Makin’ Tracks

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.”

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.”

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 obvious differences between Europe and the United States is the age of their historic sculptures. The Greeks and the Romans, who reigned long before the States were even a consideration, left an array of ancient statues of leaders and mythical gods. Many of those figures, of course, are damaged — with missing arms, severed fingers or rubbed-out noses — but they endure nonetheless.

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In that context, the opening words of Luke Combs’ single “Love You Anyway” — “If your kiss turned me to stone/I’d be a statue standing tall in ancient Rome” — provide a sense of the relationship the song portrays: significant, remembered but broken.

“I just loved the way that that sounded,” Combs says. “It just adds this unique color, to me, that doesn’t necessarily have any particular meaning behind it. But a statue in ancient Rome feels cooler to me than a statue that exists today.”

While a sculpted image documents a historical figure for as long as it stands, “Love You Anyway” documents a moment in Combs’ relationship with his wife, Nicole Hocking. He played Rupp Arena in Lexington, Ky., on Valentine’s Day 2020. She wasn’t feeling well, so when he dedicated “Beautiful Crazy” to her, he acknowledged onstage that she may or may not be in the audience, then tagged the intro: “Love you anyway.”

Songwriter Dan Isbell (“The Kind of Love We Make,” “Fires Don’t Start Themselves”) was moved by that remark, and he logged it as a potential song title to explore in his next co-writing appointment with Combs. Isbell reached out to fellow writer Ray Fulcher (“When It Rains It Pours,” “Even Though I’m Leaving”), who responded positively, and the two actually texted later about it as they took separate flights to Key West, Fla., where they co-wrote at Combs’ house on Feb. 25.

After writing one or two songs earlier in the day, they launched into “Love You Anyway” late at night on Combs’ back patio, with a distant view of the ocean, while Hocking slept. The artful Roman statue verbiage gave them a starting point, and Combs and Fulcher developed a follow-up concept for the opening verse of a woman’s touch shattering him into pieces.

Through that point, the song worked like an Alan Jackson ballad: simple, lyrically driven, conversationally paced. But in the two lines before the chorus, the chords moved more quickly and the melody embraced a new arc, preparing the listener for the next section.

“My favorite part of the song is that pre-chorus where it does that kind of scaling,” says Fulcher. “I’ve always thought of that melody as more of like a pop kind of melody, but it’s also haunting in a way. Those pre-choruses, in order to be right, they really need to set up what’s coming next.”

That pre-chorus led to a more dramatically pitched chorus, in which the singer hails the woman as a grounding force in his life, a “compass needle” that provided guidance. And as it concludes, he tells her that if he had known she would break his heart, he would “love you anyway.” The compass was Fulcher’s idea, and he and Combs had to defend it.

“I actually fought that line a little bit,” Isbell admits. “I was just like, ‘Compass needle?’ Like I didn’t understand what it was -— they literally had to explain it to my redneck ass what that even meant. As a redneck, we didn’t use compasses. You just turn right by the damn tree. I didn’t really know.”

“The thing about the compass is there’s nothing you can do to change where north and south, east and west are,” says Fulcher. “It just is what it is. And that’s the character of this song. It’s like, he’s got no choice in the matter. That’s what’s powerful about it.”

When they finished the song, Combs sang a guitar/vocal version and posted it to his Instagram account that same night.

“It didn’t really get the response I thought it was going to get,” Combs says. “A couple years later, I think we put it on TikTok or something, people were freaking out over it. It’s interesting. That’s probably the first song of mine that I’ve seen work like that.”

Combs recorded a version of “Love You Anyway” with co-producers Jonathan Singleton and Chip Matthews at Nashville’s Backstage during sessions for the Growin’ Up album, but the results were — like the Instagram response — underwhelming.

“It just didn’t sink in like we hoped, and we had so much other material we were working on,” recalls Matthews. “I remember being at Luke’s house one day to talk vocals, and he’s like, ‘Man, I don’t know, we just didn’t hook it. It’s not feeling right.’”

