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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.”
At the end of the first verse of the new Dan + Shay single, Shay Mooney’s voice cracks as he addresses a stunning woman in a bar, “I’m beggin’ you please.”
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Mooney is a singer with enormous control, and his request isn’t for her to accompany him home; overpowered by the expectation that she’ll break his heart, the protagonist instead asks her to leave him alone. Mooney’s small vocal imperfection speaks loudly in the context of a blistering performance.
“I thought that line was really important to set up that chorus,” says the group’s Dan Smyers, who co-produced “Save Me the Trouble” with Scott Hendricks (Blake Shelton, Brooks & Dunn). “‘I’m begging you, please’ — that’s kind of you putting your fist on the table and saying, ‘I’m vulnerable. I’m defenseless.’
“Shay is the greatest singer to ever do it, you know. He’s my favorite singer I’ve ever heard. I’ve never heard him hit a sour note, and I’ve recorded a lot of his notes. But man, that line is great.”
“Save Me the Trouble,” which Warner Music Nashville released to country radio via PlayMPE on July 13, is an important single for the duo, the first since it experienced some inner turmoil, debated the future of the act, then refocused its energy on moving forward. It was so important that the pair set aside an entire day at Nashville’s Ocean Way to record the one song, which begins as a spare country track, reestablishes the duo’s powerful harmonies, then transforms into a pop symphony with a momentary touch of prog-rock drama before a stark, a cappella close.
“It just felt very adult. It felt very professional, but at the same time, very grassroots and very natural and genuine,” Mooney says of that session. “After the first time through, I was like, ‘Oh, my God. Damn. This is another level.’”
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The foundation for that level was established Jan. 12 during a songwriting session at the East Nashville home studio of Jordan Reynolds (“Speechless,” “Tequila”), where they were joined by Ashley Gorley (“Last Night,” “Girl in Mine”) and Jordan Minton (“Best Thing Since Backroads,” “Good Time”). They set out to develop something that would provide a big concert moment, or a head-turning performance for an awards show.
“We definitely spent a lot of time that day figuring out what that kind of sonically would be for them,” says Minton. “Something that’s kind of big, anthemic, still feels like them — [with] fresh radio melodies that are really wide and big for Shay to sing.”
Smyers provided a title, “Save Me the Trouble,” that he had heard in a conversation, and they developed it as a barroom snapshot of a guy who recognizes the woman tempting him would only break his heart. They wrote the chorus first, in 6/8 time, using the title in the stanza’s opening line with drawn-out notes that allowed the duo to highlight its exacting harmonies. Halfway through the section, they changed pace with a rhythmic bounce, then reaffirmed the title twice more.
Mooney took the lead on the verse melody, pitching it in the bottom part of his range as they focused on the opening lines.“In that lower register, it gives you somewhere to go,” he says.
Gorley established key parts of the chord structure on piano and mapped out a general plot overview.“He’s just so smart at knowing what a song needs and going, ‘All right, so we’ve got this in the chorus and the first verse; this is what the second verse should be about,’” says Reynolds about the veteran songwriter. “Everybody’s like, ‘Yeah, that is exactly what it needs.’ He introduces a great vibe and a knowledge and wisdom of songs, whether he is contributing a lot or a little.”
In verse two, they revisited the bouncy rhythmic idea, with Mooney changing the melody from the first verse in a way that temporarily reflected a cheery “just a little kiss” fantasy, before the protagonist remembers that this woman is a heartbreaker. “We always love doing that in the second verse: changing it a little bit just to give it somewhere to go,” Mooney says. “It’s not anything insane. It gives it enough [difference] that it’s something intriguing that you’re listening for the second time around.”
The song remains open-ended — it’s not clear whether the character takes the woman at the bar home — though the writers have an idea about it. “I think he does not,” says Minton. “I think the whole night is kind of in his head.”
Reynolds and Smyers worked on a demo when the song was finished, with Reynolds building out the instrumentals in the studio and Smyers editing vocals in a bedroom closet. “It’s a leftover closet for guitar cases and awards that I don’t know what to do with,” Reynolds says. “There’s stuff everywhere, and it’s not big, maybe four by five [feet]. It’s got shelves, so he just sets his laptop on a shelf, stands there and works, closes the door. I think it’s the most dead room in the house, but he’s never recording anything, so it doesn’t matter.”
Smyers felt enormous pressure when they brought it to the recording studio because “Save Me the Trouble” had so much potential. “I knew what it needed to sound like,” he remembers. “I could almost see the ProTools session laid out. I could see the knobs and levers in the mix, and I was like, ‘We just can’t screw it up.’”
The crew developed a gradually building production: “Every line, there’s one more thing kind of going on than the previous line,” says Smyers. Steel guitarist Russ Pahl overdubbed a winding, neo-synth sound underneath the prechorus in the first verse, and Smyers thickened the vocals by adding one harmony voice at a time. The bridge featured a pair of dramatic stops with a single cymbal clang by drummer Nir Z, plus thick harmonies, enhanced by some reverb effects that hint at the sound of a Black gospel choir.
“When you listen to the track as a whole, it feels a bit dangerous,” Smyers says. “I thought that was an important sonic pivot for us after coming off a couple of super-positive, major-sounding love songs in a row as singles. I felt like a little bit of danger, a little bit of angst, was the right pivot.”
“Save Me the Trouble” debuted at No. 21 on the Country Airplay chart dated July 29. It checks in at No. 27 in its third week.
“I love where it landed,” Smyers says. “It feels dramatic, and it feels intense. It’s gotten stuck in my head since the day we finished it.”
In the chorus of his latest single, “Burn It Down,” Parker McCollum fantasizes intensely about reducing the memories of a freshly ended relationship to “smoldering coals.”
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It’s a subtly unique idea, that word “smolder.” It’s not particularly obscure, but it’s not one that appears in songs every day, and it’s a key entry point to the tone of “Burn It Down.” The production is an all-out blaze by the time it reaches a guitar solo more than two minutes through its three-minute, 36-second running time. But it’s a slow burn getting there, and McCollum credits producer Jon Randall (Dierks Bentley, Miranda Lambert) for that patient pacing.
“I wanted the first [chorus] to really just floor it,” McCollum says. “He was like, ‘Man, you just got to make them wait, you just got to make them wait.’ And I remember being like, ‘I think he’s got to give it to them.’ Now when I hear it in the store or on the radio or whatever, I’m glad we waited to grow.”
McCollum’s enthusiasm is the opposite of the attitude he brought to the writing session when he hosted the Love Junkies — a.k.a. songwriters Liz Rose (“You Belong With Me,” “Girl Crush”), Lori McKenna (“Humble and Kind,” “It All Comes Out in the Wash”) and Hillary Lindsey (“Blue Ain’t Your Color,” “Ghost Story”) — at his Nashville home on Sept. 27, 2022.
