana allows. “It’s effortless for him.”
They sent the track to Destin, and Moore recut the vocal at Stover’s house. Much of that casual take ended up in the recording’s final vocal. Moore and Stover, who co-produced with Big Machine Label Group president/CEO Scott Borchetta, cut the master instrumental tracks at The Castle in Franklin, Tenn., with guitarist Danny Rader augmenting Moore’s road band: guitarists Stephan LaPlante and Roger Coleman, keyboardist Wil Houchens, drummer Tucker Wilson and bassist Dave Dubas.
“They crushed it,” Stover says. “He has a really, really great band. I mean, these guys are super seasoned.”
Borchetta suggested Moore try to lift the vocal performance even further on the last chorus, and the singer hit some higher notes, despite attacking it in the morning when his vocal cords weren’t fully ready to go. “The first time I heard it, I got super goosebumps,” DiGiovanni says. “It’s an epic song at the end of the day, and to really kick it up one more notch at the end – I was like, ‘Yep, this is what it should be.”
The plot for “This Is My Dirt” makes a classic statement, as Moore’s character chooses his family’s history – and his kids’ future – over the greenback dollars. “The story of this song for me is the guy values the memories more than the money,” Stover says.
But the song also points to larger societal issues. Every time a farm becomes a subdivision, it reduces the nation’s food-production abilities and the inhabitable area for wild animals, sometimes including endangered species. “Everywhere we go we destroy it,” Moore says.
If, however, farmers routinely hang onto their property rather than sell to developers, the cities face more congestion. The issue, and how Americans incentivize the decisions around it, make a statement about who we are and what we value.
“This Is My Dirt” was written as a focused song about a man taking a stand for his family and his lifestyle, and it’s a good bet that most listeners will take it at that level, but it’s also a gateway to deeper conversations for anyone who cares to explore the topic further. Valory released “Dirt” to country radio via PlayMPE on Nov. 16, and it ranks No. 49 on the Country Airplay chart dated Jan. 20.
“We haven’t really done what you would consider maybe a lifestyle-type song in a little while,” Moore says. “We’ve done the beer-drinkin’ stuff, and we’ve had some love songs out. I don’t know that we’ve done one like this in a while. And I think that’s really been an important part of my career and has contributed to our longevity. It’s being upfront and honest with like, who I am as a person. I think it matters.”
One of the most engaging singles of Carrie Underwood’s early career was “Cowboy Casanova,” a warning to other women about a “snake with blue eyes” posing for his next victim in a barroom, delivered as big, KISS-quality guitars bashed out power chords underneath.
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Matt Stell’s “Breakin’ In Boots” is the male version of that song. Though the artist says, “I’ve never thought about that,” the similarities are all there: the night-spot locale, the exhortation to another guy about the danger an alluring female patron poses and even a reference to snakeskin. In this case, the serpentine comment is a note about the other man’s leather boots, but it’s easy to see the reptillian innuendo as an allusion to the woman’s forked tongue.
More than anything, it’s Stell paying homage to an item in his own closet.
“Years ago, I bought this pair of boots that I had no business buying,” he says. “It took them, I don’t know, about a year’s time to make ‘em. They drew ‘em to my foot and made ‘em and I remember when those boots came in. I’ll be married and buried in those boots. They’re python.”
The storyline of “Breakin’ In Boots” is personal, too. Stell had spotted a woman at a Nashville bar in March wearing boots that looked quite similar to his. He was in the process of closing his tab, and by the time he was free to go introduce himself and compare footwear, she was gone.
Within a few days, Stell staked out a writers room at Apple Music’s office in Nashville’s Wedgewood-Houston district for a local writing retreat. After a morning co-write, he shared the space that afternoon with writer-producer Joe Fox (“Last Night Lonely”); Los Angeles-based Nate Cyphert (“H.O.L.Y.”); and Ben Stennis (“’Til You Can’t,” “Make You Mine”), who presented the “Breakin’ In Boots” title. Everyone liked it, particularly Stell.
“The great thing about Stell,” says Stennis, “is he knows what he wants to do, and he’s very direct about it.”
The title allowed them to paint a barroom Barbie as someone who gets a kick out of using and abusing men’s emotions, and it was ideal for an aggressive musical framework, which would assist Stell’s concerts. With that in mind, Fox kicked into a four-chord progression on guitar that’s either in the key of C-major or the related A-minor; since each chord keeps rolling into the next, the home base isn’t as clear as it would have been if they were adhering to the rules that guided music-theory icon J.S. Bach.
“If you understand Bach, you could definitely understand Matt Stell,” Fox deadpans.
Stell wanted to drop John Anderson’s “Straight Tequila Night” in the opening line – that 1992 chart-topper documented a similarly bitter beauty – and it set a proper tone, but the writing wasn’t entirely linear. They bounced a bit between the opening verse and chorus.
“It’s like tightening up the lug nuts on a tire you’re changing,” Stell says. “You get them all started, and then you cinch ‘em down in kind of a star pattern. You don’t go one after the other. Somehow that kind of works.”
Midway through the chorus, they ID’d the woman as a “cowboy killer” who’s “shootin’” bourbon.
“Cowboy Killer” was a title Stell had tried to write previously – it’s also been the hook for album cuts by Jason Aldean and by Ian Munsick and Ryan Charles. And Dustin Lynch named his current album Killed the Cowboy.
“We all grew up talking about Marlboros being cowboy killers, at least in Georgia,” Stennis says. “We knew cigarettes are called cowboy killers, and so we kind of just thought calling a girl a cowboy killer instead was kind of cool.”
It certainly implies that she’s smokin’…
“Smokin’ cigarettes or just smokin’ beautiful,” Stennis quips. “Either one.”
The writing progressed without a lot of setbacks, but “Boots” still needed a bridge, and maybe a little more work on the second verse. Apple, unfortunately, was closing up shop for the day, and since they had maybe just a half-hour of work left, they went out to Stell’s Ford F-150 in the parking lot and kept writing there in public, undeterred by the prospect of passersby hearing their unfinished work.
“I didn’t really think about it at the time,” Cyphert says. “But I think we were excited about the song and were pretty wrapped up in it. We already had the chorus where we knew there’s something here. So I think that we didn’t even put that much thought into who could have heard or who was walking about.”