Though it didn’t make Growin’ Up, Matthews didn’t want to let it go. While it was a heartbreak song, he sensed that it said something personal about Combs’ relationship, and he thought it needed to find its place. Matthews ultimately decided that if they slowed it down and stripped back the instrumentation, it would put more attention on the song’s ethereal images, and Singleton agreed.

Matthews reworked the existing track at a slower pace, muting some of the instruments to simulate a more spacious arrangement, and Combs gave the treatment a thumbs-up. They recut it at Matthews’ studio in the summer of 2022, with fiddler Stuart Duncan taking a prominent place in the production.

“The fiddle is the thing, to me, that takes the track over the top,” Combs says.

He worked painstakingly on the vocal. Once or twice, he showed up at Matthews’ studio, only to decide his voice wasn’t operating with the tone and character he wanted. When they finally found a day when the conditions were right, Matthews and Singleton tried several microphones before they landed on one that most closely captured the personal nature of “Love You Anyway.”

“We definitely were going for where you feel like you’re literally standing 3 feet away from him, so that you can hear all of the harmonic crunch and grit and air, and all the little interesting characteristics to his voice,” says Matthews. “Then by not building up a track that takes up all that space, it leaves all that stuff out there to be heard, and I think all that lends itself to the emotion being being conveyed.”

The new version made it onto Combs’ Gettin’ Old album, and it resonated with the audience, renewing an idea that succeeded once before. Trisha Yearwood hit No. 4 on Hot Country Songs in 2001 with the similarly titled “I Would’ve Loved You Anyway,” which likewise celebrated a relationship’s strength even after it had fizzled out. The musical treatment was different — bigger, and more dramatic — and it didn’t have ethereal references to compass needles and Roman statues either. Neither Combs nor Isbell were familiar with the Yearwood single; Fulcher forgot about it until he heard her recording days after they wrote their take on the concept.

Combs recently held a fan contest and let his followers choose the new single; “Love You Anyway” narrowly beat out “5 Leaf Clover” by about 2%. River House/Columbia Nashville officially released it to country radio on April 15 via PlayMPE, and it climbs to No. 18 on the Country Airplay list dated May 20 in its seventh week on the chart, all because Isbell recognized a title in Combs’ onstage conversation.

“That’s the beauty of when your co-writers are also your friends,” Combs says. “They’re always taking notes.”

Country music invariably draws on the past to create its present, and with Brothers Osborne’s new single, “Nobody’s Nobody,” part of that past could be traced to an unlikely source: 1986 top 40 radio.

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The track is built on a pulsing Wurlitzer piano figure that sounds a tad like a synthesizer, and that element could have easily fit back in the day alongside Pet Shop Boys’ “West End Girls,” Level 42’s “Something About You” and The Rolling Stones’ “Harlem Shuffle.” The Osbornes’ vocals, however, are decidedly 2023 country, creating a fresh sonic juxtaposition.

“Nobody’s Nobody” “fits in pop radio in the same way that Don Henley would have fit on pop radio,” says guitarist John Osborne. “There’s still a big organic element to it. It’s all organic instruments.”

The upbeat music and humble message of “Nobody’s Nobody” came together fairly organically last year, though it took a bit of effort to find the spark. Brothers Osborne had essentially recorded their next album, their first with producer Mike Elizondo (Keith Urban, twenty one pilots), but the duo decided to take an extra week to write new material in an attempt to beat the existing songs. On the first day, Sept. 26, they were joined at Elizondo’s Phantom Studio in Gallatin, Tenn., by singer-songwriter Kendell Marvel (“Don’t Think I Can’t Love You,” “Right Where I Need To Be”), and they chased down several ideas that were OK, but not quite inspiring. Marvel and the Osbornes stepped outside for a break, and while they cleared their minds, Elizondo stayed indoors, where he stumbled onto that pulsing Wurlitzer sound, essentially a string of watery, bubbling 16th notes.

“I had a delay pedal on it,” he remembers. “It was kind of creating this certain rhythm, and when you play a chord, then the delay creates a rhythmic offshoot of it.”