“I was burned out, and I so did not want to be a songwriter at all for several months,” he remembers.His album Never Enough, released May 12, was already finished, and when Rose arrived first, he confessed to her in the kitchen that he wasn’t sure why they were even writing. It wasn’t an encouraging start.
“I’m thinking, ‘Oh, thanks, you know. We’re all here,’ ” she recalls. “And then I thought, ‘You know, Parker, you say that, but you know what always happens. You write that song that you didn’t have, and you can’t believe that you wrote [it].’ He goes, ‘I know. How many times has that happened?’
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Neither told McKenna or Lindsey he wasn’t into it, and once the actual work began, they spent about a half-hour just talking and strumming guitars. At some point, he worked into a slow-boiling groove and repeated the phrase “Burn it down” as if it were a mantra. “I love songs like that,” says Lindsey. “But it felt like the emotion wasn’t all the way there.”
McCollum soon shifted into another gear, filling in extra lines after each “Burn it down”: “ ’Til it’s ashes and smoke,” “To the smoldering coals,” “ ’Til I don’t want you no more.”
“It’s almost like it’s an answer to ‘Burn it down,’ ” Lindsey says. “It just started to develop.”
As they inserted those extra lines between the “Burn it down” phrases, McCollum began to see its bigger-picture potential, and that’s when he became fully engaged.
“He was just sitting down in a chair — I feel like it was an armchair vibe, like one of those cushy armchairs,” says Lindsey. “But he threw his hand back. It was as if he were onstage, and he was like, ‘Burn it,’ and he started visualizing what he wanted onstage. He was like, ‘Oh my gosh, y’all. I think we’re on to something. I need this. I need this visually. I need the fire in the back. I need this energy for my set.’ It all just started coming together, and when he threw his arm back, I was like, ‘Hell, yeah. You throw that arm back, partner.’”
They wrote a good part of the chorus, then shifted back to the beginning, where McCollum developed a symbolic line about an ex scattering the goodbye across the lawn. The protagonist finds himself stuck with a house full of memories. “Burn it down,” he concludes. Then in verse two, he considers the bed and the passion it represented. “Burn it down.”
By the time they got to the third verse, they focused more closely on vanquishing abstractions rather than physical items, and that brought more clarity to the song’s metaphoric disposition.
“My drummer was telling me he actually knows a guy who burned down his girlfriend’s house,” notes McCollum. “He’s literally going to go to prison for a considerable amount of time, and I kind of made the joke, ‘I hope he hasn’t been listening to my song.’ I don’t think anybody has listened to the song and actually done it, I would hope. I guess in today’s world, you never know.”
They made a guitar/vocal work tape at the end of the session with Lindsey providing harmony. Ahead of the third chorus, Lindsey freestyled another smoldering “Burn it, burn it,” teeing up the finale. McCollum brought that rough recording to Randall, who prefers that bare-bones format.
“I love listening to the work tapes,” Randall says. “Because I’ve spent enough time as a writer and I know what goes on in those rooms, I can get a pretty good idea of what the mindset was just because I kind of know the process. And I think that that works in my favor, more than it doesn’t.”
Randall recognized McKenna was using an alternate guitar tuning and wanted to re-create its open, droning sound during the tracking date at Nashville’s Blackbird Studios. Session player Jedd Hughes invented a staccato counterpoint riff, and the band built up gradually with each new stanza, primarily from drummer Chad Cromwell’s ascending intensity: After two verses, the kick drum joins subtly at the chorus, and the full kit is employed by verse three. The searing guitar solo brings the entire band to its maximum point and, after a quieter bridge, maxes out again for the finale.
Engineer F. Reid Shippen helped even more in post-production, adding a shaker at verse two and, most notably, running McCollum’s voice through a filter during the first two verses. The effect hollows out his tone and emphasizes the consonants and breaths in his performance. “I think his vocal is smoldering,” says Rose. “The whole song is, honestly, the tempo and the mood of the track, and the way he’s singing it. It’s a lot of smoldering.”
When MCA Nashville decided to make it a single, Randall did a quick, more typical, remix that dropped the vocal filtering and ramped up the sound before the first chorus. By then, everyone agreed that the slow-building approach was right for this release.
“Everybody kind of fought me on it, and I think everybody thought I was crazy to not go big on the first chorus,” Randall says. “But eventually everybody came back and said, ‘The coolest part of the song is that it waits to get big.’ Which breaks [with] the way everybody thinks in town.”
Country radio received the single via PlayMPE on June 5, and it moves to No. 45 on the Country Airplay chart dated Aug. 5. “Burn It Down” seems positioned for a long, smoldering life rather than flaming out in a flash, which would aptly reflect both the slow build McCollum experienced on the day he wrote it and the arrangement that Randall oversaw.
“He’s such a seasoned veteran,” McCollum says. “He knew exactly what he was doing. I was the young guy trying to bust it out real quick, and he was right. He usually is.”
When Joe Nichols earned his first country hit in 2002, he followed it with a post-breakup song, “Brokenheartsville,” wrapped in contradiction.
The protagonist was in a dour period, but still delivered a sarcastic toast to his gold-digger ex, using a hooky, singalong chorus to mask the pain in the lyric. The song’s inherent paradoxes ultimately led to Nichols’ first No. 1.
Now that his 2022 Quartz Hill release, “Good Day for Living,” has returned him to the top 20 for the first time in nine years, Nichols is in career-reboot mode — and this follow-up single, “Brokenhearted,” is even more contrary than its 2002 predecessor.
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“It’s filled with all kinds of irony,” he says. “It’s not lost on me that it’s a party song complaining about party songs. And for ‘Brokenhearted’ to be the title line, you know — here I am, a guy with the song ‘Brokenheartsville.’ That kind of title is made for me. It makes it seem like I was made to say it.”
Appropriately, “Brokenhearted” traversed a broken path before it finally found Nichols. Rhett Akins (“What’s Your Country Song,” “Honey Bee”), Marv Green (“I Called Mama,” “Amazed”) and J.T Harding (“Beers and Sunshine,” “Different for Girls”) wrote “Brokenhearted” circa 2018 at Green’s office at THiS Music, which has since been shut down when founder/president Rusty Gaston moved to Sony Music Publishing. Harding arrived with a set of downtrodden potential titles, all of them a direct contrast to his energetic, colorful personality.
“Writing with Marv Green and Rhett Akins is not something I ever take for granted, so I came prepared,” says Harding. “I came in with some titles — and you know, I like to say my heart’s been broken more than the ice cream machine at the local McDonald’s. So I always have titles: ‘All My Future Exes Live in Texas,’ or something like that.”