Despite that public-facing scenario, the parking lot is where “Boots” reached its most vulnerable moment. They fashioned a bridge that temporarily broke the repetitive chord structure, and the singer doubled down on his warning that the smokin’-hot woman would leave potential suitors broken. He implied that he had firsthand knowledge.
“Bridges are always my favorite part of the song,” Cyphert notes. “I think it’s nice to give a listener one more new little piece of something before you launch them back into a chorus, and in this case, I feel like the bridge is the most emotional part of the song. It’s kind of the soft side of the whole situation.”In the ensuing days, Stennis built a demo with a four-on-the-floor drum pattern that felt sort of danceable. Stell liked it, but had other ideas, and asked Fox to work something up with a little more of a rock tone. Fox infused more dynamics into it, paring back at the end of the first verse to a haunting piano background, which made the launch of the anthemic chorus even more pronounced. He also developed a down chorus for the post-bridge section, and rolled in a high-energy banjo part on the chorus to amp it even further.
“There’s a banjo on meth cranking through that song,” Stennis says.
Stell began using “Breakin’ In Boots” as the closer for his concerts almost immediately, replacing “Shut The Truck Up.” They subsequently recorded the final master at the Black River compound on Nashville’s Music Row during the summer with a cadre of studio musicians playing on top of Fox’s demo. Most of his playing on that demo bit the dust, though some of it remained intact.
“I would have programmed drums, but those would be replaced,” Fox says. “It was mostly the little things [that stayed in] — the baritone electric guitar that’s in there, that’s my guitar from the demo. Same with some of the other guitars that are in there, and there was my banjo from the demo.”
RECORDS Nashville released “Breakin’ In Boots” to digital service providers on Oct. 6, then shipped it to country radio via PlayMPE on Nov. 6. The woman who inspired it will likely never know she’s the subject.
And Stell still doesn’t know if she really is the heartbreaker the song implies.
“She could have very well been,” he allows. “I never got a chance to find out.”
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Some of the most important learning experiences happen outside of the classroom, in a school of life where people trade hearts and dreams and bodies — and find out that not everyone deserves those gifts.
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Ashley Cooke knows more about the school of romantic hard knocks than she prefers.
“As a young person growing up and falling in and out of love — and what you think is love, and what actually isn’t love — I think it’s easy to get so caught up in it,” she says. “I put up with a lot of stuff in different relationships that, if you listened to my whole debut album, it’s a lot about relationships and about toxicity.”
Shot in the Dark, which Big Loud released July 21, amasses two dozen songs in that general vein. One of those tracks — “Never Til Now,” featuring a guest appearance by Brett Young— earned Cooke her first gold award from the RIAA on Dec. 5. But “Your Place,” inspired by a major disappointment, has real potential at becoming her first radio hit. It boasts an easy, singalong hook; the kind of lyrical flip that historically plays well in country; and an innate believability, thanks to its connection to one of her harshest real-world lessons.
Cooke dumped a boyfriend when she discovered he had cheated on her, and even though she was definite about closing that particular door, he kept pestering her about maybe getting back together. Cooke had a hook, “It ain’t your place,” logged into the “note graveyard” — as she calls it — on her phone, and the idea lined up perfectly with the boundary-drawing abilities that she was developing.
“You basically kind of regain your power,” she observes, “by saying, ‘Hey, you know, you don’t get to know those things anymore. You’re the reason this thing broke. You should already know that this isn’t your place anymore.’”
“Your Place” was the first idea she offered during a co-write with Jordan Minton (“Best Thing Since Backroads”) at the Nashville studio of songwriter Mark Trussell (“Good Time”) on Aug. 16, 2022. It was that rare moment when an idea was immediately obvious, but surprisingly untapped.
“It felt like something that we hadn’t heard before,” says Minton. “But also we could see the road map for the whole song when she said it.”
Cooke had a melody in mind even before she introduced the idea, so when they buckled down, starting with the chorus, Trussell began developing a chord progression beneath the topline. The passage never quite resolved, moving from the four chord through six-minor, five and the one, though Trussell played a different note on bass, keeping the sound unsettled. Played on acoustic guitar, it sounded unintentionally like it derived from 1990s alt-rock. “I liked the emotional intensity of those chords,” Trussell says.
The chorus started with three half beats — “It ain’t your…” — before Cooke found her “place” on the downbeat of the measure, leading the singer from a hazy uncertainty into defined firmness. Thus, “Your Place” melodically mirrored the lesson the song embodied.
“It has a little runway into it,” observes Minton. “It makes the whole chorus feel more conversational. She’s not belting the melody out. It’s a very kind of subdued, conversational melody, which makes it just felt like she was talking to the person.”
When they attacked the opening verse, they populated the story with loads of furniture — both songwriter “furniture” (physical objects that create a sense of scenery) and literal furniture. They included a spare key to the guy’s front door, a Jeep in the driveway, a toothbrush on the bathroom sink and a whole neighborhood reference: “Haven’t been to your side of town in weeks.” It ranged from the intimate lavatory to the larger community, those details strengthening the double meaning when she scolds the guy at the chorus: “It ain’t your place.”
Verse two shifted from objects to behaviors, with the singer warning her ex to stop reaching out to her family or to her, because, of course, “it ain’t your place.”
Finally, they fashioned a bridge, determining that they needed to reinforce the song’s message a little more strongly. Cooke wanted to do something with the cliché “You made your bed, now lie in it,” and they batted around ideas for a bit until Minton blurted out the solution: “You made your bed, and I ain’t sleeping in it.” In addition to emphasizing the song’s message, it served a full-circle function, returning to the literal furniture concept from the opening verse.
“The bed is just even closer zoomed in to that same point, ‘I’m not staying at your place,’ ” Trussell says. “Sometimes on a bridge, you want to say something different. And sometimes in a bridge, there’s not something else to say, but maybe you can say it in a more cutting way or a deeper way. In this case, I guess it is a little bit more cutting because it’s more zoomed in.”
Trussell developed a demo with several guitars, a simple drum part and an atmospheric keyboard — a spare production that showcased the crafty lyrics but wasn’t particularly hooky. Many members of the team weren’t immediately enthusiastic about it, but as Cooke piled up tracks for the album, she kept insisting “Your Place” was important. She finally cut it during the last session for the project, on Nov. 14, 2022, at Nashville’s Ocean Way.
