Makin’ Tracks

When the digital age began, one of the attractions was the promise of an easier life — information more readily available, machines doing math problems, the possibility of shorter work weeks and lives of leisure.

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Instead, of course, the world is simply more complicated. Employers expect higher output, easy information creates distraction, and the combination of multiple phone numbers, email addresses and social media accounts means a constant barrage of spam and misinformation. It’s easy to understand why a big chunk of the population would prefer to turn back the clock in one or more aspects of life. And that’s a sentiment at the heart of Tyler Hubbard’s newest single, “Back Then Right Now.”

“I think there’s an undertone of a life lived less complicated, more simple,” he says. “And I do think the music, you know, it’s not over-thought. It’s just smooth and easy, and easy to listen to and, hopefully, kind of takes you there sonically.”

The day went fairly smoothly when Hubbard wrote the song in April with David Garcia (“Meant To Be,” “Ghost Story”), Jessie Jo Dillon (“Memory Lane,” “Break Up in the End”) and Geoff Warburton (“But I Got a Beer in My Hand,” “Best Thing Since Backroads”) at Garcia’s studio. Warburton arrived about a half-hour early to work on musical ideas, and they landed on one built mostly around two simple chords.“His guitar collection, they’re some of my favorites to play, but he handed me a new one that was in a strange tuning,” remembers Warburton. “I was excited because that’ll make me play something that’s not difficult, and then he was playing something on the Telecaster, I think. It just lined up perfectly with what I was playing.”

Once the whole group was assembled, they picked that musical foundation over a couple of others, then fished for a lyrical theme or story that would match the tone. Dillon brought up “Back Then Right Now,” a title she had logged in her phone after a trip to East Tennessee, where her uncle was frustrated by his new-model truck.

“He was like, ‘I could use a little back then right now,’ ” she recalls. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God, that’s such a great song title.’ And so I wrote it down, and that day we wrote it, that was the first title anyone said.”They tackled the chorus first, planting the title in the first line and at the end, and giving it a compact, rolling melody in between.

“A lot of times if you get too rangy — if the hills are too big and the valleys are too low — sometimes it’s harder to sing or harder to remember,” notes Hubbard.

Once they got the chorus started, they began periodically hopping to the verses. Hubbard turned the title’s “back then” to a recurring “back when,” setting up pieces of the past that have changed: photos are for posting, a Walmart has replaced a fishing spot, and the stick shift has all but disappeared.

“Some of that ‘back then,’ we could probably stand to learn something from that,” Garcia says. “Turns out that if you slow down a little bit, you might enjoy this gift we have of life a little bit more.”

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Accordingly, they balanced out some of the surface nostalgia with points of deeper meaning. One of the places where they struggled with that was the chorus’ setup line. Hubbard eventually pulled out “makin’ life count,” a sort of stealth reminder to live in the moment.

“Dave is really good at music stuff, lyrics as well, but he’s a really good leader of ‘You know, that might not feel right,’” notes Warburton. “He was saying a couple of times, ‘That line’s not right, that line’s not right, still not right.’ And then we just kept throwing out lines. I think Tyler had that line, and that really sort of tied it in a bow for us.”

Well, almost. They decided it needed a bridge, though staying with the song’s simple theme, they kept the same chord progression and made the section short, reemphasizing how life was lived in the moment in more innocent times.

“We were more interested in the melody doing something than we were in giving more information,” Dillon recalls. “We kind of felt like we had said what we wanted to say already, and so it kind of became about wanting to change the mood a little bit melodically.”

Garcia finished the demo overnight, keeping that smooth foundation, and Hubbard used it to introduce “Back Then Right Now” to his co-producer, Jordan M. Schmidt (Mitchell Tenpenny, Ingrid Andress). The demo was strong enough that when they tracked it at Sound Stage, they played it once for the musicians and let them decide what enhancements might work.

“They did a great job — you gain a couple of new things that were really cool that weren’t there before versus just settling with where it was,” says Garcia. “When we heard the final, I was stoked, man. It just sounded so good.”

One key upgrade came in the verses. Jonny Fung inserted pulsing eighth notes on electric guitar, creating extra motion and tying into the “back then” title by approximating a sound familiar on such ’80s throwback titles as The Police’s “Every Breath You Take,” Mike + The Mechanics’ “All I Need Is a Miracle” or Fleetwood Mac’s “Everywhere.” Schmidt stacked at least two — maybe more — threads of that part to get a chunky sound.

“We probably threw about 50 guitars on there,” Schmidt exaggerates. “I don’t really know, but it’s never just one.”

Garcia’s demo had used a 16-second intro — long by 2023 standards — and the final version kept that format, but slipped the title in over the top to introduce the hook up front. That was also a step toward ’80s sensibilities, when Exile’s “I Can’t Get Close Enough,” Don Williams’ “Lord, I Hope This Day Is Good” and Ronnie Milsap’s “Stranger in My House” all employed intros that exceeded 20 seconds.

“Sometimes I feel like the intro can really help set the mood,” says Schmidt. “Why does every song’s vocal need to start at six seconds and the chorus needs to hit by 36 seconds? That’s when it kind of gets a little too mathematical. I understand there’s a game to play. But at the end of the day, a great song is a great song. You know, ‘Stairway to Heaven’ [with a two-minute intro] was a hit. Maybe you’ve heard of ‘Hotel California’ [with a one-minute-plus intro]?”

Drummer Nir Z made the short bridge even more meaningful, dropping into a halftime feel for a couple of bars before returning to the original rhythm, as if the song was stuck in the past for a bit before kicking itself back into the now. Fung played a guitar solo, though Schmidt had second thoughts and asked him to try something else later; Fung overdubbed a Dobro solo at home. Hubbard made a minor change in the lyric, too, revising a reference to “asphalt” in the opening line to “blacktop,” creating an internal rhyme with “back” and “black.”

Hubbard had several contenders for his next single, but EMI Nashville ultimately went with “Back Then Right Now,” shipping it to radio on Sept. 7 via PlayMPE. It ranks at No. 38 after five weeks on the Country Airplay chart dated Oct. 21.

