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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.”
In the five years since the release of his debut single, “Best Shot,” Jimmie Allen has earned a reputation as one of country music’s most industrious figures.
He has piled numerous high-profile TV roles — including stints on Dancing With the Stars, Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve and Celebrity Family Feud — on top of what’s typically the most exhaustive period of an artist’s career, while also launching several businesses and establishing a family, to boot.
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Part of what has propelled him is a seemingly indefatigable energy, a can-do-it disposition that fueled his upward mobility from a rough period when he was forced to sleep in his car. Most successful people have some period of dues-paying, and while Allen never seems to complain about — or solicit sympathy for — that part of his past, he acknowledges it in the opening stanza of his new single, “Be Alright (15 Version),” which honors the foundational character the hard times inspired.
“It was important to tell that story,” he says, “because a lot of people want to run from the struggles. But you have to get into it.”
Appropriately, “Be Alright” was forged in the aftermath of a difficult period. Allen never grew comfortable writing songs over Zoom during the pandemic, and he only did it twice. As the world began to open back up, he booked a full week of writing in Los Angeles, and returning to that kind of in-person connection tapped into his animated spirit. The bookings included a session with Jason Evigan (“I Should Probably Go to Bed,” “Talk Dirty”), songwriter-producer Gian Stone (Meghan Trainor, Jonas Brothers) and Castle, a trio that Allen was meeting for the first time.
Allen didn’t have much time for pleasantries. When he entered the studio, set with a sleek wall logo that gave it a mild Star Trek vibe, he announced he wanted to write a song with an upbeat affirmation that everything would be all right. Atypically, they dived into work in the first five minutes.
“When you start a session, especially when you don’t know the other people, there’s like 30 minutes, an hour, hour and a half of easing into writing a song,” Stone says. “You talk and you kind of get a background, and you do all this stuff. And in a weird way, that kind of happened two hours into this. We jumped in right away.”
Evigan had received a rather elaborate cigar-box guitar for a birthday present, and he used it to craft a twisty opening riff that matched the cheery tone of Allen’s theme. Evigan and Stone concentrated on the musical elements, while Allen and Castle enthusiastically tackled the message. “Castle has like, crazy, wild energy,” says Evigan. “He just keeps the room going, and then Jimmie is the same way. I mean, he was preaching. He’s really well spoken and has just so much to say. So we’re kind of sitting back like kids, taking notes.”
They endeavored to balance the track’s sonic positivity with a healthy level of depth, following a blueprint laid out by multigenre duo Louis York. “Claude Kelly, the amazing songwriter, and Chuck Harmony, they have this phrase called ‘deep-fried veggies,’ ” Allen says. “The ‘deep-fried’ part is it feels good. But the ‘veggies’ part, when you listen to it, is something that’s good for you.”
The second verse neatly used the casual phrasing established in the first verse. The first word, “patience,” is followed by a pause, cleverly making the listener wait (“That was intentional,” Allen says), ultimately encouraging persistence before segueing back into the chorus. That singalong section is a relentless parade of speedy phrases, seven lines that embrace life’s unpredictability with a tight rhyme scheme: “roll with it,” “flow with it,” “go with it.” The L.A. writers suggested doubling that part, though Allen was adamantly opposed.
To wrap the process, Allen sang over the day’s programmed tracks, and he broke into yet another hooky idea — a simple repetition of “alright, alright, alright” — during the final take.
“We loved that,” remembers Stone. “He did an ad-lib track at the very end — doing the vocal, a lot of times, we’ll be like, ‘Hey, can you just try to add some ad-libs and see if you hear anything?’ I think he started doing that in the end, and we were like, ‘Wait, that should be a whole part of the song.’”
It became a post-chorus — “We called it a ‘super chorus’ when I was growing up in bands,” Evigan recalls — when they dropped it in place after Allen left. But they also renewed that thought of doubling the “roll with it” section by simply repeating that seven-line passage twice. They did that on both the first and third occurrence — the second one remains the original length — and Allen ultimately approved as the song’s structure became more clearly defined.
“There was a lot of science that went into it afterward,” Evigan notes. “When he left, I remember us both being like, ‘What is going on with this song? It’s all over the place.’ ‘I’m gonna roll with it’ — was this a chorus? But once we doubled it, we kind of knew it’s got this rolling thing. It just feels good.”