Producer Jimmy Robbins (Kelsea Ballerini, Maddie & Tae) endeavored to keep the final recording pared back, much like the demo, pulling it together while fighting a bad case of food poisoning. “It was horrible,” he recalls.
Drummer Nir Z, bassist Jimmie Lee Sloas, guitarists Kris Donegan and Ilya Toshinskiy, and keyboardist David Dorn used tremolo tones and pulsing parts to create a sense of movement without distracting from the message. They increased in intensity at just the right moments to enhance the song’s development.
“There’s not a ton of tracks on the record, but there’s enough there that the chorus lifts and kind of helps you feel the dynamic change,” says Robbins. “It’s not a super-rangy song where the range does all that work for you.”
Cooke recorded her vocal at Robbins’ place in one of the first sessions he held after moving to a new location. “She’s so good on the mic, and gets everything she needs to so efficiently,” Robbins says. “But this one in particular, I think we did, top to bottom, like probably three or four takes and probably most of it was the third take. She’s very good.”
Big Loud released “Your Place” to country radio via PlayMPE on Oct. 29, setting Dec. 11 as the official add date. It’s been satisfying on both a creative level and on a personal one.
“In a weird way, writing ‘Your Place’ was kind of my line in the sand of ‘Hey, I’m going to turn a new leaf and not deal with those kinds of relationships anymore,’ ” she says. “Singing that song every night on my headline tour, you feel that power kind of being put back into who you are and your worth and your respect for yourself. And it’s cool to see people in the crowd also responding to that.”
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His hometown — Willacoochee, Ga. — sounds a whole lot like “Chattahoochee,” so it’s not entirely surprising that indie artist RVSHVD’s current single, “Small Town Talk,” employs many of the same values that inhabit an Alan Jackson song.
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The red brick church, the tire marks he left on Main Street, his first broken heart and his grandmother’s grave marker all provide this relatable sense of RVSHVD’s upbringing, which is quite similar to the childhood that many country fans experience across America. In a very real way, “Small Town Talk” exists mostly because RVSHVD doesn’t tend to talk that easily about what he’s doing or where he’s from. He just kind of lives it.
“My dad will sit there and tell me the same story,” he notes, drawing an obvious contrast. “Even random people in the grocery store, if there’s somebody standing there, he’ll walk up — he don’t even know the guy — and he’s like, ‘This meat’s high, ain’t it?’ He don’t even know the guy! My mom, she ain’t going to say more than three words. That must be where I get it from.”
RVSHVD’s reserved nature was on full display in April 2021 when he took part in a writing retreat specifically designed to generate songs that fit him at The Penthouse, the home base for his manager, Jonnie Forster, located near the Beverly Center in Los Angeles. Four or five different rooms were set up with at least one “track guy” and one topliner, with each of those rooms aiming for a song in the morning and another in the evening across two or three days. It all started with a get-acquainted session, where RVSHVD shared a little about his personal history, his goals, his tastes and his philosophy. Still, the introduction wasn’t all that detailed.
“I think I remember Jonnie making some jokes about, you know, ‘Good luck trying to get a lot out of him, because he’s usually a man of few words,’ ” says singer-songwriter Josh Logan.
That’s apparently pretty accurate — it’s similar to the understanding that singer-songwriter Willie Jones, who shares Forster as a manager, has of him. “RVSHVD is like that,” Jones says, “simple, low-key, real chill, laid-back, really grounded and really thoughtful.”
Logan, Jones and Jason Afable all ended up in a room together that first morning, and as they sought a direction to write for RVSHVD, they fixated on that “man of few words” description. They batted around some ideas, then found themselves wondering what more they could learn about RVSHVD if, as an old adage suggests, the walls could talk. That became its own train of thought, and as they started chasing down what that could mean, Forster popped into the room for a bit. They told him where they were headed, and somehow the phrase “Small Town Talk” showed itself.
“Jonnie was a big part of that title,” says Logan. “I don’t remember if someone just threw out the title, or he really kind of got us going or encouraged us down that road.”
But it was enough to work from. Afable developed a bittersweet, arpeggiated chord progression on electric guitar, and they began building a hook that flipped the gossipy implication of “small-town talk” into a confident portrait of a man’s roots speaking for his character. The opening lines — “The way I was raised up/I don’t really say a lot” — came directly from the day’s conversation and set up the storyline that followed.
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The phrasing in that verse was conversational, leaning into a fluid, hip-hop vibe near the end of the stanza, then lifted into a chorus melody that emphasized repeated three-beat phrases: “small-town talk,” “grade school walls,” “right from wrong,” for starters. The chorus’ images and its melodic components were classically country, forming a contrast with the flowy, hip-hop lead-in. It hinted at an artistic range that also showed itself in the span from the verse’s lower melodies to the chorus’ higher notes.
“A lot of singers got maybe one sweet spot,” Logan notes. “But for RVSHVD, I feel like his low tone is so rich and deep, and I just love that tone. But then also he has that upper range that just soars. So when he hits that, it just makes our job easier because we can really utilize a different range, and we have [fewer] rules.”
The second verse painted an image of a broken-hearted young man who narrowly escaped tragedy, recounting an 18-year-old who drank a fifth of his dad’s Jack Daniel’s after his girlfriend broke his heart, jumped into his dad’s Cadillac and left tire marks on the road. The story wasn’t exactly RVSHVD’s — he changed the road to Main Street, his first overindulgence in alcohol was actually with Wild Irish Rose, and the tire marks he left were from playing with the gear shift in his mom’s car around age 10. But the narrative still hit close to home.
“When I first recorded the demo for it, I was getting choked up, and my wife, Angel, she was there with me,” remembers RVSHVD. “I’m tearing up, and I keep looking at her over in the chair, trying to make sure she don’t see me.”
The initial demo relied on the electric guitar part and drum with some other programmed parts thrown in. Afable produced several versions of it, though they had a hard time getting it right. RVSHVD, at some point, seemed to lose faith in it, so Forster suggested that Jones cut it. The song, he sensed, was too good to let go. Jones agreed on the song quality, though the opening lines didn’t really suit him.
“I talk a lot,” Jones says with a laugh.
He changed the street name and substituted Shreveport for Georgia to personalize it, but it never felt quite right.