“At the end of the day, this feels unique right now for the format, but also familiar and nostalgic,” Hubbard reasons. “It’s sort of like a good second cousin to ‘Dancin’ in the Country.’ I just felt like it was a good follow-up to that.”

Years ago, when Brad Paisley was racked with pain from a ruptured disc during a trip, a long-forgotten doctor gave him a prescription for OxyContin with instructions to take it as needed.

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“I knew enough at that point,” Paisley remembers, “to rip it up.”

But the experience also gave him enough information to understand how his home state of West Virginia had become ground zero for an opioid crisis. Paisley and co-writer Lee Thomas Miller (“In Color,” “It Matters to Her”) addressed the topic in “The Medicine Will,” a gripping overview that appears on Son of the Mountains: The First Four Tracks, an EP released Sept. 29 that teases his next album. They could have easily turned “Medicine” into a trudging ballad of anger and grief, but instead embedded it in a midtempo package that hints at the strength of resilience. Though to be clear, anger is distinctly buried in there, too.

“I really do believe that this might be the best song I’ve ever written,” notes Paisley. “I can say that humbly. I do think that it’s as important as anything I’ve ever written — whether anything I’ve ever written is important. It feels that way because I know what it can mean to where I’m from. If you’re going to write a song about where you’re from, you want it to do some good.”

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Paisley was already deep into the creation of his next album when Miller watched the Netflix series Dopesick, which premiered Nov. 10, 2021.

“It’s very damning,” Miller says. “It’s not a feel-good 30-minute [sitcom], but the more I researched after watching it, it was pretty accurate.”

The project documented how Purdue Pharma, owned by the Sackler family, twisted government connections and processes to con a vulnerable population into believing that OxyContin was nonaddictive. The company persuaded two congressional Republicans — Tennessee’s Marsha Blackburn (now a senator) and Pennsylvania’s Tom Marino (no longer in Congress) — to introduce a bill that made it difficult for the Drug Enforcement Administration to penalize drug companies. Once it passed, Purdue specifically induced coal-mining communities in West Virginia, eastern Kentucky and western Pennsylvania to use OxyContin to quell the pain caused by back-breaking work. Some 12 million pills were shipped to Kermit, W.Va., a town of just 350 people. As a result of the campaign, one county in the state estimated 10% of its population was opioid-dependent.

“Everywhere where [drug companies] should have been shut down, they doubled down,” says Miller. “They knew they would make all this money — I mean, they made Saudi Arabian money.”

Watching Dopesick, Miller scribbled down a thought: “If the livin’ here don’t kill you/ The medicine will.” He brought the hook and the topic to Paisley, who admits he was skeptical: “I said, ‘Yeah, I think that’s an interesting idea. I don’t know how good a song it would be.’ That was my instinct.”

But they toyed with it anyway at the bar in Paisley’s home studio, The Wheelhouse. Paisley established an acoustic guitar feel that sounded as dark as “Whiskey Lullaby,” and he grew more positive about the idea once he had the twisted opening lines to the chorus: “There’s coal under the mountains/ And gold in them there pills.”

“Whenever I play it for somebody, I watch their eyes because I need to make sure that they hear the word,” Miller says. “Once you get the word ‘pills,’ you know what we’re talking about.”

They sketched out some of the song’s repetitive themes, particularly one built around digging holes. They addressed digging the mines, digging graves for overdose victims and digging a hole that’s “hotter than the sun” where the Big Pharma executives can roast for eternity.

“No one’s gone to jail yet,” observes Paisley.

He “wrestled with the melodies,” he says, careful to make it inspiring and listenable, but not Pollyannic. Ultimately, the structure builds from a dark-sounding verse to a transitional pre-chorus (Paisley calls it a “channel” because it works almost like a mine shaft, transporting the listener to the next section), ultimately reaching an energetic chorus, offset by the stinging bite of bluegrass harmonies. Once they had a verse and chorus completed, Paisley went to the studio upstairs in a converted bedroom and put down an instrumental bed.

They continued working on “The Medicine Will” for several weeks, chipping away until they had a song that told the story without naming names and without wallowing in victimhood. Much of its power rested in their ability to shape a narrative that plays out like a news piece but still feels like a call to action.And when the band swung into action, “The Medicine Will” found its full expression. Working with co-producer Luke Wooten (Dierks Bentley, Dustin Lynch), Paisley augmented his road crew with three bluegrass pros — Dobroist Jerry Douglas, vocalist Dan Tyminski and mandolinist-vocalist Sierra Hull — whose presence underscored the Appalachian foundation of Paisley’s home state. Midway through tracking, Kenny Lewis switched from an electric bass to an upright model, enhancing that acoustic sound, though Paisley wasn’t strict about following the bluegrass tradition.

For starters, he still utilized drummer Ben Sesar on the track, and he added burning electric guitar at a later date. Additionally, he had Kendal Marcy apply a Hammond B-3 organ. Like each of the eight instruments in the mix, it gets subtle moments to make its presence felt without ever dominating the proceedings.

“That was one of the pieces of glue because if you’re going to make a song about this area of the country, it’s not all just bluegrass,” Paisley says. “There’s something about that B-3 that feels churchy.”

While he worked on “The Medicine Will,” Paisley heard from Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), who — unaware of the song — invited the singer to appear June 1-2, 2022, at a GameChanger prevention education event in White Sulphur Springs. Paisley performed the song live for the first time at the bipartisan gathering for 500 kids. He later shot a video in a Beckley, W.Va. mine.

“I can’t even express what that was really like, standing there singing and the water trickling, and the echo of it, and you’re however-many-hundred feet below the ground,” recalls Paisley.

The video features a number of recovering opioid victims as well as Manchin, who confirms the pharmaceutical abuse behind “The Medicine Will”: “They preyed on the people who did the hardest work, who sacrificed the most, because they figured they’d be the most dependent.”

“The Medicine Will” fits into a bigger arc in Paisley’s public persona. His recording of “Same Here,” featuring Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy (included in the new EP) and his participation in The Store, a grocery outlet that provides free food for needy Nashvillians, demonstrate his intent to use his platform for something bigger.