The ideas weren’t necessarily clicking, but Akins was amused by their consistency, especially given the tone of the current country format. “I just made a joke, like, ‘You can’t be sad in country music these days, because every song is happy and everybody’s partying,’ ” Akins recalls. “It was totally tongue-in-cheek and a joke. And then we said, ‘Hey, let’s write it.’”
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Green hit a chord on the guitar, Akins sang a line that became a key part of the chorus, and they dived into a barroom celebration centered on a protagonist who can’t find a country song that fits his dismal mood. Never mind that country music is — or was, a few decades back — the genre people could count on to commiserate in self-pity.
“This was no way in the form or fashion of a ‘Murder on Music Row,’” says Green, alluding to an Alan Jackson/George Strait classic that lamented the loss of traditional country. “This was more like ‘Where’s a sad guy got to go to hear a sad song?’ But at the same time, he’s smiling about it.”
“Brokenhearted” employs a semi-convoluted structure, appropriate given the consternation of the first-person character. It starts with the chorus — actually, with the back third of the chorus — instead of a verse, then segues into the full chorus before the first verse finally arrives 53 seconds into the track. In fact, it’s the only verse in the song. Following another round of the “Brokenhearted” chorus, it slides into an instrumental solo, leading to a bridge that sounds a little like a verse before one final presentation of its rather lengthy chorus.
“When you start with a chorus, it changes the structure of a song,” Akins notes. “You can wind up with four choruses if you’re not careful. You have to do something different in the middle.”
But even its opening was different. “Brokenhearted” starts with an a cappella cold vocal, particularly odd given that Akins spent part of the session churning out classic guitar riffs.
“Rhett Akins is literally a jukebox in cowboy boots,” Harding says. “He was playing every ’80s rock riff you can imagine. I couldn’t stump him — Van Halen, Mötley Crüe — but he kind of does it without laughing or saying anything, which makes me laugh, because he’s in a trance playing all these really great, iconic guitar riffs. I just remember all of this music and inspiration swirling around the room at the same time we’re writing this song, ‘Brokenhearted.’ ”
William Michael Morgan recorded a version in 2018, but it didn’t see much action, and Gaston continued to shop the party-flavored demo, featuring Akins on vocals. Midland and Tim McGraw both showed interest but never got versions into the marketplace. Meanwhile, former BBR Music Group founder Benny Brown formed Quartz Hill in 2020, recruiting Nichols to the label. He thought “Brokenhearted” was suited for the artist, who agreed.
“They sent me the Rhett Akins demo,” Nichols says. “I didn’t know anybody else cut it, and it’s normally like this. I don’t really know anything about [its history] until it’s on an album and somebody will be reviewing the album and tell me about it.”
Producers Mickey Jack Cones (Dustin Lynch, Jameson Rodgers) and Derek George (Randy Houser, Chase Bryant) ran a tracking session on Jan. 29, 2021, cutting it first after a lunch break to get the musicians’ adrenaline going. They toyed with an opening instrumental riff, but ultimately started the performance cold, mirroring the demo. In fact, they followed the demo rather closely.
“What made this song quirky and fun and a little more like a barroom is the fact that the structure wasn’t the same as every other song that’s out there,” says Cones. “So we did explore changing it up, just because it felt a little left-footed. But we realized the left-footedness of the track is what made it feel real and right.”
Drummer Jerry Roe played a major role in the song’s attitude with a fierce backbeat. It got a temporary percussive enhancement during the solo section — half-electric guitar, half-Scotty Sanders’ steel — with a computerized tambourine playing triplets underneath. Cones, George and Wes Hightower supplied tight harmonies later, though label deadlines limited Nichols’ ability to fully explore the lead vocal. He felt that he could better, but ran out of time and assented to the track with a promise that if they singled it, he could redo the vocal.
Sure enough, when it was teed up for radio, Nichols reminded Quartz Hill that he wanted another go at it — though once again, the deadline was tight. Cones wasn’t available to fly to Nichols’ Texas home to oversee the vocals, so he got Nichols to sing multiple versions, then compiled the best parts into a more aggressive performance than the original. Nichols dropped an unnecessary word here and there, altered his melodic approach to the end of a few lines and generally applied more swagger.
“It definitely made it better,” Cones says. “Especially when it’s going to be the single, and it’s going to be at radio, you want it to be as best as it can be.”
Quartz Hill issued “Brokenhearted” to country radio via PlayMPE on May 22, adding to the flood of upbeat country songs that it satirizes. “And I’ve written a lot of songs that it’s satirizing,” Akins says with a laugh.
Not that heartache and ballads are entirely removed from country. “We do have Apple and Spotify and whatnot,” says Green. “If that’s what you need, you can get there.”
In the meantime, “Brokenhearted” has the potential to provide timely balance for the format with a solidly country song, even if it’s not the tear-jerker that its name implies.
“It says out loud,” Nichols notes, “what a lot of people have said under their breath a little bit — which is ‘Let’s play some country music, man.’ Not too many guys left that are willing to do country music.”
Even before he turned 90 two months ago, Willie Nelson was one of America’s most recognizable personalities.
Now that he’s a nonagenarian, he has entered territory associated with the likes of Betty White, Jimmy Carter, Bob Hope, George Burns and Carol Burnett — loved by nearly everyone and pretty much beyond reproach. So messing with one of Nelson’s signature songs is hazardous; it won’t harm Nelson, but the artist who plays with it is taking a risk. Thus, Jake Owen admits he felt nervous about recording “On the Boat Again,” an interpolation that twists Nelson’s crossover classic “On the Road Again.”
“You never want to tarnish something that was always great,” he says.
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But he also liked the challenge it represented, and it didn’t hurt that when he reached out to Lukas Nelson, Willie’s son gave it a thumbs-up and passed it along to his dad, whose publisher worked out a royalty agreement with the writers. Likewise, Owen had some history with interpolations: “I Was Jack (You Were Diane),” which borrowed from a John Mellencamp classic, topped the Country Airplay chart five years ago.
“It was like, ‘It’s going to be dangerous,’ you know, but I then understood the point of it,” he remembers. “And it was a great point in my career.”
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“On the Road Again” has done well for Nelson. He wrote it on the back of an airbag during a flight with movie producer Sydney Pollack, who needed a song about the touring life for the movie Honeysuckle Rose, in which Nelson starred. Nelson earned synch royalties for its use in the picture, performance income from country radio and other formats after it crossed over, royalties for other interpolations and corporate revenue from its use in several commercials.