“It was cool, but I felt like I was lying,” he admits. “Then he came back around, RVSHVD, like, ‘I want to do a version.’ I was like, ‘Do it and do it well.’ They changed the production, and I was like, ‘Whoa, that’s what I like to hear.’ ”
For that last go-around, Afable reached out to a multigenre Los Angeles production team, Dream Addix (aka singer-songwriters Michael Ferrucci and Chris Valenzuela, both of whom participated in the original retreat at The Penthouse), and they were able to meld just enough classic country pieces, such as fiddle and baritone guitars, to capture the song’s small-town essence and still feel contemporary. RVSHVD recut the vocals, and — since he had lived with “Small Town Talk” long enough —he had a different physical reaction to the song.
“It wasn’t tears no more,” he says, “but it was still chills on that.”
RVSHVD shot a video to “Small Town Talk” in his hometown, performing on the same football field where he used to play bass drum in the marching band and receiving a key to the city. The video and the song itself, released Nov. 3, shine a light on the same sort of small-town ethics at the center of country’s lexicon. RVSHVD knows it firsthand, and he expects the rest of his first album will create an even fuller picture of that heritage.
“Hopefully,” he says, “it’ll come out next year.”
For decades, Grand Ole Opry icon Roy Acuff wore the crown as country’s leading male, a title that was reinforced by the 1982 NBC special Roy Acuff -— 50 Years the King of Country Music.
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But that status was never 100% exclusive or guaranteed in perpetuity. In 1978, Newsweek proclaimed Willie Nelson the king of country music in a cover story, and TV Guide bestowed the same honor on Garth Brooks in 1994. In more recent years, that recognition has gone most often to George Strait.
Still, with some fluidity surrounding that nickname, singer-songwriter Ryan Larkins (“The Painter”) was stumped in September 2018 when his kids pressed him on the subject. He had been listening to a bundle of classic country songs — Strait, Nelson, Dolly Parton, Patsy Cline, Randy Travis — and when his oldest son asked who the king was, Larkins didn’t have an immediate answer. But one would emerge.
“I was sitting at a red light on Charlotte Avenue,” he recalls, “and it just kind of hit me out of nowhere, like ‘I know exactly who the king of country music is.’ ”
The answer was so good that Larkins decided the idea needed to be written: “The king of country music is the song.” He introduced the hook to a couple of co-writers, J.R. McCoy and Will Duvall, during an appointment at Curb Music Publishing that month. They needed no convincing to chase it down.
“Cool thing with this song,” says McCoy, “the song truly is the king of country music — because the song can’t die. That king is never going to be slayed. It will always live on forever.”
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They started work by addressing the question — who is the king of country music? -— with an obvious exercise, considering what artists deserved those credentials. After batting around names, they threw George Jones and Merle Haggard into a shortlist that formed the first three lines of the chorus: “Some say Jones, some say Travis/ Some say Strait, some say Haggard/ Are sittin’ on the throne.”
“Will came up with the Travis line,” McCoy recalls. “Even though it’s not a perfect rhyme with Haggard, it goes together so well.”
One more was too obvious to skip. “Strait had to be in there somewhere,” says Duvall. “That’s his thing. He is the king of country music.”
The Acuff part of the debate did not go ignored, though he’s such a historical figure at this point in time that they felt it might confuse younger country fans. “I love classic country,” Larkins notes. “But we talked about it, and we thought, ‘OK, there are quite a few people who are not even going to know those names,’ which is a shame. But to drive that point home, I thought we needed to stick with recognizable names.”
The chorus ended, of course, by identifying “the song” as king. Then they dug into the first verse, focusing specifically on the places where that king might be heard, including the church, the radio and in cities “from Saginaw to Houston.” The first town was a nod to an artist they couldn’t fit in, the late Lefty Frizzell, whose last No. 1 single was the 1964 chart-topper “Saginaw, Michigan.” Houston likewise acknowledged Larry Gatlin & The Gatlin Brothers Band’s final No. 1, “Houston (Means I’m One Day Closer to You).”
Verse two showed itself fairly easily. It centered on the connection between the song and the audience, recognizing how “the 9-to-5’ers in the trenches” appreciated the sound of the steel guitar and fiddle, but truly responded to the “three simple chords and the truth” in a great country song.
“It wasn’t really pounding our heads against the wall,” says McCoy. “That second verse, I think that went quicker than the first verse and the chorus.”
The chord changes from the classic era they were celebrating typically would occur on the first and third beats of a measure. But they kept “King” current by making those changes on the after beat through most of the song. They didn’t discuss it. It just happened naturally, with Duvall leading on guitar.
“We are writers in this time, and I think there was just something that felt natural about that,” he says. “The way that Ryan writes, those pushes didn’t feel off. Those actually felt right and fresh.”
Soon after they wrote it, Larkins played songs for THiS Music president Rusty Gaston (now Sony Music Publishing Nashville CEO), who was so moved by “King of Country Music” that he had Larkins stop and start over. When he finished, Gaston told him it needed a bridge. Larkins wasted no time; that night, he called Duvall, and it took them a mere 10 minutes to create the extra stanza. Since “King of Country Music” was about the song, they decided to list a few: “I Saw the Light,” “I Walk the Line,” “Amazing Grace,” “Always on My Mind” and “He Stopped Loving Her Today.”
“King of Country Music” got Larkins a publishing deal, and it secured his first label contract when he met with Jay DeMarcus’ Red Street in 2022. It was the first song in his audition, and DeMarcus — impressed by Larkins’ songwriting prowess and by his rich vocal tone — was tempted to sign him during that meeting, though he restrained himself for a day. DeMarcus and guitarist Ilya Toshinskiy co-produced “King,” with Toshinskiy inventing a melodic signature riff for the intro. The two also added a rising three-chord progression that led to the hook.
While “King” was a celebration of the song, DeMarcus and Toshinskiy were particularly sensitive about framing Larkins himself.
“The one thing that was paramount to everything else in cutting music on Ryan was making sure that the voice was the centerpiece,” explains DeMarcus. “When you have a voice like that, that’s so effortless and so easy to listen to and easy to digest, the track has to complement the lyric and the delivery. It can’t get in the way.”