“It would be so much simpler, easier, to just be like, ‘OK, here’s a song about love, or a situation, or something funny,’ ” Paisley says. “But that isn’t what I’ve done. For better or worse, this is a phase of my career where I have to say something.”

It’s not something talked about much outside of creative circles, but there are few more obvious — or more effective — production techniques in modern music than the down chorus.

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After establishing the singalong part of a song with a couple of refrains, dropping the instrumental energy the third time around allows the listener to keep singing while the track prepares for the big finale. It happens in songs like Dan + Shay’s “Speechless,” Michael Ray’s “Whiskey and Rain” and Lainey Wilson’s “Heart Like a Truck.”

But Jelly Roll takes the down chorus to another level in “Save Me.” There is no third chorus, so there’s no real opportunity to drop the supporting instrumentation. But for a singer to call himself a “lost cause” and announce that he’s “damaged beyond repair,” well, it’s tough to get more “down” in a chorus than that.

“Early on in my songwriting I chose connection and honesty,” Jelly Roll says. “I didn’t feel that it had to be songs that only seemed like everything was fine, especially when the songs that helped me, or that I saw help my mom the most, were songs that you felt someone was speaking to you from an honest space about something you were going through. That’s where you find connection.”

Jelly Roll really needed connection when “Save Me” came into existence. It was June 2020, when the pandemic had shut down the nation for three months. With tours canceled and plenty of unstructured free time, he desperately wanted to make some music, and he booked Nashville’s Sound Emporium for two weeks to hammer out what would become the Self Medicated album. Deep into the process, songwriter-producer David Ray (“Son of a Sinner”) picked out some basic chords to unwind a bit during downtime.

“I remember sitting in the corner, and I was just kind of noodling on the guitar,” he says. “They were looking at their phones and just kind of taking a break, and I started noodling on that song, and I just reached out, ‘Somebody save me from myself.’ And Jelly was like, ‘What is that?’ ”

That “save me” starting point became the opening line, and they chased the song down in linear fashion, each line leading to the next. Jelly Roll was admittedly immersed in vices, and “Save Me” turned into a painful confession.

“I was in the thick of it — I knew the lifestyle I was living at that moment wasn’t one that could be sustained,” he says. “I needed to make changes in my life, and it was my personal cry for help. Thankfully now I can say I’ve made a lot of positive changes, but I’m still a work in progress.”

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The song unfolded initially with drawn-out phrases that established his ailing spirit, then changed textures when the drinking and smoking arrived atop insistent triplets in a mantra-like prechorus. The chorus breaks into a melodic lift, even as Jelly Roll unveils his “lost cause” admission. They crafted four lines of brokenness, but still needed four more. Instead of taking that second half of the chorus to another place, they repeated the four lines again.

Ray instinctively questioned that. “I do remember bringing that up,” Ray says. “He just felt so passionate about what those four lines said, he wanted it to be a repeat. He just wanted to drive that home.”

“Sometimes,” Jelly Roll explains, “people will hear you but not understand the gravity of what you are saying until you say it again.”

They inserted a simple, wordless melody at the close of that chorus to break from the heaviness, then moved forward again. The second verse opened with an empty sky and concluded with the singer washing away his pain, presumably with booze. And in case the listener didn’t fully understand the first time around, he repeated the mantra-like pre-chorus again, then repeated the “down” chorus. No silver lining.

They recorded it right away, with Ray playing a spacious guitar part as Jelly Roll delivered the difficult, emotional truth. His singing wasn’t perfect — some of the vocal was pitchy, and he didn’t always use full diaphragmatic support — but, like a George Jones performance, Jelly Roll’s imperfections accurately conveyed the depth of his feelings.

“I don’t know how to go beyond the compliment of Billboard saying it’s a George Jones vocal,” Jelly Roll says with a laugh. “Do we get to make that a quote? Is that on the record?”

A couple of days later, Jelly Roll did a live studio version of the song for YouTube with Stu Stapleton playing a piano part that would appear on the final version. Originally, the song had a different title until just before he released it as “Save Me.” The airy production — with Jelly Roll, Ray and Robin Raynelle singing the wordless section — would be certified platinum by the RIAA.

Once he signed with Broken Bow, Jelly Roll envisioned an alternate country rendition, and Wilson was an obvious duet partner. He called on a longtime friend, producer Zach Crowell (Sam Hunt, Dustin Lynch), to guide it, and once Jelly Roll’s team mentioned the slow-build arrangement that he’d been using on “Save Me” in concert, Crowell had a direction that made sense and alleviated some fears.

“The song was already a hit for Jelly Roll and already kind of changed his life,” Crowell says. “I was very nervous to go in and touch it.”

Guitarist Sol Philcox-Littlefield developed subtle, ethereal sounds to provide some appropriate texture, while drummer Grady Saxman waited until the second chorus to fully engage, dragging on that second prechorus in a way that underscores the despondency in Jelly Roll’s lyric. “It’s intentional, because, no offense, the original guitar part is dragging right there,” Crowell says, noting that was a fortunate imperfection. “We didn’t want to replace David Ray’s stuff because it would turn amazing and perfect.”

Crowell and Jelly Roll were both in the booth when Wilson came in to Sound Emporium to record her vocal. The enthusiasm was palpable, even if that mood is a bit counterintuitive for a heavy song. “I did a few takes and after each one, Jelly stood up behind the glass, all hype, talking about how much he loved it and pumping me up before the next take,” she remembers. “He has this way about him where he can encourage vulnerability and feeling just through his genuine excitement and the way he lifts you up.”

Their version was released to digital service providers on May 11, ahead of the Whitsitt Chapel album, and it generated an immediate response. They performed it together on NBC’s Macy’s Fourth of July Fireworks Spectacular, and country radio began playing it before the promotion department started working it, bringing it to a different audience than the rap- and rock-based following that originally took it platinum.

“Jelly has done a beautiful job of not only shedding light on his journey but giving fans a safe space within his music,” Wilson says. “Being able to reach beyond genres is a true testament to how many folks this song speaks to.”