It was likely one of those ads that inspired this latest wrinkle in the song’s story. Songwriter Blake Pendergrass saw that spot and thought it would be good for a laugh to rewrite it as “On the Boat Again,” and when two different writing appointments were scrapped on Music Row in June 2022, the four writers who were still around got together for an informal, no-pressure Friday session. All the participants — including Devin Dawson, Rocky Block (“For What It’s Worth,” “Broadway Girls”) and host Kyle Fishman (“Down to One,” “Small Town Boy”) — wanted to keep it light, and Pendergrass dropped the “Boat” idea on them. The original is repetitive enough that revising the chorus was a snap; “making music with my friends” quickly became “drinking cold beer.”
“Once you say, ‘On the boat again,’ that’s three of the four lines,” notes Block. “You know what the melody’s going to be, so it was just about finding two hooks, and that ‘boat’ rhyme with ‘float’ — once we got that, that’s all you really had to do for the chorus.”
After the first chorus, the second and third occurrences expand from four lines to eight, with the “Boat” version including a slight melodic change, dropping the final note in the “float” line for a slight variation.“I can’t say that that was purposeful,” Block says. “It may have just been an oversight, but it just kind of felt like what it needed to be.”
But where Nelson’s original starts with the title, the interpolation needed new verses to work properly, holding the familiar part of the song back to create an “aha” moment. “It’s a nice situation to just leave it to the imagination until the chorus gets there,” says Pendergrass. “It draws you in when the chorus hits, and then I think people get hooked on it after that because it’s so familiar.”
The lower-pitched verses feel a bit like an Ernest Tubb melody, with the song’s humor showing itself at the outset. A blue-collar worker pines for a weekend escape, only to be stuck in traffic on a trip to the lake. But it’s worth it when he gets out on the water with the same revelers from the previous weekend. At one point, the writers played with the phrase “tie one on” — alluding to both beer consumption and the dock — but when it didn’t work in the verses, they retrieved it for a climactic bridge.
“This is what the beauty of co-writing is,” Dawson observes. “I think I said, ‘Lord knows it won’t be long ’til I go and tie one on/ On the boat again.’ I said ‘on’ twice, you know, and then Kyle was like, ‘Just say “on” once, and go into the chorus.’ It just rolled perfectly.”
The whole thing was completed in roughly an hour, and the guys pulled together a quick work tape with vocal and four guitars. Their initial targets were Owen and Luke Bryan, and since Block writes for Big Loud, he took it to producer Joey Moi (Morgan Wallen, HARDY), who recognized it would be an interpolation simply from the title. Once he heard it, he thought it was ideal for Owen.
“There’s no in between,” notes Dawson. “It’s either going to be a single, or it’s just never going to get heard. So we got lucky.”
Owen didn’t know it incorporated Nelson’s song until he heard it, but the way it was built pulled him in.“It just made me smile,” he says. “And quite frankly, it’s a life that I’ve lived since I was 10 years old, just being on boats back in Florida.”
They recorded it in the fall at Nashville’s Blackbird Studio with drummer Jerry Roe, bassist Jimmie Lee Sloas, keyboardist Dave Cohen and guitarists Ilya Toshinskiy and Derek Wells. “We couldn’t let it take itself seriously — people would mock us to death,” says Moi. “It just had to smile the whole time, and it had to have that kind of summertime beach feel that Jake has without totally leaning on beach/aquatic musical clichés.”
Wells’ slide guitar parts and Cohen’s circus-like use of a pipe organ tone to accompany the bass gave it a woozy feel similar to Toby Keith’s “Red Solo Cup.” “Originally, the solo section that we had, we were having way too much fun when we were tracking and we made it way too goofy,” Moi says. “We had a bass solo and a [Hammond] B-3 solo. We had this four-instrument solo fight going on. I opened it up a couple months later, when Jake was coming to sing, and like, ‘Oops, we might have ran a red light on cool.’ We ended up cutting it back, and I had Derek come back in and write a new solo.”
During the process, Owen made the connection with Lukas, and Sony Music Publishing worked out the copyright issues, allegedly giving Nelson’s team half the royalties, according to two of the composers. “As a writer, it’s cool to have our names beside Willie,” says Pendergrass, “even if it was in a Frankensteined, kind of piecemealed way.”
Owen and the label had several options for the first single from his Loose Cannon album, released June 23, but a radio executive insisted “Boat” was the one. “They’re like, ‘Jake, stop ignoring the obvious,’ ” recalls Owen.
Released to country radio via PlayMPE on May 25, it sails to No. 41 on the Country Airplay list dated July 8. Owen would love to see the song emulate the chart run of his Mellencamp interpolation.
“Willie just turned 90,” he reasons. “That’d be so cool, he’s out here with a song on the radio that goes No. 1 and he’s a writer on it. That’s pretty awesome.”
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When Nate Smith emerged with his debut single, “Whiskey on You,” in 2022, a key piece of his backstory was the November 2018 Camp Fire, which destroyed the city of Paradise, Calif.
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Smith, who was on the path to becoming a nurse, lost everything in the tragedy. But he wrote a song about the experience, “One of These Days,” and when it went viral, he ended up returning to Nashville, where he had previously recorded for Word, and gave music a second shot. Another song, “Wildfire,” led to his recording contract with Sony Music Nashville in 2021. Now his second radio single — “World on Fire,” which RCA Nashville released to country broadcasters via PlayMPE on May 15 – draws on Smith’s history once again.
“I have a fire theme in my songs,” he says. “It’s something that just stayed with me.”
“World on Fire” uses flames as a metaphor for a relationship that has been burned to the ground. But as personal as the symbolism might be for Smith, the title for the song came from co-writer Taylor Phillips (“Heaven by Then,” “Hurricane”).
“He’s got a million of ’em,” says co-writer Ashley Gorley (“Last Night,” “Girl in Mine”). “He’s the idea guy.”
Phillips works as a volunteer firefighter in North Carolina in a sideline gig, and after he helped put out blaze at a construction site, he took a phone call where he ended up recounting the tragedy. In the process, he focused on what it meant for the victim.
“I said, ‘You know, that person’s whole world is on fire,’ and I just wrote that down on my phone and really never looked back at it,” he recalls. “I was scrolling through one day and started thinking about a relationship, breaking up with somebody in a town like that. You know, you’re not just leaving that person. You’re taking the whole town with you, leaving memories everywhere.”
In November 2022, Gorley hosted a two-day writing retreat to come up with songs for Smith that included his producer, songwriter Lindsay Rimes (“Lonely If You Are,” “Cool Again”). On the first day, Smith shared a bit about the Camp Fire, and Gorley mentioned that it might be worthwhile to incorporate that into a song. When Phillips participated the second day, Rimes mentioned the previous day’s exchange, and the two of them did some very cursory work with Phillips’ “World on Fire” title song, building on late-’90s/early-2000s rock influences.
Once Smith and Gorley were in the room, they dug in fully on the chorus, bracketed by the title at the front and the back, with soaring flames referenced in the middle. Smith played a major role in shaping the top line’s intense direction.