DeMarcus played bass, plugged into the console so he could sit next to the engineer, while Toshinskiy was stationed on the Starstruck studio floor with drummer Jerry Roe, keyboardist Michael Rojas, steel guitarist Paul Franklin and guitarists Rob McNelley and Guthrie Trapp. The guitars and keyboards, in particular, utilized an ever-changing range of tones, reflecting a variety of styles that have supported country’s greatest songs through the years. DeMarcus later overdubbed some new acoustic piano licks, particularly a fill near the end of verse two that borrowed from the style of classic A-team musicians Floyd Cramer and Hargus “Pig” Robbins.
“The guitar parts, in particular, were something that we really, really concentrated on having the right mixture of traditional, really great country licks with laying down some great rhythm parts as well,” DeMarcus says. “The tune is so exposed, you need to make sure that the parts work together.”
Larkins cut his final vocals at DeMarcus’ home studio, overseen by a cardboard cutout of Cousin Eddie, Randy Quaid’s offbeat character from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. DeMarcus “pushed me,” says Larkins, “but it wasn’t an uncomfortable thing. I felt right at home.” “Anything I sang to him, he went right out and executed it,” DeMarcus adds. “It’s like taking a Ferrari out for a spin, you know. It’s really fun to have a voice like that to play with and just see what works.”
“King of Country Music” definitely worked. Red Street released it to country radio via PlayMPE on Oct. 12 with a Nov. 27 add date. With the trend toward ’90s country, Larkins’ debut single arrives at an opportune moment.
“I love where country music’s going right now — it feels like everybody’s welcome,” says Larkins. “But I feel this shift like, ‘Hey, we’re going to get a little more country here.’ And I love that.”
When families get together across America for Thanksgiving on Nov. 23, one of the key elements beneath the drumsticks, gravy and pumpkin pie is an appreciation for the people who had the biggest role in making us who we are.
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Or, at least, that’s how we think it’s supposed to be. In many households, the gathering will be a contest to see how long the day goes before long-held internal feuds spiral into arguments. And in other residences, relatives will recall the mom — or the uncle or the spouse — who’s no longer around, and regret will set in about not making the best use of the time while they were here.
In that spirit, Jay Allen’s “No Present Like the Time” serves as a reminder about living life to the fullest, a kind of Hallmark card that urges the listener to get the most out of every moment while it’s still possible.
Allen knows something about it. His mom died of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease in February 2019. As he trudged forward in the aftermath, he realized he had missed some opportunities — to ask questions, share a story or simply say, “I love you.” He mostly held his chin up, but when he competed on NBC’s The Voice, he was stuck in a lonely hotel room with only occasional 10-minute breaks. He used the isolation to finally start processing his grief, and the hurt began evolving into gratitude for what she had left him. He soon realized she would want him to get on with his life.
“I started thinking about the positives that I took from losing her,” he remembers. “This song came out of it.”
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Allen tried to write what became “No Present Like the Time” four or five times, but it never quite jelled. So he got in touch with songwriter Nate Kenyon and writer-producer-musician Micah Wilshire (Jason Aldean, Darius Rucker), and met them during a break from The Voice at Wilshire’s backyard studio in Nashville. Wilshire had just lost his father three months prior, and each of the writers felt a sense of purpose in the work.
“I remember talking about bits of wisdom I could leave my son and wisdom that maybe my dad left me, too,” says Wilshire. “Going along with what Jay’s story was, obviously, it was just kind of a raw day. But it was really cathartic.”
Wilshire played the foundational guitar for the co-write, and Kenyon contributed a simple melodic guitar line in the opening seconds that’s easily played on a single string. The opening verse was a sort of hodgepodge of ideas: “Take a picture, take a chance,” “Don’t hold your breath, hold your kids.” They didn’t form a particular narrative, though the images had a loose commonality.
“We weren’t really trying to have this progressive journey,” Kenyon remembers. “It was really like a gumbo pot of really important stuff.”
All those scattered thoughts led melodically to the chorus, where everything came into focus with a series of phrases about the tenuousness of the moment. “It can fade in a minute,” they warned, “no matter how you spin it.” The lines kept ticking toward the inevitable twist of the key phrase: “There’s no time like the present/ There’s no present like the time.”
But they didn’t stop there. Allen wanted to make the flip of the word “present” clear to the listener, so they threw in a post-chorus of short, stabbing phrases that underscored the new meaning: “It’s a gift, it’s all you get.” From that “gift” line, the post-chorus became a sort of mantra, concluding with a simple reminder: “Say ‘I love you.’ ”
“At first we were like, ‘We should do this as like a post- on the second chorus,’ ” recalls Wilshire. “And then I was like, ‘No, we should just do this every time as part of the elongated chorus.’ There’s enough meat to say that we feel like we should say it every time.”
The second verse took a philosophical tack -— “Help a stranger, help yourself/ Pull that Bible off the shelf” — that brings to mind the parable of the good Samaritan and ultimately encouraged the listener to remember what matters most. Then it rolled again into the chorus, with its focus on the urgency of the moment.
“All three of us have our own view of this song because we came from our own heads with it,” Wilshire says. “But part of it is the struggle of living in the now. It’s a struggle for everybody — really living, and being present, is so hard.”
They had said all that needed to be said, so they skipped writing a bridge, left space for a guitar solo and added one more swing through a down chorus that grew in intensity to close after two-and-a-half minutes.
Wilshire played most of the instrumental parts on the track — he overdubbed a crisp guitar solo later that night — but he purposely used Kenyon’s simple guitar part in the open and left some of the finger noise from playing the nylon strings on the track, too. “I am not a guitar player,” says Kenyon appreciatively. “I can strum, and I can do a little bit of picking, but you normally would never hear me playing guitar on a recording.”
Allen purposely over-enunciated on the vocals to make certain that the message connected with the listener. And he countered some of his rock background to deliver the song with an understated tone. “Miss Gwen Stefani on The Voice, she pulled me aside and was just like, ‘Jay, you don’t have to scream all the time,’ ” he says.
In all, it only took about 90 minutes for the three creatives to write “No Present” and get a rough recording down. “This is one of the songs [where] God’s a co-writer,” says Kenyon. “We didn’t overthink. We probably broke some of the normal writing rules, but it just felt good. And it felt right.”