Allen positioned “Be Alright” as the opening track of Tulip Drive, which Stoney Creek released June 24, 2022. Even as the album arrived, Allen already had an alternate version in mind that would be more suitable for airing on country radio.
“They play what they play, and I’m all about respecting where you are,” says Allen. “If I want to be played on country radio, I need to give them something they want to play.”
Allen and producer Ash Bowers (Matt Stell, George Birge) recut it on July 5 at Front Stage on Nashville’s Music Row with a live band. Allen changed two lines, too, altering the chorus’ opening phrase, “Smoke it and roll with it,” to “You gotta roll with it.” They had Evan Hutchings play a bigger, hotter drum part, and Allen re-sang the lead vocal to fit the new version.
Allen hoped to get Matthew McConaughey to guest in the video — the “alright, alright, alright” post-chorus seemed tailor-made for him — but the actor was out of the country.
In the meantime, Allen designated the new version “Be Alright (15 Edition),” to pay homage to his late father, a baseball enthusiast who wore the No. 15 on his jersey. Stoney Creek released it to country radio via PlayMPE on March 21. He is optimistic that its positive message will have an impact on the country fan base.
“I feel,” Allen says, “like this is what the world needs to hear right now.”
Gauged solely by its title, “Standing Room Only,” it’s understandable if listeners expect Tim McGraw’s latest single to be a song that celebrates big concert moments or triumphant sports events.
In fact, it’s a crucial lesson about acting with integrity for the benefit of friends, family and the community in general. The question McGraw asks about life in the bridge of “Live Like You Were Dying” — “What did you do with it?” — is a query that gets revisited, at least in spirit, in “Standing Room Only.”
“To me, it’s like the last point on a triangle with ‘Humble and Kind’ and ‘Live Like You Were Dying,’” he explains. “They all, to me, have this big, universal feel. You know, I’m just the vessel. They’re not my songs. I just feel lucky to be in the same universe with these songs and to be able to sing them every night. It’s almost like they belong to everybody.”
The “Standing Room Only” copyright actually belongs to songwriters Tommy Cecil (“Home Alone Tonight,” “You Were Jack [I Was Diane]”), Craig Wiseman (“Live Like You Were Dying,” “The Good Stuff”) and Patrick Murphy, a singer-songwriter-pianist signed to Warner Music Nashville. They wrote it over Zoom in April 2020, roughly a month into the coronavirus pandemic, when the outbreak and online writing were both still new to Music Row composers.
Cecil presented the “Standing Room Only” title with the twist already built in. “It was inspired by something in a movie, and I don’t remember what [movie] it was,” says Cecil. “But the thought I wrote down was, ‘When he dies, at his funeral, everybody will be standing. It’ll be so packed that there will only be standing room.’ ”
The idea connected immediately. Wiseman blurted out the first two lines of the chorus: “I wanna live a life, live a life/ Like a dollar and the clock on the wall don’t own me.” It launched them into a song about prioritizing character over wealth, about spreading hope instead of hoarding power.
“It’s just a song about treating everybody, in my opinion, the way that you want to be treated,” Murphy suggests. “Be kind to every single person that you come into contact with each day because you have no idea what that person’s going through.”
They worked in a non-sequential order, fitting key phrases into the chorus or into the verses as the ideas surfaced. The opening lines focused on misplaced anger and the loss of old friendships, and Wiseman diverted the narrative in the last half of that verse down a symbolic road, with the protagonist chasing a pot of gold in a downpour. He shakes his fist at the sky, only to catch a life-changing thunderbolt in the midst of the storm. It’s a metaphor that Wiseman wasn’t entirely certain his co-writers would accept.
“Most songs, I just try to say, ‘F-150,’ you know, and get down to the chorus,” he says. “It was so fun to be able to actually write and use the metaphor.”
That thunderbolt represents a light-bulb moment when the singer reframes his life, letting go of temporary, short-term distractions and emphasizing meaningful, long-term results. “You have to get right in the middle of a wrong decision to realize what the right decision is,” says Wiseman.
As the writing progressed on “Standing Room Only,” Wiseman rolled out one more key phrase, forming the song’s bridge: “Stop judging my life by my possessions/ Start thinking ’bout how many headlights will be in my procession.” His co-writers were stunned.