“I’m big on the melodies,” he says. “Obviously, Ashley Gorley is the king of that, but really making it my own is important, and I can tell certain melodies don’t work. Like if it’s too happy — I know it sounds kind of emo — but if it’s too giddy, it’s not a Nate melody.”
Halfway through the chorus, Gorley suggested a repetitive rhyme — “burn, burn, burn” linked to a world that won’t “turn, turn, turn” — cinching its singalong qualities. When they shifted to the verses, Smith shared some of the details from the Camp Fire: how his brother could barely see through the smoke as he tried to evacuate, how they didn’t even recognize old haunts because the landmarks had all been destroyed. The song infused the terror of the fire, but it also reminded Smith that disasters can be a prelude to something better.
“Anytime I’m thinking about the Camp Fire and stuff, it’s definitely an emotional thing,” he notes. “There’s a lot of gratitude, too, when I think about it because in a weird way, as tough as the situation was — and it was harder on some people than me — it’s still changed the trajectory of my life.”
Phillips was impressed by Smith’s willingness to tackle such a horrific topic. “I think that what’s so cool about his artistry is that because he is that vulnerable, he is willing to open up,” says Phillips. “He’s able to tell the world a lot of things that some people probably wouldn’t want to.”
Rimes created a guitar-based demo, slipping in a part just before the bridge that borrows from the sound of a siren. Then he shipped it off to Sol Philcox-Littlefield, who layered more guitars on top. But when Smith was gearing up to do final vocals, he asked for even more.
“Nate was like, ‘I want it to rock more,’ so I picked up my Les Paul and turned up the amp, and we just started playing some heavy guitars,” says Rimes. “Then the intro lick — that kind of guitar line at the top was never there on the demo. I think there was some other guitar there. And Nate kind of had the idea of like, ‘We need some kind of thing that sounds sort of like Foo Fighters.’ ”
Since Smith’s self-titled debut had already been turned in, Rimes planned to take his time finishing “World on Fire.” But Smith, with the label’s support, put the chorus up on TikTok on Jan. 14, and it created instant, overwhelming demand. That also presented a bit of a problem: His self-titled debut album was already being pre-sold; if they changed anything about the 20-song collection, it would nullify all those sales. So they left that album intact for its April 28 release, but also fast-tracked a deluxe edition with six additional songs, released the same day.
“It was very stressful,” Rimes recalls. “Our mastering deadline [was] the week after, so it was like two weeks until we needed everything done. I had to get all the [new] songs recorded and ready for mixing within a week.”
On May 11, four days before Smith’s single release, Dolly Parton debuted her own “World on Fire” during the Academy of Country Music Awards, though her take on the title had a political lean, and her global-themed skirt suggested climate sensitivity. “They thankfully are completely different, so I think they can coexist,” says Gorley. “When they said the title, I was like ‘Oh, shoot.’ And then when she started singing, I was like, ‘Ah, that’s a completely different vibe. We’re OK.’ ”
Smith’s “World on Fire” debuted on the Country Airplay chart dated June 24 and sits at No. 54 in its second week. So while the song borrows from the in-the-moment emotions of his personal tragedy, it’s also representative of the big-picture effect that the Camp Fire had on his life.
“If the fire never happened, I wouldn’t be an artist. I wouldn’t have written these songs,” he says. “It’s kind of crazy how life works.”
Amid the ever-present marketplace demand for positive, uptempo recordings, country artists who take a contrarian position with stark, tragic ballads are sometimes rewarded on the awards circuit. Grammy Awards or nominations have been granted through the years to such spare titles as Sugarland’s “Stay,” Ronnie Dunn’s “Cost of Livin’,” Cole Swindell’s “Break Up in the End” and Reba McEntire’s “She Thinks His Name Was John.”
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Carly Pearce’s “We Don’t Fight Anymore,” enhanced with a guest appearance by Chris Stapleton, seems an instant contender for that kind of reward. Released by Big Machine on June 16, it artfully weaves a raw vocal performance across a vulnerable music bed as it portrays a couple so resigned to a passionless existence that the two people barely acknowledge each other. If a song could make bones ache, “We Don’t Fight Anymore” would do it.
“I really don’t think I’ve ever been more proud of a song,” she says.
Pearce co-wrote “Fight” with Pete Good (“Tale of Two Towns,” “Y’all Life”) and Shane McAnally (“half of my hometown,” “Some People Do”) at Good’s studio in Nashville’s Berry Hill neighborhood on a day when their initial ideas all failed to jell. “Fight” emerged from conversation.
“I don’t remember who said, ‘We don’t fight anymore’ — it was probably Shane — and I was like, ‘Let’s go sad. Let’s do it,’ ” she recalls. “Pete played this riff that was so inspiring. He has such a good melodic sense and also such a way of building a track that inspires you. From five minutes in, I just felt like we were on to something.”
None of the three were working out personal problems. Pearce, in particular, was in a relationship at the time, so even though her last album, 29, was built around a divorce, “We Don’t Fight Anymore” was not an extension of that project.
“Many of us have been in a relationship at some point where it’s kind of running on fumes,” says Good, “so there’s enough to tap into and then, obviously, take liberties to be a storyteller.”
McAnally served up the opening line of the chorus — “We don’t yell, ’cause what the hell/Difference does it make” — using a bold, attention-getting internal rhyme. They purposely stayed more subtle the rest of the way.
“A lot of times, when you have a line like that, you want to beat the rest of the song to death and match it,” McAnally says. “But the rest of it has to soak in. That top of the chorus brings you back into the song, and then the rest of it just happens.”
Pearce guided much of the melody, from the verses’ conversational notes to the melancholy, descending prechorus and the heartbreak range of the chorus. “It’s Carly’s gift,” says Good. “She’s just one of those natural singers and creators of melody. It’s just inspired, whatever she’s singing, and it’s got so much heart behind it.”
They wrote a bridge for a single voice, begging for any shred of possibility the couple could end the stalemate — “I wish you would say something, say anything” — then called it a day. Good developed a demo, and he came up with a short, aching riff for the intro that would be repeated through much of the song. “It sets the stage so well,” McAnally says. “Somehow in that lick, I hear the story. I don’t know how he does that.”
Pearce was so pleased with the results that she teased one chorus on Instagram in early September, though she later removed the post. She also shared “Fight” and six other songs with Big Machine Label Group president/CEO Scott Borchetta, and he was such a big believer from the outset that Pearce and her crew felt empowered to develop the song without considering any preconceived commercial blueprint.
“He got it, even from the beginning, what the song was going to be,” says co-producer Josh Osborne (Midland, Jon Pardi). “We were fortunate to not feel any of that pressure of, ‘Hey, let’s add a bunch of bells and whistles.’ We just leaned into a great song. It speaks for itself.”