Wilshire added some atmospheric guitar sounds that night and sang background vocals. And at a later date, when it came time to release it, Allen came back to Wilshire’s studio to rerecord the lead voice on a more expensive microphone. They ultimately decided the performance from the co-write had more heart and kept that version.
ONErpm released “No Present Like the Time” to digital outlets in 2022 and, after about a year, decided to bring it to country radio, issuing it via PlayMPE on Oct. 5. Allen also created a Christmas version, even though it’s not a holiday-specific song. Wilshire dropped light sleigh bells into the background and recorded a very basic keyboard part that lent a little extra dreaminess.
Allen, who joined the Alzheimer’s movement in his mother’s final years, has reportedly helped raise more than $100 million for the cause. “No Present Like the Time” has a sentiment that applies to an even wider community.
“My entire team realizes I have a message to convey, and that message is this song,” Allen says. “What I do as an artist really isn’t really about me. It’s about how can I utilize my little gift, my ability to write a song, to help people, to give back to someone, to make them feel not alone, to make them love the person next to them a little harder.”
It’s a good reminder at a time of Thanksgiving.
The moment that set Parmalee apart from its competition early into its career is also one that the band wished had never happened.
On Sept. 21, 2010, two robbers held up the group on its bus in the early morning following a show in Rock Hill, S.C. Drummer Scott Thomas shot and killed one of the assailants, but he was also hit by three bullets and went into a coma that lasted two weeks. For many acts, it would have literally been the end of the road. But Parmalee rallied together like a band of brothers — appropriate since Scott and lead singer Matt Thomas are indeed siblings and bassist Barry Knox is a cousin — and the group returned to its touring routine barely three months later, beginning with a New Year’s Eve show in Greenville, N.C.
After signing with Stoney Creek in 2011, the band released its debut single, the banging party song “Musta Had a Good Time.” But instead of playing off the tragedy to raise its profile, Parmalee — which includes guitarist Josh McSwain — did its best to avoid the topic. The guys wanted to be known first and foremost for their music, and the post-show shootout was tough to discuss.
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“We kind of steered away from it,” Scott says. “If somebody asked us, we would talk about it, but we didn’t make it a point. [It was] probably just [our] healing process.”
While the band had some hits with a sound that evolved into mainstream country-rock, Parmalee found its commercial groove in 2020 after teaming with Blanco Brown on the lighter pop tune “Just the Way.” It became the group’s second No. 1 single, which the act followed with the Country Airplay chart-topping wedding song “Take My Name” and the hypnotically sweet No. 3 single “Girl in Mine.” But when Matt went into a writing session on June 6, 2022, the goal was to morph their sound once more — leaning into the timbre of his voice.
“He can sing so high, and he can sing these crazy melodies, and we’ve never gotten to fully show that,” says producer David Fanning (Thompson Square, Avery Anna), who also manages the band and serves as a frequent co-writer. “That day, to me, was one of the beginning times of ‘Hey, let’s start showing what you can do. Let’s start shining a light on that.’ ”
Teaming with songwriters Abram Dean and Andy Sheridan, Fanning and Matt took that goal to an anthemic level, aiming for a song that could work as a film’s end theme à la “I Don’t Want To Miss a Thing” in Armageddon.
“We wanted a grand melody, we wanted a grand idea, we wanted classic-sounding chord changes,” Matt recalls. “Something big and universal was really the thinking.”
The chord changes fit that movie-theme ideal. A simple, descending pattern (A-minor-7, G, F) delivered a rock texture — a dark sound that, coupled with a hopeful story, had epic potential.
“It is full of tension,” says Matt, “but it’s a positive message.”
The opening verse promises delivers two promises: “You’re never gonna be alone” and “I’ll never be far away” — both pledges that seem particularly large coming from a band of traveling musicians whose life requires them to be away from home. Delivered over a pulsing piano that harkens to 1980s Chicago, the song ultimately lands at a heavier-sounding chorus that contemplates the couple in question as action heroes battling the world. In that stanza, the singer’s feelings become clear as he takes his last breath, announcing, “I’m gonna love you.” It was only when that melody arrived that the “Gonna Love You” title emerged.
The four writers worked diligently to craft a universal text of unending commitment, but while the sentiment was significant, evaluating their progress was difficult. The typical country song references specific, visual images — furniture, in Nashville songwriter parlance — but a song like “Gonna Love You” employs more ethereal, less defined, aesthetics.
“Writing a song that lives in the emotional world, personally, I feel like it’s harder, especially if you second-guess yourself,” Fanning says. “But also, I think it’s a chance for you to just say what you want. Hopefully, people realize, ‘Hey, they’re coming from a real spot, and we feel that way, too.’”
At the end of the day, it needed a bridge, but the writers weren’t sure where it needed to go. So they let it sit, and Matt and Fanning worked at it for months, periodically texting each other ideas for that last section or working through it in the lounge on the bus. Eventually, they used that bridge to refocus on long-term commitment, contemplating “our last day” and “the last words off of my lips.”
The demo pointed quite obviously to where the song needed to go, and the recorded version — cut at Nashville’s Soundstage — blended the Chicago vibe with other compelling elements: 3 Doors Down-like power-ballad guitar chords, old-school-pop electric piano, breezy finger snaps and hard-country steel guitar.
“We came from all that stuff,” says Matt. “That’s the music and the style that really impacts me as a writer and singer, and us as a band.”
As they lived with the song, Fanning and the Thomas brothers all separately began associating the epic nature of the production with Parmalee’s dramatic backstory. They had never embraced it publicly, but pairing the shooting with the emotional message in “Gonna Love You” — hanging together under duress, the threat that Scott could breathe his final breath at any moment — would easily explain the depth of the band’s bond.
On Oct. 3, Stoney Creek released “Gonna Love You” to country radio via PlayMPE. One week later, on Oct. 10, Parmalee filmed the video with the blood and violence from the robbery limited to short, crucial moments, while a replay of the workman-like club show and the traumatic hospital scenes propel the narrative. The video challenged the band internally as the musicians relived their precarious past. They processed some of the grief and fear that had lingered for 13 years, and they anticipate that recounting of their most tenuous evening will help fans better understand the band. It might also help some of those fans process their own pain. Just don’t expect Parmalee to make that incident central to its public marketing beyond this particular video.