Meanwhile, the other three debated their options outdoors. Since things weren’t really jelling, they could have easily called it a day. But Marvel mentioned a title he had thought about, “Nobody’s Nobody.” He wasn’t entirely certain where to take it, but he envisioned it as something sad.

“I didn’t hear it that way at all,” says lead vocalist T.J. Osborne. “I actually heard it as, ‘[If] nobody’s nobody, [then] everybody is somebody.’ And then they were like, ‘Oh s–t, OK.’ ”

When they returned to the studio, that positive ideal seemed to match up well with Elizondo’s propulsive keyboard bed, and they set to work with a new sense of purpose, developing “Nobody’s Nobody” in perhaps 45 minutes. The opening lines contrasted a hall of fame inductee against someone else whose stardom might be short-lived. But the next two lines level the playing field a bit: “Some people never ever make a name/ But change the game in someone’s story.” Beethoven’s mother exemplifies the thought: Most people know nothing about her, but it’s a good bet that she had an effect on his enduring art.

“I think most people aren’t meant to go down in the history books, but everyone has changed the trajectory of someone else’s life,” T.J. notes. “That is just a really simple line, but it speaks to me in such a way that just hits every time I hear it.”

The individual phrases in that opening verse ended primarily with blue notes, providing just the right amount of angst and grit. “Most American music has blues influence,” says John. “It’s almost impossible to not have some version of that because it’s so intrinsically a part of American culture and American roots. And it’s also something that we love to sing and play. So it’s just in our DNA.”

The song’s atmosphere changed subtly when they reached the chorus, which uses longer notes and a bed of harmonies while inserting that “everybody’s somebody” sentiment. After celebrating a range of people — “sinner, saint or son of a gun” — they flipped to the “nobody’s nobody” hook. And they tagged it with a slow-cooking “No, no, nobody” post-chorus that extends the hook into a bit of a mantra. “I didn’t want that to stop,” T.J. says. “It just feels so good.”

Elizondo built the demo, then played bass when they tracked the master version at Phantom with John on guitar, Abe Laboriel Jr. on drums and Phil Towns playing keyboards. They tried a number of different approaches they hadn’t attempted on previous albums, starting with John layering more guitar parts into the fabric than in the past. “As a guitar player, if you ask me to play more, I’m not going to say no,” he quips.

He played some distinctive stabs in the chorus, with the sound intentionally washing out as the notes fade over Towns’ pulsing keyboards. John also created an instrumental bridge for “Nobody’s Nobody,” a series of rising, dexterous patterns.

“One of my favorite bands of all time is Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, and I didn’t realize until I got further into playing guitar how important of a guitar player Mike Campbell is,” says John. “When I listen to Mike Campbell, everything is so incredibly intentional and does as much service to the song as possible. And I always wanted to lean in that direction.”

T.J.’s lead vocals embraced the song’s inherent humility with appropriate understatement, completing each of his performances with admirable consistency. “Once he’s got it locked and programmed in his brain, he will give you three, four takes of each section — or top to bottom, depending on the process — and they will be nearly identical,” Elizondo says of the singer.

The Osbornes handled the harmonies differently from past efforts. They stacked loads of vocals into the background, and T.J. contributed to the supporting voices with his brother for the first time. They sang the parts face-to-face on separate mics in the same room, with Elizondo encouraging them to keep building.

“I’m a student of all the greats you’d hear about, like [producer] Roy Thomas Baker doing all the Queen vocals with everybody on one mic,” says Elizondo. “They would sing each note three or four times, and then they’d go to the next note and they just kept layering and layering.”

Brothers Osborne’s team, including EMI Nashville and Q Prime South, was nearly unanimous in assessing “Nobody’s Nobody” as the best first single from their next album, and the duo agreed. EMI released it to country radio via PlayMPE on April 6. It climbs to No. 47 after four weeks on the Country Airplay chart dated May 13.

“The subject matter really aligns with who we are and what we’d like to see in the world,” John notes. “It’s crazy right now, everyone’s so divided. Everyone is just looking for a reason to hate another [person]. And for us to have a song that isn’t just your typical life or love song — it has a positive message — it’s just all the more reason for us to put this out first.”