Stoney Creek released it to terrestrial broadcasters through PlayMPE on Aug. 22, and it ranks at No. 26 on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart and No. 7 on Hot Country Songs. On Sept. 7, it earned a Country Music Association Award nomination for musical event of the year. Jelly Roll’s “down chorus” has had a profound effect. Not only has the audience responded to its honesty, he used it as motivation to address the issues it laid bare.

“Seeing how the song impacted the lives of so many people almost immediately, it helped me find the strength to make the lifestyle changes I needed to make,” he says. “‘Save Me’ truly changed my life in more ways than one.”

Sometimes shadows conceal the truth, but often they reveal it.
Several of country’s historic songs have placed the singer outside of a house where the actions occurring inside — usually conveyed through shadows — announce the hard truth that a relationship is over.

Jim Reeves’ 1957 recording “Two Shadows on Your Window” and Wynonna’s 1992 single “I Saw the Light” each find the singer spotting two silhouettes in one embrace, a sign that the protagonist is a permanent outsider. Toby Keith’s 1994 drive-by “Who’s That Man” agonizes over the guy living with his former family and sleeping with his ex-wife. Rhett Akins’ “That Ain’t My Truck” spies the other guy’s pickup in the driveway and the “shadow on her wall,” and knows he’s lost a competition.

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The title of Scotty McCreery’s new single, “Cab in a Solo,” doesn’t obviously announce that scenario — on paper, its meaning is likely confusing to all but the most ardent wine connoisseurs — but as its plot unwinds, McCreery’s character is outside of his now-former girlfriend’s house, watching a kiss play out in the shadows on her bedroom wall. When she turns off the light, it doesn’t take much imagination to know what he imagines.

“It’s not a smiling song,” he says. “But I’m happy to sing it, because it kind of takes me back to what I grew up listening to.”

What McCreery listened to in his youth was ’90s country, and “Cab in a Solo” was an attempt to emulate the sound of that era. He hosted a writing retreat at his home in the North Carolina mountains this year with songwriter Brent Anderson (“Lonely Tonight”) and songwriter-producer Frank Rogers (“Five More Minutes,” “I’m Gonna Miss Her (The Fishin’ Song)”).

The two guests did their homework ahead of the trip, trying to set up some ideas that would fit the bill. Rogers had a title that neither he nor Anderson loved — to this day, they don’t remember the original. But Anderson changed it, Rogers reshaped it, and it finally became “Cab in a Solo,” shorthand for “cabernet in a Solo cup.” Anderson got a laugh when he imagined the final hook: “Drinkin’ cab in a Solo/ Solo in the cab of my truck.”

“That’s the cool thing about co-writing,” says Anderson. “The point for me is to write something with somebody else that you wouldn’t write alone.”

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They paired it with an almost grinding signature guitar lick. Then they brought it up to McCreery in North Carolina after writing several other songs with a scenic view from his back deck on March . McCreery was in on “Cab” from the beginning, but it required that they map out the story a bit. That was one of the easiest parts of the exercise.

“We have to be in a truck, and you have to have wine,” Anderson quips. “Your path is kind of laid out inherently in the hook already.”

They landed on a guy who realizes during a break in a relationship that he wants to move forward. He buys a quality bottle of red and heads to her house to rekindle the romance. And of course, he discovers when he arrives that, based on the shadows in her bedroom, she’s already moved forward with someone else. Instead of writing it in linear fashion, they bounced among different stanzas — “Maybe a little bit of the ADHD/squirrel thing happened,” suggests McCreery — and they settled on a Silver Oak 1998 as the brand at hand. The outdoorsy name has a country vibe, though more importantly, it’s an expensive option (about $115, according to several websites) for a blue-collar guy. And it fit Rogers’ taste.

“At some point, I just threw out Silver Oak because I liked the wine,” he says. “It was a little deeper detail with that point, and if he’s going to make up for something, it’s not going to be [Trader Joe’s] Barefoot or Two Buck Chuck. It’s going to be something pretty good.”

Once the protagonist realizes his plans are dashed, the guy addresses his options in verse two: Does he take the bottle back for a refund? He ultimately decides to drink it right there at the curb while his ex is making out in the house. It’s a tragic story, though told with tongue in cheek and with a melody that would appeal to George Strait.

After they initially uncorked “Cab in a Solo,” the song tumbled out in a scant 90 minutes. Anderson whipped up a basic demo with a recording rig on the back deck around 1 a.m., and McCreery gave it a quality vocal. Its finish was rich, too.

“This was the song that I just kept coming back to when I was in my truck running errands or if I put my earbuds in before bed,” says McCreery.

Rogers co-produced “Cab” with Derek Wells (HARDY, Maddie & Tae) and Aaron Eshuis (Ryan Hurd) at Nashville’s Blackbird Studios. Wells did a basic guitar part, knowing he would have overdub opportunities later, then spent the rest of the session in the control room with the production team. Steel guitarist Mike Johnson was given plenty of room to affect the texture, and drummer Evan Hutchings played snare on the rim during the verses, subtly re-creating the ’90s vibe amid some other modern textures. The arrangement was relatively spare compared with more contemporary productions, and the musicians were careful to make all the parts work together.

“When the tracks are less dense, everything has to match,” Wells says.

Later, Wells went to work on the signature lick. They had pitched the master recording higher than the demo, but in the new key, the original riff “didn’t have the gusto to it,” he says.

“We kind of overhauled it,” he adds. “It’s kind of stacked up and doubled, with some more lower octaves in some different positions, just to beef it up and make it feel like it was as impactful as it had been on the demo in the new key. I think there’s even a baritone [guitar] tucked in underneath it to make it feel really pronounced and strong.”

McCreery delivered the final vocal without complication under Rogers’ guidance, though they took one additional pass and experimented with some vocal ornaments at the end of a few lines that approximate Keith Whitley. “I haven’t really recorded a bunch of those songs where I can really do that kind of stuff,” says McCreery. “It was just me having fun with it, and it really turned into a signature part of the song.”

“They’re not easy at all,” Rogers says of those inflections. “I promise you, if I get to the point where I decide to do [“Cab”] on a writers night, I will not be doing that.”