“We’re always going to be uncomfortable talking about it,” Scott says. “I don’t think that’ll ever change, but [the video] worked out great.”
That video is expected to arrive Nov. 25. Meanwhile, “Gonna Love You” debuted at No. 60 on the Country Airplay chart dated Nov. 18, beginning a run that Parmalee hopes will vault it back to the top rungs of the list.
“It’s easy for me to sing, and every time I hear the song, I’m in the mood,” says Matt. “This is a special song.”
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When the Country Music Association hands out its 57th annual awards on Wednesday (Nov. 8), Hailey Whitters will have one of the best seats at the ceremony, given that she’s a finalist for best new artist. She’s a buoyant personality on a normal day, but Whitters is particularly upbeat about this long-sought career stage.
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“I always dreamed of getting to be a part of the CMA Awards,” she says. “It’s been 15 years I’ve been chasing this dream in this town, so there definitely have been moments where that window might have seemed to pass for something like that. So I’m elated to be a best new artist [nominee].”
The nod comes on the heels of her bubbly breakthrough single, “Everything She Ain’t,” and with her follow-up, “I’m in Love,” Whitters is solidifying the brand with two-and-a-half minutes of bright, seemingly random images sold with her blade-like vocal tone.
“I hope it kind of sends a message that I’m here to stick around for a while,” she says, “like, I’m not just this one-hit wonder — whatever — with ‘Everything She Ain’t.’ There’s more where that came from.”
“I’m in Love,” like Whitters, had to wait a long time for its opportunity in the spotlight, and with good reason. The title is, by itself, less than overwhelming. After Nicolle Galyon (“Tequila,” “half of my hometown”) logged it into the list of potential song titles on her phone, it was years — potentially a full decade — before she found a setting where it made sense to even suggest it.
“When we start a co-write and people start throwing out ideas, I usually start at the bottom because those are the most fresh, new ideas,” she says. “When you get in a rut and none of these ideas are sticking for whatever reason, sometimes I’ll just scroll way back up.”
That was the case on January 11, during a writing session hosted by Cameron Bedell (“Down Home,” “Found It in You”). They had booked an assignment with Lee Thomas Miller (“In Color,” “It Ain’t My Fault”) and ended up postponing and re-booking several times for over a year. Once they got into the room — nothin’.
For 90 minutes, they batted around ideas, unable to find anything that got all three of them interested. So Galyon reached back for “I’m in Love,” which was better than it sounds because it came with a device: This is in that, this is in that, and I’m in love. As simple as that was, it had potential with the right this’es and that’s.
“The whole thing was, how can we make whatever they’re going to be as unique as we possibly can?” says Miller.
The only other parameter they set was to develop a ’90s sound for it. Bedell started in on an easy chord progression, Galyon crafted a melody around short phrases, and she and Miller traded images, beginning with an opening line — “Beers in the bucket, suds in the sink” — that gave a wink to Sara Evans’ “Suds in the Bucket.”
“When [Nicolle] and Lee were going back and forth, they were going so fast,” Bedell recalls. “They were like, ‘There’s chicken in the skillet.’ ‘Oh, yeah. And there’s ice in the drink.’ But then there’s ‘this in this.’ I was sitting there going, ‘Yeah, yeah, all that’s good,’ as I’m chunking away at the guitar. It was just like a puzzle we were all trying to put together at the same time.”
They stuck faithfully to the “in” theme until they worked their way to the chorus, where they signaled the new stanza by flipping the sentence to “Ooh, ooh, I’m out of my mind.”
“We’d given a lot of information, and then you get to the chorus, you need a break from it,” Miller explains. “We went the opposite at the most important line. That’s the first time — the chorus breaks the device.”
But that shift also represented a change in the focus of “I’m in Love.” “The verses are all environmental, you know; painting the picture of what’s going on around her,” Galyon notes. “But the chorus is what’s going on inside her.” They tossed the “in” device out at two more key points: at the end of the last verse and in a bonus line — “Chills down on my spine, hearts on the line” — in the final chorus.
There were a few other oddities. “Deers in rut” is a hunting term — they essentially reference animals in heat in the song’s chorus. They also incorporated some astrological material in multiple spots: man in the moon, stars in a line and Mercury’s all in retrograde. “‘Sister’s in her room smokin’ God knows what’ and the ‘Mercury’ line kind of make it feel a tad modern and a little edgy, because everything about it is so wholesome,” Galyon observes.
They came back a second time, mostly to revise the way the chorus closed out. Galyon, who had to run, sang a quick vocal for the demo, fully intending to improve on it later. Bedell worked further on it, and the creative team for his publisher, Liz Rose Music, got excited about it, quelling the last of his minor doubts.
“After we finished it, I was like, ‘I don’t know if anyone is going to like this because maybe they feel like it’s too much random stuff,’ ” remembers Bedell. “That was my fear at first.”
Whitters held meetings with publishers to consider outside songs, with Galyon — the head of her label, Songs & Daughters — in the room. Liz Rose co-founder Dave Pacula told Galyon how much he liked “I’m in Love” — a surprise to Galyon, who didn’t think the demo was finished — and Whitters and her husband, producer Jake Gear, had him play the demo, which was not on the day’s agenda. By the end of the first chorus, they were ready to put it on hold.
“It just felt like me — so like my language — and felt like something I would say,” Whitters recalls. “The energy behind it is kind of flirty, kind of playful, fun. It just felt really strong.”
Gear booked a fairly large band for two days of recording at Nashville’s Sound Emporium on February 27 and 28, though the group doesn’t sound all that big. The players all find moments to shine in small bursts, particularly impressive since the windows between the song’s phrases are fairly tight.
“It’s just so fun having everybody there at once instead of resorting to overdub sessions,” says Gear. “There’s a lot of stuff on the track, but it’s not necessarily too busy. It’s because they know what everybody’s doing.”
Gear and engineer Logan Matheny added some hand claps — shades of “Everything She Ain’t” — and they got Michael Rojas to provide some old-world character with an accordion part. “Haley loves accordion,” Gear says. “She’s got family down in Louisiana — we spend most Easters down there — and there’s this Cajun restaurant we go to all the time to hear Zydeco. And then I’m a sucker for [John] Mellencamp. He had a lot of accordion in his stuff, and that heartland rock sound has a little bit of a throwback, old-timey thing.”