They recorded the instrumental tracks at Nashville’s Sound Emporium on Nov. 15, the same day that Pearce picked up her first Grammy nomination, for the Ashley McBryde collaboration “Never Wanted To Be That Girl.” Guitarist Ilya Toshinskiy and Dobro player Josh Matheny re-created Good’s key riff, guitarist Sol Philcox-Littlefield employed a shimmering tremolo effect that highlights the couple’s instability, and pianist Alex Wright dropped notes here and there that helped develop a sense of movement without stealing attention from the basic story. Fiddler Jenee Fleenor heightened the track’s lonely quality in overdubs, and drummer Aaron Sterling was asked to reimagine the original percussion, transitioning the kit from a time-keeping tool to a more atmospheric element.
The song’s heartbreaking quality posed a potential challenge when Pearce cut the final vocals. It required her, and the producers, to stay in that fragile space long enough to record multiple, believable takes. “It’s not method acting,” Osborne says. “It’s not that hard, but she definitely wanted to be in the character and in the moment of the song. And so once she got in there, she was willing to stay in there and keep going.”
As work progressed, Pearce began thinking about Chris — who previously won a Grammy for “Either Way,” a similarly spare song about a broken couple — as a vocal partner. She reached out in January to his wife, Morgane Stapleton, who said they would consider it, but also warned he would pass if he wasn’t really into the song. Pearce waited weeks for an answer. Unaware of that overture, Big Machine meanwhile decided “Fight” should be the first single from Pearce’s next album. Morgane called to say yes on Feb. 4, the night before Pearce won her first Grammy, and Chris called at a later date during his drive to the studio to get creative input from Pearce. She told him she wanted harmonies, but to feel free to add anything that he felt. He took command of the bridge and raised the song’s emotional quotient another notch.
“It unlocked the whole other side of the story in a very unexpected way because you don’t typically hear somebody come in on a bridge that has only been singing harmony,” says Pearce. “It just turned into something so cool because he trusted his gut.”
Pearce went back to the studio to adjust her vocal in the bridge to Stapleton’s performance, and McAnally cut and pasted a wailing cry from the song’s final moments to the end of verse two.
The plot of “We Don’t Fight Anymore” never quite arrives at a conclusion, but that’s also part of its attraction. It resides in the ache, and the authenticity in the performance practically guarantees that “Fight” will have an impact on playlists and the awards circuit. Still, as real as it sounds, Pearce insists that she’s only playing a character this time around and that fans should not read anything into the song’s difficult emotions.
“I came on to the scene with a heartbreak ballad, and I’ve always been a storyteller that said things that were uncomfortable,” she notes. “Who I was long before 29 is still the same girl.”
When Catie Offerman performed for programmers during Country Radio Seminar on March 14, she provided the Ryman Auditorium audience a mystery worth unwrapping.
Offerman announced her first radio single would be “I Just Killed a Man,” then launched into a slowly unfolding storyline full of dark imagery and phrases: Cops, chalk outlines, a getaway car and a guy begging for mercy in the driveway. The story was spellbinding; Offerman delivered it with a clear, inviting tone; and it was easy to ponder even as she performed it: “Really? Her first radio single is going to be a murder ballad?”
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But after two full verses and two choruses, the bridge shook up the plot: “Just because it ain’t a crime/Don’t mean I won’t be doing time.” More pondering: “How can a murder not be a crime? Oh, it’s not a murder. This song is awesome!”
That’s generally the way people react to “I Just Killed a Man,” though not everybody needs two minutes or so to figure out that the song isn’t quite what the title implies. “I say the name of it, all the women think it’s about killing their ex-boyfriend — I think they get all giddy about it for a second,” Offerman says. “It ain’t about murder, but I’ve never heard heartbreak talked about this way before.”
Circumstances lined up nicely for “I Just Killed a Man,” a title that emerged before the final day of a songwriting camp in Nashville last August that had a handful of composers focused specifically on material for Offerman. At the end of the day’s work on Aug. 9, two of the writers — Ryan Beaver (“Party Mode”) and Joe Clemmons (“Rose Needs a Jack”) — hung out at Beaver’s place to brainstorm for the next day. They flipped on the TV, and the Netflix menu fortuitously promoted a series that debuted that same day: I Just Killed My Dad. A couple of word changes and “I Just Killed a Man” led them down a creative road that compares a breakup to a murder.
“We just started throwing lines back and forth, not co-writing, but just nonchalant,” recalls Clemmons. “You know — ‘They won’t lock me up for this one’ – playing with the metaphor.”
Beaver called his neighbor — songwriter Jessie Jo Dillon (“Memory Lane,” “Break Up in the End”), who was also part of the Offerman camp – and clued her in. And when they arrived the next morning, it wasn’t long before they shared the concept with Offerman and songwriter Benjy Davis (“Made for You”). Clemmons broke into a progression on guitar with and came up with a signature instrumental lick at the same time, and everyone pitched in.
“Catie started singing the chorus melody,” Beaver remembers. “It was such a collaborative effort. Benjy was such a great editor and writer that day; Joe was great. I mean, it’s really rare to feel that way because you sort of feel like you need a leader, or somebody has a better vision, and then the others are helping fulfill that. But not that day. This was a day where everybody was firing.”
“It was one of those days,” adds Dillon, “where you feel like you’re almost getting it from somewhere else.”
They wrote it in 6/8, an alternative to the typical 4/4 time signature. While it’s not the usual framework, it has undergirded such stalwart titles as Keith Urban’s “Blue Ain’t Your Color,” Chris Stapleton’s “Tennessee Whiskey” and Jason Aldean’s “You Make It Easy.”
“I Just Killed a Man” “reminds me of [Little Big Town’s] ‘Girl Crush’ in a way,” Offerman says, citing another 6/8 predecessor. “The subject matter, you’re kind of like, ‘Whoa, what’s going on here?’ And then you just can’t help but being soaked up in the feeling of the tune.”
The metaphor in “I Just Killed a Man” works in great part because songs typically treat the person who ended a relationship as a villain. But verse two cast both people in the breakup as victims of the situation. Still, it’s easy to picture the stanza as a confession in an interrogation room. “Jessie pretty much wrote the whole second verse by herself,” says Clemmons. “Obviously we’re all helping and everything, but she had that line, ‘Tonight it’s just whiskey and guilt on the rocks.’ And that is such a Jessie Jo Dillon line. I’m pretty sure she spit that whole thing out.”
As fluid as the writing session was, “I Just Killed a Man” ended up running long. Davis was key in trimming the excess. “At some point, we were messing with some kind of pre-chorus, and I remember really liking what it said,” Dillon notes. “But it was one of those things that I think happens in songs sometimes where you kind of have to — no pun intended — kill off your favorite character, because it just felt so good to go into the chorus as quick as we did.”