With McCreery’s affinity for the song, its clever wordplay and the current interest in ’90s country, it was an obvious choice for a single. Triple Tigers released “Cab in a Solo” to country radio via PlayMPE on Aug. 18, and it floats at No. 41 on the Country Airplay chart dated Sept. 23. No one in the shadows took issue with the decision.

“It was a consensus,” says McCreery. “Doesn’t happen a bunch, but when we have consensus, don’t second-guess it.”

“Question the Universe” is a strange title for a song. It’s fairly abstract, doesn’t roll off the tongue and doesn’t sound like it rhymes with anything in a comfortable, singable way.

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But it sure fits independent artist Teddy Robb. He had a near-miss on a relationship, meeting a woman he thought was his soul mate just days before she moved to Los Angeles to live with her boyfriend. He had a near-miss on a songwriting opportunity when Old Dominion guitarist Brad Tursi started — and finished — a song about Robb’s almost-relationship before Robb had arrived for a writing appointment. And Robb had yet another near-miss when the song came along shortly after he lost his recording deal with Monument and had no label that would issue it.

All of that gives real perspective to the “Question the Universe” title. Robb struggled to find any meaning in the series of events, and his performance of the current release is heartbreakingly convincing.

“The emotion of it is so raw that when I’m singing it, it kind of takes me right back to that moment,” he says.

That moment was St. Patrick’s Day 2022. Robb met Leah Lawson, a former Miss South Carolina, at Nashville club Red Door, where the green beer was flowing. They had an instant, undefined connection and ended up talking and partying for much of the night. “It really started off the very first night, very platonic, just like friends,” he remembers. “There was sparks, but [she] was very up front: ‘I have a boyfriend. I’m going to L.A.’ ”

During the evening, they ran into Tursi, and the party expanded. “We hung out that night, and everyone kind of slept over at my house,” recalls Tursi. “We just stayed up late and indulged ourselves in music and all the other things you can indulge yourself with, and then I guess the next day, they’d really fallen for each other.”

Lawson and Robb met up daily during her final days in Nashville, and he admittedly tried to get her to stay. She insisted on sticking with her California boyfriend, and Tursi watched Robb experience torturously teasing circumstances. Robb planned a co-writing session at Tursi’s house, and before it commenced, Tursi sat down at a piano that he had recently purchased.

“I don’t really know how to play it that well,” Tursi says. “Accidents can happen, which makes it more inspiring sometimes.”

Tursi stumbled across some melancholy chords and began recounting Robb’s heartbreaking tale with conversational, out-of-meter lines about meeting over drinks and forming a seemingly doomed connection. It eased into an aching chorus melody that accompanied an accurate summation — “Right person, wrong time” — with the singer adhering more closely to the beat for singalong ease, even as he reveals his anger toward God. Tursi didn’t know where he was going until he reached the chorus’ final line: “It’s shit like this makes me question the universe.”

Musically, that chorus started on a two-minor chord — an unsettled sound that the listener intuitively hopes will resolve. The entire eight-line stanza dodges root-chord finality, though, until the last line, wrapping itself in the situation’s inherent frustration. “It’s hard to accept that, [when] you actually like the person and there’s seemingly some insurmountable obstacles in your way,” says Tursi. “The chorus definitely feels that.”

He kept going with it and finished “Question the Universe,” then texted it to Robb, who was en route for the co-write when it appeared on his phone. Surprisingly, he wasn’t at all bothered that he had missed out on crafting it.

“I was flattered because it was so accurate — Brad paid attention so well to our story,” Robb says. “I mean, I’m still a kid from Akron [Ohio] who moved to Nashville to write songs and play country music, and to find out a guy wrote a song about you … I still have those kinds of moments.”

On March 25, following a send-off dinner for Lawson, Tursi played “Universe” for the ill-fated couple on piano at his house, reflecting their turmoil back to them even as they lived it out. Tursi stealthily whispered to Lawson that he knew she was gone for good.

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Indeed, when she reached California, Robb told her not to call him again unless she moved back. But he decided he needed to record “Question the Universe.” Following the rules hadn’t necessarily paid off, and “Universe,” he felt, broke a bunch. “It starts with the title, ‘Question the Universe,’ ” he says.

It’s definitely outside the norm for country music, as are the melancholy chords, its piano foundation and its ballad tempo. But the differences are what make it stand out, as it did when producer Pete Good (Brandon Ratcliff, Alana Springsteen) reviewed a bundle of songs that Robb presented him. “When he played that, I was just like, ‘Holy crap, what is this?’” recalls Good. “It doesn’t sound like anything else. It’s a one-of-a-kind song.”

They recorded it on July 22, 2022 — four months after it had been written — at Good’s Stone Jag Studio with drummer Evan Hutchings, bassist Craig Young, guitarist Sol Philcox-Littlefield and pianist Alex Wright. The team agreed with Robb that they should break some rules with it.

“We knew that with this song in particular, we could take liberties,” Good explains. “It felt like it needed to be kind of dreamy, atmospheric, surreal — whatever word you want to use — and then we wanted to kind of crescendo toward the end of the song as well, where it just got more intense as it went on.”

Hutchings’ drum part felt sluggish — appropriate support for a depressed protagonist — and Philcox-Littlefield created a swath of razor-like sounds with a spacey vibe — “We’re talking about the universe here,” says Good — and a sitar-ish guitar break. As much as 90% of Robb’s final vocal came from his performance with the band as he relived every ounce of the pain in Lawson’s departure. It was so personal that he delivered even the difficult, out-of-meter sections with conviction.

“It stretched me vocally,” Robb says. “I just tried to do my best to sing what I was feeling, and so that’s probably why it feels like it pushes and pulls, as far as the meter goes. [The feeling’s] important when you’re telling a story like that.”

Good brought Sarah Buxton in to handle background vocals, and the sections where she sings unison octaves are particularly haunting. “It sounds like another person in a song versus a cast of people,” notes Good. “I wanted it to feel a little bit more like there’s an actual, singular female in the song with Teddy. It feels more intimate.”

Robb released it independently on April 20 with Gator Michaels Consulting. After Cumulus expressed some interest in playing it, Robb overdubbed a clean hook line — “Shit like this” became “Things like this” — and released it to radio on July 28 via PlayMPE.