“I looked at Craig, and I said, ‘Craig, where did that come from?’ ” Cecil remembers. “Craig goes, ‘Well, I’ve been trying to write toward that the whole song.’ ”
Counting the number of headlights following the hearse is not the literal point, says Wiseman. It’s about making a difference among the lives that one does touch. “You could actually fall into the same trap you did chasing money and stuff if [the attendance] was your only thing,” he observes.
When the song was completed, Wiseman recorded a guitar/vocal and sent it to Cecil. He used it as a template for a full demo with Murphy singing lead over a piano-based production loaded with ethereal elements that highlighted the spiritual quality of the message. Since Murphy was the participating artist, he had been the original target for “Standing Room Only” — but he was only 22 at the time and wasn’t entirely certain if he had enough life experience to convince an audience that he fully understood it.
“Toward the end, they had asked me, ‘Hey, do you think this is a song for you? Should we pitch it?’” recalls Murphy. “I was very appreciative for them even asking, and so I was like, ‘You know, let’s just see where the song could go. Maybe I will cut it. But if it ends up in a different artist’s hands that we love, why not?’”
The song languished for months with little feedback, but Cecil — who repeatedly played the demo — refused to let it go. He ultimately tweaked the percussion in it, then resent it to Wiseman for an evaluation. Within a half hour, Wiseman responded: “Hey, man, it’s on hold for McGraw.”
McGraw had just released his Here on Earth album and wouldn’t be recording for a while, but “Standing Room Only” was special. In fact, when the sessions started a year or more later in a high-ceiling recording studio owned by drummer Shannon Forrest, McGraw and co-producer Byron Gallimore (Jo Dee Messina, Sugarland) waited until they had cut at least 15 other songs and fully knocked off the pandemic rust before they tackled “Standing Room.”
McGraw tempered the ethereal ambience from the demo and grounded his recording with more standard instruments, highlighting the communal, neighborly tone of the story. “I wanted it to be more of a band-sounding song, and I wanted the earthiness in it,” McGraw says. “I wanted the human aspect in the record because of everything that’s going on in the world and because of what this song says. I wanted my vocal to be really out front so you really hear the story.”
He caught about 80% of the final vocal during the tracking session, and it finds him sonically mirroring the song’s intent. The back half of the chorus is pitched near the top of his natural range, and by challenging himself in the performance, his art reflects the message. “You’re not taking the easy way out,” he says. “The song challenges everyone to be the best of themselves that they can be and challenges me to be the best of myself I can be. Therefore, the way you sing it, the way you approach it, should challenge yourself to be the best that you can be.”
Big Machine released “Standing Room Only” to country radio on March 9 via PlayMPE. It reaches No. 31 in its fifth week on Country Airplay, making a mark with an affirmation when many communities — Nashville, in particular — need to hear it.
“The song just came along at a time when I thought it was important for something to say, and I love having those kinds of songs,” McGraw notes. “To be an artist that songwriters will bring those kinds of songs to, and to be able to record a song like that and have people actually listen to it, that doesn’t escape me. And I’m grateful.”
Tension abounds: Josh Mirenda’s current Average Joes single, “Wind Up,” is a perfect storm of excited angst — dramatic outbursts of percussion, nearly unresolved chord progressions, grainy confidence and a plot with a fair amount of mystery. An amped-up couple surges toward heated physicality, though their destination remains unknown. The singer leaves his soul precariously exposed, and all of the requisite emotional peril is felt in the mix of hard-edged music and suspenseful storyline as “Wind Up” moves into a moment of expected passion.
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“There’s some danger with love,” Mirenda says. “You meet somebody or something, you got to let that guard down if you’re willing to actually fall in love with somebody. It can be a dangerous, nervous kind of feeling to be vulnerable that way.”
Waiting for love — or to express it — can often build tension, and waiting is a key element of “Wind Up.” Mirenda wrote the song with Will Weatherly (“Thinking ’Bout You,” “Lose It”) and Michael Tyler (“Blame It On You,” “Somewhere on a Beach”) around 2019, with Jason Aldean squarely in their creative crosshairs. They didn’t have a specific title or hook in mind, though when one of the guys landed on a forward-leaning electric guitar groove, it gave them an energetic core to work from.
“We just kind of started messing with an electric and those chords,” recalls Weatherly. It’s “that dark, driving thing. It’s just never bad to aim uptempo.”