Beaver and Clemmons wasted no time working up a demo that night at Beaver’s home. The recording laid out a strong map for the final product, kept musically lean. “I’m in a two-bedroom, two-bath, little condo, and one of the rooms is just set up for music gear and recording,” says Beaver. “Joe and I kept it really simple. I was like, ‘Man, this just needs to be about this story. It needs to be about this vocal.’ ”
That made it a difficult piece to get right when Offerman and producer Dann Huff (Kane Brown, Brantley Gilbert) cut it at Nashville’s Blackbird Studios. Two electric guitars played the instrumental signature lick in unison an octave apart, but even as they tried to minimize distractions from the melody and plot, the track was still too busy. “This kind of song, you can screw it up just because it’s a whisper,” Huff says. “There’s no grandstanding.”
They later went through a couple rounds of cuts in the production, muting instruments to give space for the story to fully resonate. Offerman recorded her final vocal at Huff’s home studio, singing it several days in a row among a batch of songs. Each day, she became a little more relaxed with the process and a little more in touch with the piece’s emotional subtleties.
“Some singers try to over-emote, overtell a story, overact,” says Huff. “In this one, I vaguely remember us speaking about the fact that there needs to be an air of desperation, a quiet desperation. Not overly dramatic — that spoils the story. It’s just that ache and the resolve to the emotional part of the lyric.”
Offerman and her creative associates were all pleasantly surprised when MCA Nashville chose the 6/8 ballad with murderous allusions as her first radio single, releasing it via PlayMPE on May 8. Based on the reaction she received at the Country Radio Seminar show, she’s bound at the very least to grab programmers’ attention.
“When you send them a text, or a message in their inbox, that says ‘I Just Killed a Man,’ you know at least they’re going to listen,” she reasons. “That is a cool thing about this title. I think it intrigues people, and I think it makes them want to listen because what other song have you ever heard called, ‘I Just Killed a Man’?”
The most glaring elements of Lainey Wilson’s new single, “Watermelon Moonshine,” are its thematic similarity to Deana Carter’s 1996 classic “Strawberry Wine” and a lonesome slide guitar.
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But one of the track’s most daring aspects is so subtle that most listeners are unlikely to even think about it. The melody in the chorus is surprisingly similar to the one in the verses, which is a distinct departure from the way most modern songs are constructed. Consumers’ attention spans, it’s widely believed, are short, and writers and producers are generally sensitive to changing the tone of songs every few bars to keep listeners on board.
Wilson had that issue in mind even as “Watermelon Moonshine” came together.
“When we were working on that chorus, I remember thinking, ‘OK, this sounds really, really similar to the verses,’ because I try to make sure that my verses and my chorus sound completely different from each other,” she says. “We decided to go up, you know, melodically on certain words and down on certain words. We kind of massaged it to where it was just different enough. But it really just kind of felt like a lullaby, and I didn’t want to mess with that too much.”
The base melodies for those two sections originated with songwriter Josh Kear (“Need You Now,” “Most People Are Good”) building on the title “Watermelon Moonshine,” which he came up with in a simple brainstorming exercise.
“One morning, I made two lists — months before we wrote this song — ‘Things I love,’ ‘Things I strongly dislike.’ Not a fan of the ‘hate’ word,” he notes. “Then I looked at the lists and tried to combine my likes and dislikes into titles. My least favorite food of all time is watermelon and my least favorite alcohol is moonshine … I think I turned those lists into a handful of titles, but ‘Watermelon Moonshine’ is the only one I ever resonated with enough to try writing it.”
Kear was scheduled for an appointment on Jan. 12, 2022, with Wilson and Jordan M. Schmidt (“wait in the truck,” “God’s Country”). But he was under the weather and the COVID-19 omicron variant was raging, so to play it safe for his co-writers, he worked through Zoom. That morning, he dialed up the “Watermelon Moonshine” title and proceeded to write most of the first verse and chorus, waxing nostalgic about a first sexual experience. The top line’s persistence was decidedly not an issue.
“I find the melody somewhat hypnotic,” he says. “If anything, I felt like the melodic consistency allowed me to stay lost in the story without getting distracted.” Wilson and Schmidt immediately recognized that “Watermelon Moonshine” had a similar plot and title to “Strawberry Wine,” though Kear didn’t quite figure it out until later in the day.
“By then, I was so in love with the song as it was, I wasn’t really worried about it,” he says. “I felt like what we were creating was worthy in its own right. I also figure the world can probably handle a loss-of-innocence song involving alcohol once every 25 years or so.”
Wilson and Schmidt, working at Schmidt’s studio, helped guide the second verse, in which the woman recalls having her initial experience with both alcohol and sex at the same time. That, of course, spurred Wilson’s memories of her first taste of liquor. “I remember being 17 years old, and taking a few sips of whatever it was that we were trying to hide from everybody, and that I wanted to be drunk,” recalls Wilson. “I wanted to feel like I was drunk, so in my mind, I was like, ‘I think I’m a little tipsy,’ when the truth is, I probably got more tipsy off mouthwash.”
Written in the key of C, the bridge transitions into a B-flat chord — a departure from the natural key signature — and as a result, that section almost feels like a modulation to a new key, though it quickly returns to more standard triads. “This is one of my favorite bridges,” Schmidt says. “I do feel like our contributions altogether for that bridge took the song to a new level and kind of broke the monotony of it a little bit, and kind of makes the listener have to engage again, if they were becoming disengaged at all.”
Schmidt produced a demo that relies on finger-picked guitar, using reverb on Wilson’s voice in the chorus to demonstrate the song’s dreamy nostalgia. Producer Jay Joyce (Eric Church, Brothers Osborne) reworked it in the studio with Charlie Worsham strumming guitar to create a pulse at a slightly faster speed. Rob McNelley drew out the slide guitar for a long, aching sweep.
“I remember everybody just kind of feeling extremely laid-back, like a melancholy feeling,” says Wilson. “It did seem like everybody in the room was reflecting as they were playing. I know I definitely was.”
After the fifth or sixth take with the band — which included bassist Joel King, guitarist Aslan Freeman and drummer Brad Pemberton — it felt like that bridge section needed even more separation from the rest of the song. Joyce left space in the track for an additional guitar segment, filled later with a descending passage that keeps the melancholy while injecting a new creative thought. Additionally, it breaks up a sentence: The last line of the bridge is a lead-in to the third chorus, and by dropping the guitar into the middle of that thought, the new material leaves the listener in bittersweet suspense.