The developments are making Robb more optimistic about his career path. And there’s a postscript regarding Lawson, too: A little more than a week into her time in Los Angeles, she realized it hadn’t been the right move. She returned to Nashville, pursued the relationship with Robb, and the two are now engaged. He has fewer questions for the universe than he did in March 2022.

“I think it takes heartbreak in this town,” he says, “to prepare you for the really good stuff.”

The first time Cody Johnson heard “The Painter,” it took him home emotionally.
After the first line, “She talks about the future like she’s flipping through a magazine,” it seemed familiar.“I’m like, ‘Well, there’s Brandi,’” he says, referring to his wife.

After each of the remaining five lines in the opening verse, he had the same thought: “There’s Brandi.” And when the chorus hit – “I don’t remember/ Life before she came into the picture” – he was pretty much gone.

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“Tears started welling up in my eyes,” he recalls.

It was no question after that moment that Johnson would record “The Painter.” But what particularly makes the song work is that his sentiment about his wife is not entirely unique. The words also apply to the marriage of Red Street Country singer/songwriter Ryan Larkins, who conceived the basic idea – that a woman brought meaning and color to a man’s life – with his wife, Chauntay, in mind.

“I was getting to go and do what I love every day, and I was just talking about how I wouldn’t be here without her,” he says of the original co-writing session. “I just had a few words, like ‘masterpiece,’ ‘colors,’ ‘canvas,’ and I kind of had this thing: ‘She made a masterpiece/ Yeah, she’s the painter.’”

Larkins introduced the concept during a writing appointment with Kat Higgins (“Knowing You”) and Benjy Davis (“Made For You”) in the front room at Nashville’s THiS Music on June 26, 2019, the month before the company’s co-founder, Rusty Gaston, left to head Sony Music Publishing Nashville.

“It was basically like, ‘This is my wife and our life, she’s the painter, she’s the color, she’s making everything come to life,’” Higgins notes. “We were just smiling. It was such a fun song to write because we all love the character.”

Davis started in with a rolling guitar figure and casually dropped the poetic opening line about “flipping through a magazine,” though the rest of “The Painter” wasn’t quite so effortless. They wanted to sell the painting theme in the lyrics but were very specific about not overdoing it. The second line suggested a non-painting artist, and the end of verse two intentionally avoided rhyming. They moved around between stanzas, placing images where they seemed appropriate. The enthusiasm increased when the chorus honored her patience: “With every wall I built, she saw a canvas.”

“I don’t remember who said that, or remember when it was said, but that’s when we knew we were on the right path,” Davis recalls.

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In the third verse, the woman gives her approval to her man’s blue periods, a sort of recognition that rough patches offer value of their own. The writers talked a bit about writing a bridge for “The Painter” – they might have even tried one or two versions of a bridge – but ultimately dropped that plan and inserted a four-bar space for a solo.

“When we left that day, we knew we had something special,” Larkins notes. “And so we kind of talked about it a little bit through text. And we’re like, ‘You know, we probably need to revisit this because it just doesn’t quite land.’ So we got back together and worked on it.”

They had determined that “masterpiece” was a little over the top, so when they reassembled a few weeks later, that line became the primary focus of the day. “’My life’s a masterpiece and she’s the painter,’ we felt like that was a little too grand,” Davis says. “We had to kind of strip that away and be like, ‘No, it’s not a masterpiece. I see it this way, and she sees it that way.’”

Within a couple hours, they changed it to “My world was black and white, but she’s the painter.”

Higgins oversaw the demo, with a resonator guitar delivering the rolling effect while a kick drum kept the pace moving by hitting every beat once the first chorus came in. Larkins sang it like he meant it, and Higgins provided a vocal countermelody in the chorus. The version that Johnson would hear was almost master-quality, and his interest affirmed the writers’ diligence. “The fact that he wanted to cut this,” Higgins says, pausing. “It’s sort of like a knighting to get chosen by Cody.”

Johnson recorded “The Painter” with producer Trent Willmon (Granger Smith, Zane Williams) at Starstruck, where Johnson had the best chance of connecting with the studio band.

“There’s this magical spot where the singer is in the little vocal booth,” Willmon says. “In the corner, and through the glass, you can see both the entire band and the control booth. There’s not a lot of tracking rooms like that, where the singer can see everything that’s going on. The musicians get so much inspiration from Cody and this just brutal energy that he sends out, and he can see them, they can see him, and they just thrive off of him.”

Tim Gallaway took on the key resonator part, and Jerry Roe handled the drums, starting the kick at the very beginning to emphasize the pace a little more, with shaker creating additional motion in several sections. They recorded it at 98 beats per minute, the same deceptively brisk tempo as the demo. Later, Willmon brought fiddler Jenee Fleenor in to overdub additional parts, some of them inspired by the vocal backgrounds Higgins had sung on the demo. Fleenor also built the solo section, developing an elegant string quartet one instrument at a time.

“That part blows me away,” Larkins says. “It moves me almost to tears, like as much as the chorus or the very first verse. It’s such a huge part of that song now.” Willmon worked with Fleenor in-person on that section. The decision to cut it that way, instead of just emailing her the files, was one of his favorite parts of the process.

“If I sent [the tracks] to her it would be like giving up tickets on the 50 yard line to the Super Bowl,” he says. “It is about as creatively musical as it can get watching her do her magic.”

The mix of strings, resonator and Travis Toy’s steel guitar imbued the “The Painter” with a whole pallet of sound, supporting the storyline in an appropriate fashion. “We’re not reinventing the wheel here,” Johnson says. “But all those different nuances, it paints a beautiful picture and it has all those different colors in it.”

Johnson’s relaxed, emotional vocals – delivered with Brandi in mind – were captured on a newly purchased $10,000 Brauner microphone, with Johnson changing “my world was black and white” to “my life was black and white.”

“The Painter” became a unanimous choice for the first single from a forthcoming album. Warner Music Nashville released it to country radio via PlayMPE on Aug. 10. It debuted at No. 12 on the multi-metric Hot Country Songs chart dated Aug. 26 and started at No. 33 on Country Airplay. It’s at No. 40 on the Sept. 9 Airplay chart.