“I’m in Love” became the title track for a summer EP, and Big Loud and Songs & Daughters released it to country radio via PlayMPE on Sept. 26. It tracks at No. 55 on the Country Airplay chart dated Nov. 11. Coinciding with her first CMA nomination, Whitters would like to think it’s a sign her career details are working just like the stars in the text.
“They all kind of lined up,” she says. “I’m just really excited for this new era. It just feels very fun. And very country.”
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“You’ll never know unless you try.”
Throughout history, some form of that advice has been given to people who doubted their own entertainment ambitions. Almost no one gets a movie part without auditioning, or has a hit as a recording artist without stepping up to the microphone.
But the competition is stiff and there is no sure-fire metric to guarantee that following the path pays off. So nearly every creator who has chased their dream for any length of time questions periodically whether they should quit.
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That makes HunterGirl’s debut single, “Ain’t About You,” one of those personal songs with universal relevance. In 2021, she had been in Nashville for five years, playing the bars, writing songs and networking with other aspiring artists and musicians. As some of them made important steps forward, she continued grinding it out with no visible opportunities on the horizon, and as her fatigue increased, so did her pessimism about the road she had taken.
“Nothing was really happening, and a lot of my friends were getting record deals and publishing deals,” she recalls. “I was honestly just kind of the friend falling behind and not really knowing if I was on the right path or if I made a mistake.”
One day in autumn 2021, HunterGirl seriously contemplated giving up on her dream. She gritted her way through a lunchtime performance at a bar on Nashville’s Lower Broadway, which she thought might be one of her last shows in Music City. At 6 p.m. that same day, she faked a smile during a Tuesday-night Zoom writing appointment with veterans, whom she regularly helped process their experiences through songwriting in the Freedom Sings program. One particular woman, who had been holding back for months, announced that she was ready to put her story into a song, and HunterGirl helped her find the words and begin to release some of her turmoil. As often happens in those sessions, they ended the exercise in tears, and the veteran offered a heartfelt thanks: “Hunter, I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
After the call, HunterGirl shed more tears, and she instinctively picked up her guitar and began questioning what it would have meant to this veteran if she had given up on music. She began writing about her feelings — essentially processing her inner world the same way she asked the veterans to do it.
“I call this one my 45-minute conversation with Jesus,” she says. “It was supposed to be my thinking-about-leaving-Nashville song, and ended up being my staying-in-Nashville song.”
She crafted an opening line about how she had begun the day, reviewing all the reasons she should quit. But the feedback from the veteran about what a difference HunterGirl had made for her changed the journey in the song.
“That’s where the thought, ‘What if it ain’t about you?’ came from,” recalls HunterGirl. “It’s about how many people that you could be letting down, or the people that you can touch.”
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That line would become a key part of the “Ain’t About You” chorus, which she decided should change each time it occurred. The first chorus was easily written about a little girl who needed encouragement to believe in herself, the second chorus acknowledged a young boy who needed permission to cry — and the final chorus, about providing hope through her music, was written with the veteran in mind.
She devoted the second verse to the trap of comparing one’s life against other people, a problem compounded by social media. She felt that it needed a bridge before she could conclude, and that posed the biggest hurdle — though with “Ain’t About You,” that lasted only a matter of minutes. She ultimately decided to put quitting in a spiritual dimension, cinching her decision to stay in Nashville.
“If you throw it all away, you’re telling God He made a mistake, but He never makes ’em,” she says. “Whatever He was planning was bigger for me than anything that I could imagine and greater than I could come up with, and I just had to be patient.”
HunterGirl had no intention of ever playing it for anyone, but it at least changed her mindset. During the next week, friends encouraged her to audition for American Idol. Days later, she played another bar show, and at the end, a former Idol crew member suggested she tryout. She took it as a sign, and the audition led to participation in Idol’s 2022 season, where she finished runner-up and earned a recording contract with Wheelhouse.
She still had no intention of sharing “Ain’t About You” until a barbecue where fellow Idol alums Noah Thompson and Chayce Beckham asked her to play something she had never played for anyone else. Their overwhelming reaction made her more open with the song, and at a later event, BMG Nashville president Jon Loba walked in as she was about to play it again. He insisted it needed to become a single.
So HunterGirl cut the song at Nashville’s Blackbird Studios with producer Lindsay Rimes (Nate Smith, LOCASH), who helped her make “Ain’t About You” a little more consistent by repeating a prechorus melody that originally appeared only once. The session was her first time to record in a significant studio, so he gave her a mini-tour to make her feel at home and took efforts to get her comfortable with the musicians. Since “Ain’t About You” was so personal, he asked her to perform it for the band so they could fully understand how it fit her.
Guitarist Ilya Toshinskiy fashioned the acoustic foundation similarly to the way she played it, forming an intimate undercurrent.
“I didn’t want to take away from the guitar, and the vocal — that was sort of the DNA of the song,” notes Rimes. “I wanted it to sound like she was sitting there playing the guitar, even though obviously, Ilya was playing the guitar. That’s the foundation of the song.”
Only three musicians played prior to the first chorus, when the entire band joined the proceedings, though they still approached it lightly. Electric guitarist Sol Philcox-Littlefield weaved in faint atmospheric touches, then hinted at an emergency siren in the background of the decisive bridge.HunterGirl recorded the final vocals at Rimes’ studio, where he again took steps to make her feel comfortable. They revisited the difficult emotional circumstances in which she wrote “Ain’t About You,” and she ended up in tears again as she delivered those feelings in her performance.
“The most important thing is whatever is happening in my room here between the mouth and the microphone,” Rimes says. “That’s the magic. I think the environment, my energy — everything contributes to a great vocal.”
Wheelhouse released “Ain’t About You” to country radio via PlayMPE on Oct. 2. HunterGirl is believed to be the first female country singer on a major label to appear as the sole writer of her first single since Mary Chapin Carpenter in 1989. The experience has affected the way that HunterGirl writes songs.
“Sharing the most personal parts of my life -— like all my insecurities, everything that I was dealing with at the time — it made other people feel comfortable to feel that way, too,” she says. “And so this song completely changed the way that I wrote from here on out. Everything after this is going to be full heart, my full honesty, everything in me 100% because there’s no telling who else is going through the same thing.”