“It did take me a second when I heard the master to switch gears in my head; like, ‘Oh, this is how Jay envisioned it,’ ” Schmidt says. “Now I’ve gotten used to it and I love it. He’s one of those producers where he’ll never take it in the way you think it should go. He’ll take it the way he thinks it should go. And I appreciated that about him. I don’t know him — I’ve never even met the guy — but I feel like I know him through his productions.”
Wilson sang all through the process — on the demo, on every take during the tracking session and in vocal overdubs at a later date — finding small nuances to exploit as she progressed, though the final version doesn’t sound much different than her performance on the demo. “I literally did maybe three passes,” she recalls of her overdub appointment, “because I still wanted it to feel real and raw, and not completely overdone.”
Stoney Creek released “Watermelon Moonshine” to country radio via PlayMPE on May 9, as a follow-up to “Heart Like a Truck,” which peaked at No. 2 on Country Airplay. Two days later, Wilson won four Academy of Country Music Awards, including album of the year, for Bell Bottom Country. “Watermelon,” the project’s sophomore single, moves No. 55-47 on the Country Airplay chart dated June 10.
Should there be cause for a No. 1 party, watermelon moonshine is certain to be on the drink menu.“Better be there,” she says, promising a buzz: “I will give you a glass of mouthwash.”
One of the tenets of life on planet Earth is that no one knows how much time they have here — although society generally expects that most people should probably live somewhere between, say, 55 to 90 years. It’s tragic when kids don’t make it to double digits, but amazing when people reach triple digits. Perspectives about all that change as age accrues.
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Thus, when Kimberly Perry wrote “If I Die Young” for The Band Perry around age 25, she masterfully delved into a touchy, fragile topic with a character who imagines her own premature death and the devastating effect “the sharp knife of a short life” might have on her mother.
Perry was not necessarily anticipating that outcome for herself, though a lot went into that song that she didn’t fully understand until she decided to write a sequel last year. She even went to therapy to gain more insight into the emotional genesis of the piece, which brought her song of the year honors from the Country Music Association in 2011.
“Psychologically, there was a bit of hedging of my bets with my dreams,” she explains. “I had such huge ideals, and dreams at that moment for a family, and for all the things that I did not see present in my life. I was quite a daydreamer, and I think for whatever reason, death — and a young death — almost felt more romantic than those dreams not coming true.”
The message of “If I Die Young” was enhanced by the deft marriage of an artfully mysterious storyline and a melancholy musical foundation, and its singalong chorus became a point of reference for an entire generation. When AMR Songs acquired select pieces from Perry’s songwriting catalog, CEO/partner Tamara Conniff queried her about the origins of “If I Die Young” over coffee, then casually asked if Perry had ever considered writing a follow-up about its protagonist, assuming the premature death never came.
“It was like this lightning-bolt moment for me,” remembers Perry. “But it was equally terrifying, so I procrastinated for a solid four months before even beginning to think about what that might look like.”
She also decided not to address it alone, knowing she could not be subjective about messing with a modern standard. Perry was writing fairly regularly with Jimmy Robbins (“The Bones,” “Half of my Hometown”) and Nicolle Galyon (“Tequila,” “Automatic”), and she had several conversations with Robbins about a sequel. It was the last songwriting idea they addressed before she was to record Aug. 27-28, 2022. Galyon didn’t know anything about it until they dropped the idea on her during the writing session at Robbins’ studio.
“I think had I had more time to think about it, I would have been pretty intimidated by the concept,” Galyon says. “But I was like, ‘Yeah, let’s go.’ It honestly just kind of felt like another day of writing a song.”They had some obvious parameters. For starters, “If I Die Young Pt. 2” needed to retain most of the original’s iconic chorus. The melody remains the same, and the only line they changed in that section was the finale: “Well, I’ve had just enough time” became “Now I know there’s no such thing as enough time.”
And where the original opens with that chorus, they needed to start “Pt. 2” with a verse, which would give the singer an opportunity to reframe the current moment and cast the chorus as a song from the past. They did that with the last line of the pre-chorus: “I’m changing my tune since I said …”
And Perry literally changed her tune. She altered the melody in the verses, introduced a new chord progression in the bridge and took on the viewpoint of a woman no longer thinking about how her own death would affect everyone else, instead contemplating how her mother’s passing would affect her. Her own real-life changes informed their approach. “She had just gotten married, and so everything was very forward-thinking,” recalls Galyon. “It just kind of breathed new life into how to write that narrative.”
The new opening verse reflected the wedding — she eloped with husband Johnny Costello, driving to Las Vegas from Los Angeles in a black convertible, Perry thrusting her hands in the air in jubilation for much of the trip. In verse two, the singer grapples with issues that accompany aging: She increasingly resembles her mother, thinks about her mom’s passing and takes note of the casket in the first iteration of “If I Die Young.”
“If it was somebody else, the word ‘casket’ would have maybe thrown me off.” Galyon says, “But what has connected for Kimberly in the past, commercially, has been those kinds of blunt and quirky adjectives and words. There’s something about that that works for her that doesn’t work for other people.”
The new version retains the same final words — “So put on your best, boys/ And I’ll wear my pearls” — but the clothing is celebratory instead of funereal.
“Instead of ending with a period, it’s ending with an ellipsis or an exclamation point,” says Robbins.Robbins produced the demo, then worked with Perry to assemble an appropriate band for the final session, centered on guitarist Bryan Sutton, who played on the first “If I Die Young.” They recorded it at Backstage in a higher key than the original and at a quicker pace, reflecting the singalong status the song has attained in concert. Drummer Evan Hutchings played in a way that emphasized key moments in the melody, and Jenee Fleenor came in later to overdub fiddle.
“It’s just wild how much space it takes up and how much the track is carried by fiddle,” Robbins says. “It kind of shifted everything for us.”
While writing the sequel presented a challenge, singing it did not. “This was a piece of cake for me,” says Perry. “My body, and my muscles, my voice knows this song so well that I just walked out of the vocal booth, maybe in a half hour, like, ‘Guys, I think we killed this.’ I like my original version, but my voice has matured and changed so much since then, too. So it was really a cool opportunity to get to document my growth in that way as well.”
Perry had several options for a first single with RECORDS Nashville, but ultimately the team settled on “If I Die Young Pt. 2,” since it helped tell the story of her transition from lead singer of The Band Perry to solo artist. Her brothers, Neil and Reid Perry, reportedly gave their approval to her revision, and RECORDS released “Pt. 2” to country radio on May 4 via PlayMPE. In its third charted week, it ranks at No. 52 on the Country Airplay list dated June 3.
She says she’s already feeling a reconnection with the country audience: “I’m finding that people, while they love the original version, they really are coming with me on the journey of ‘Hey, I’m so glad we have this version. Like, this is healing all the things for me and healing my inner child.’ ”