“I don’t sing ‘The Painter’ any harder than I’m talking right now,” he says. “That is rare for a Cody Johnson song. But it’s not, ‘Hey, look at me. Look how good I can sing.’ It’s all about the message.”

Several years ago, Dierks Bentley was taken aback when one of his team members told him his concerts made him the center point in a big party.
He has plenty of fun stuff to draw from in building set lists — “5-1-5-0,” “Somewhere on a Beach,” “Drunk on a Plane” and “What Was I Thinkin’,” for starters — but he’d always thought of himself as a serious musician with something to say. That conversation was one of those moments when the push and pull of his introspective private self and cheerleading public role crystallized, and it’s a dual purpose he continues to balance.

“We’re all looking for the raw emotions, the connection with the singer, the connection with fellow fans, and so that mode’s very real,” he says of his onstage identity. “But off the stage, that’s just not who I am. I’d rather be up on a mountain by myself, just alone. I really do appreciate being alone, or with my wife or my family, but just having real conversations and watching sunsets and sunrises and just looking for those moments that really make you feel like you’re connected to something deeper.”

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With his latest single, Bentley found “Something Real” in the mountains of Telluride, Colo., when he hosted a songwriting camp circa 2018 with four fellow writers: HARDY, Ashley Gorley (“Last Night,” “Girl in Mine”), Luke Dick (“Burning Man,” “Settling Down”) and Ross Copperman (“Dancin’ in the Country,” “Gold”). It was early winter, and Bentley engaged in some real-life pursuits during that four-day retreat, including hikes and a trip to a ski slope with Dick, who admits he was challenged.

“What good is being in Telluride if you’re inside the four walls?” Dick asks rhetorically. “I hadn’t been skiing in forever, and he put me in past my comfort zone, which is funny, because he’s pretty much a local up there now. He’s not going to ski with the novices, or even the intermediates. He’s off doing the crazy stuff.”

In the less-dangerous arena, Bentley woke up at his home one morning and worked up a few ideas over French roast coffee. He hopped over to the house where the other writers were staying, with a now-forgotten title built around the word “real.” Whatever that title was, it reconstructed as “Something Real,” and they used it to explore the dichotomies in Bentley’s existence — aiming to do it in a way that could be felt by the audience.

With five A-list writers participating, the process involved some chaos. Copperman and Dick tended to focus more on the music, Gorley and HARDY — who snapped out the chorus’ opening image, “I need a little backbone in my backbeat” — keyed in on the lyrics, though all of them jumped around a bit to different aspects of the song and to different stanzas.

The opening verse found arena-headliner Bentley longing for an easier, less-cluttered lifestyle, which is part of the attraction in Telluride.

“I love living somewhere small, you know, with no stoplights,” he says. “There’s so much accountability living in a small town because you see these people two, three times a day. You can’t be a jerk, you can’t not respond to a text message because you’re going to literally see them at the post office. You have to be responsive, you have to be kind; you have real conversations.”

In one of the most revealing sections, he cited one of the hurdles of commercial music, lamenting that he “can’t really pour my heart out on the FM radio,” adding that deeper songs “won’t fill up the coliseum on the edge of Tupelo,” a line that — once again — was shaped by Mississippi-born HARDY.

Bentley wasn’t complaining in that moment, but actively seeking to be challenged: “Give me something that’ll burn I can turn into something I can feel.” The challenge was to dig deep in life, but also to dig deep in a song and still make something commercial.

“[Songwriter] Tom Douglas said something about songs that make you remember and songs that make you forget,” Dick recalls. “Most of the songs that are hits are songs that make you forget. What is it making you forget? The idea that loneliness exists at all, and it’s rare that a song that is making you remember that loneliness exists and that it’s OK to be in it.”

Dick and Copperman built the demo, which featured HARDY’s voice. Bentley tried to record “Something Real” three different times — the last at Addiction Studios in Berry Hill, Tenn. — before he found what he was looking for, a performance with a distinct U2 vibe, thanks to searing electric guitar work from Jedd Hughes and more intricate notes enhanced by a delay pedal. The track stacks five guitarists total, including Dan Dugmore, better known as a steel guitarist.

“One of my favorite things to do with Dan when we’re in the studio is to ask him to play electric,” says producer-engineer F. Reid Shippen (Toby Keith, Ingrid Michaelson). “He’s fantastic at it. He plays rock electric like a super-enthusiastic 14-year-old who just doesn’t make mistakes.”

Shippen also took some of Danny Rader’s off-the-cuff banjo noodling and fit it into the mix to provide some country texture amid the U2 sonics.

Late in the game, Jon Randall (Parker McCollum, Miranda Lambert) became the track’s fourth producer, along with Bentley and Copperman. He was called in, he says, to “sprinkle the Americana, or the hippie-trippy stuff, or the ear candy.” Randall focused primarily on the bridge, where the song’s deepest message — “I’m just looking for some truth” — provides its apex.

“More than anything, I think I really just came up with some ideas to build that bridge, so the bridge would be really, really huge and hit hard,” Randall says. “There’s some guitars, percussion things, building to this moment.”

At that “truth” climax, the whole thing breaks down with Bentley and HARDY — who came back in to add harmonies — delivering the message with clarity. “I think that really took it over the top,” Shippen says.

Capitol Nashville released “Something Real” to country radio through PlayMPE on June 12 as the second single from Gravel & Gold, providing deceptively thoughtful perspective in an intensely commercial sonic framework. It’s not unprecedented in Bentley’s career: He has enhanced his reputation with such from-the-soul titles as “Home,” “I Hold On” and “Come a Little Closer.”

“I found when I put songs out that are really personal, there’s a deeper connection because we’re all the same,” Bentley says. “We’re all going through the same struggles, and I feel like the song will connect in that way. It’s going to be a little slower rise to get there. I’ve had other songs that might have been quicker out of the gate, but I feel like this one will have a really important impact on people that listen to it and move them in a deeper way.”

It’s an understated song with loads of longing and alchemical alliteration.
“Tucson Too Late” takes Jordan Davis out of the general pockets he has explored in previous singles. Contrasting with experienced ballads “Buy Dirt” and “Next Thing You Know” on one side, rock-edged productions “What My World Spins Around” and “Singles You Up” on the other, “Tucson” rides a midtempo pace with traditional country roots.

“This is the type of song that I grew up on,” Jordan says. “This feels like I could have picked this song up and put it in the playlist that my dad was listening to whenever I was falling in love with country music, whether it’s ‘Watermelon Crawl’ or ‘Holes in the Floor of Heaven,’ ‘Check Yes or No.’ And maybe it is the nostalgic kind of sound that makes the song a little extra special.”

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It doesn’t hurt that “Tucson” is the product of a friends-and-family foursome: Davis, Jacob Davis, Josh Jenkins and Matt Jenkins, the group that penned “Buy Dirt.” It definitely helps that the melody makes effective use of musical tension, hitting the kinds of notes that make listeners lean forward in their seats, edging toward resolution. That happens, in fact, three times in the last line of the chorus.

“There’s an ache to that s–t,” says Josh.

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Josh had the original title, “Tulane Too Late,” which — by referencing a New Orleans university — tugged on the Davis brothers’ Louisiana roots. He brought it up during a 2022 writing session that Jordan had to miss. In its first incarnation, the title linked Tulane and two-lane highways, though the school’s real-world location is in the center of a start-and-stop urban grid. The three writers toyed with other possible locales that suggested wide-open terrain and landed on Tucson.

“That title feels classic,” Matt says. “When you say ‘Tucson,’ it just fits the story of getting somewhere too late, the girl’s already gone. Nothing feels more lonely and sad than a lonely cactus out in the desert, a tumbleweed rolling across the road.”

The three writers played a bit with the idea but didn’t commit to any specific direction. Jacob called Jordan later and relayed the “Tucson Too Late” title, firing up his brother’s songwriting instincts.

That came in handy when the other three joined Jordan on tour a few weeks later, on July 16, 2022, to write on the bus outside the Magic Springs Water & Theme Park in Hot Springs, Ark. They had no new ideas that day, so Jordan asked about “Tucson.” The city name triggered thoughts of classic country tunes “Marina Del Rey” and “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” and Jordan specifically suggested they capture the tone of “Miami, My Amy,” a Keith Whitley single that also benefits from blatant wordplay.Josh slid into a slightly unusual progression, strumming a two minor chord to kick off the chorus on a then-new guitar.

“It’s a really crappy nylon that I bought for like 150 bucks at Guitar Center,” he recalls. “It doesn’t stay in tune, but it was the first time I took it out on a bus run, and I think there was some spirit to this gut-string that paired with the vibe and the chords and the hook. This sounds hippie-dippie, but it was like it was inviting us to explore some of those chords.”

After inserting a lonesome, descending guitar line into the stanza, Josh came back to the two minor, and they logged the chorus’ last two lines of lyrics, emphasizing the three unresolved notes in the melody on the way to the hook. They reverse-engineered the chorus’ words from there, the guy “racing through the desert” to stop his woman from leaving on a jet plane, realizing the whole way that he would not make it.

Why doesn’t he just call her? “I wanted to answer that in the video,” says Jordan. “We have him run over his cellphone.”

Backing up to the song’s beginning, Josh fashioned a five-note lead-in — similar to the guitar in Rodney Crowell’s desperate “Ashes by Now” — then gave the verse a different version of the chorus’ descending motif, this one akin to Danny O’Keefe’s desolate “Good Time Charlie’s Got the Blues.” In the song’s opening two lines, the protagonist pondered whether the relationship had simply been a mirage.

“I can’t remember who said it — that wasn’t me,” Josh notes. “But it was such a cool way to play on the desert, Tucson — the lonely aesthetic — in a fresh way.”

They moved to the three minor — another out-of-the-norm chord — for the pre-chorus, and it sounded so good that they repeated that pre-chorus in the second verse, shortening the verse to reach it earlier. They returned to the three minor one more time in the bridge, dropping a reference to Merle Haggard’s “Silver Wings” during that stanza.

“The 16-year-old me that would be listening to George Strait sing ‘Marina Del Rey’ or ‘Galveston,’ or one of these songs that would have some of those chords, would be proud,” says Matt.

The four writers made a guitar/vocal work tape over the sound of the air-conditioning and the bus door — “I think somebody was making coffee during the second verse,” Jordan says — then passed that rudimentary recording to producer Paul DiGiovanni (Dustin Lynch, Travis Denning). It was, in turn, the reference tape during a Nov. 7 tracking session at Nashville’s Sound Stage for the studio band: guitarists Derek Wells and Ilya Toshinskiy, drummer Nir Z, keyboardist Alex Wright and bassist Jimmie Lee Sloas.

DiGiovanni gave them plenty of leeway to capture a less-is-more, classic country vibe. Nir Z played on the rim almost all the way until the second chorus before he squarely hit the snare drum. (DiGiovanni would later give the first-verse drum a slightly trashy sound with a “rim crunch” effect.) Wells threaded a baritone guitar part that recalls “Wichita Lineman”-era Glen Campbell in the track and heightened the tension with judicious swells over the key three minor chord in both pre-choruses.

“He’s doing this little fake steel thing,” notes DiGiovanni. “It’s just like a volume pedal on a clean electric guitar with some reverb.”

To differentiate the bridge’s three minor from the pre-choruses, they dropped the quasi-steel; instead, harmony singer Trey Keller piled up 13 background vocal tracks in that passage, staggering them across several entry points. “I didn’t really have a super plan for that,” DiGiovanni concedes. “That was just part of what we had, and we rolled with it.”

“Tucson” and “Damn Good Time,” the leadoff track for Bluebird Days, were both recorded the same day after the rest of the album was completed. Jordan envisioned “Tucson” as the second single, though “Next Thing You Know” supplanted it, based on heavy streaming. MCA Nashville finally released “Tucson” to country radio on Aug. 7 via PlayMPE.

“I was pushing myself as an artist and as a writer to do something that maybe a fan would listen to and be like, ‘Hmm, I wouldn’t see him put a song out like that,’ ” says Jordan. “I love the song, I love the cut of it. Let’s see how it shakes out.”