The chords are simple: grounded in the key of G, “Wind Up” spends the bulk of its time in C and D chords that beg for resolution and an E-minor that serves as a murky shadow of the tonic. It does eventually arrive at the G, but it only stays there for a mere beat before flicking back to its inherent tension. The sense of mystery had the writers completely engaged, even if they didn’t know where it was headed. They only knew the words had to match the musical undercurrent to work fully.
“As you’re moving forward in a write, you know, the music can drive the lyric, and then the lyrics can continue to drive the music and they can keep working off each other,” Weatherly says. “At the end of the day, you want it to feel like the emotion that you’re saying. You want to believe the singer.”
They developed a chorus first, focused on a couple who is bored with a club. The pair sneaks out to its ride, hitting the blacktop for some intense alone time, though its destination is unclear. That hazy journey matched the essence of the day’s writing process.
“Ironically, it’s called ‘Wind Up’ — the whole premise of the song is like, ‘Hey, let’s just swing for the fences here and see where we wind up,’ ” says Mirenda. “What we did in the room with the idea, it just kind of fit.”
Mirenda and Tyler had primary control of the song’s melody, centering on specific notes that begged for resolution, much like the underlying chords. As they unwound those phrases, Weatherly worked up the track, kicking out a good portion of it before the appointment was done. He focused particularly on the percussion, casting the chorus in half-time rhythms to vary the texture between that section and the verses.
“I love playing with rhythm, so it could be 120 [beats per minute], and it turns into 60 perceptively in the chorus,” Weatherly notes. “Then you go to the second verse and you’ve got the four-on-the-floor [kick drum]; it’s back to 120, like DJ land.”
Weatherly finished the demo that night, and when he sent it to his co-writers, Mirenda forwarded it directly to Aldean, who in turn put it on hold. He held it for a while, though he ultimately decided against recording it. “That happens as a writer,” says Mirenda. “It is what it is.”
But Mirenda couldn’t let go of “Wind Up.” He played the demo frequently and made the song his concert opener. Invariably, fans asked about it after his shows, so Mirenda put it in the mix when he headed into Starstruck Studios last fall with producer-engineer Nick Gibbens (C.J. Solar, Marty Stuart), who used Weatherly’s demo as a road map.
They operated with the same “See where we wind up” ideal as the song. Gibbens told the band, particularly drummer Evan Hutchings and guitarist Sol Philcox-Littlefield, to cut loose on the rocking foundation that Weatherly set, not knowing quite how they would proceed.
“Half the fun to doing any of this is watching dudes that are tiers above anything I could ever play or Josh could ever play, taking our ideas and going three steps further with it,” Gibbens says.
Hutchings applied some wickedly propulsive fills in key sections, while Philcox-Littlefield sculpted a flashy, intricate solo that elevated the energy and tension. It gave them a track that could easily fit between Puddle of Mudd and 3 Doors Down on turn-of-the-century rock radio.
“For all the energy that’s in it, it’s pushing midtempo — it’s not blazing,” notes Gibbens, dissecting Hutchings’ drum part. “We tried to stay on top of the beat with as much subdivision as we can get and just tried to treat it like an early-2000s rock track, like what Josh and I were listening to in high school: the Warped Tour every summer, a lot of guyliner, a lot of angst in there.”
To provide stylistic balance, Mike Johnson slipped in atmospheric steel guitar riffs that mimic the pedal tone in Brooks & Dunn’s “Ain’t Nothing ’Bout You.”
“That is my favorite country song of all time,” Mirenda says. “Brooks & Dunn is my favorite country artist/act/duo/band -— whatever you want to call it, Brooks & Dunn is my favorite. I play it every night in my live show. I do a little ’90s country acoustic medley, and I cannot wait to play that every night.”Mirenda and crew cut six songs that day, and at the end, they toasted their efforts with shots of Black Sheep Tequila. Mirenda later knocked out the final vocals, managing to deliver a grainy sound and believable phrasing while staying true to the notes.
“There’s not a lot of people that can do that,” enthuses Gibbens. “Cool always beats perfection to me, and he’s able to do both, where he is really accurate with his pitches and his phrasing, but he still puts character on it. And that’s what’s way more important than being perfectly on pitch.”
Average Joes released “Wind Up” to country radio via PlayMPE on March 1, and Mirenda has heard a few spins, thanks in part to some radio friends who have given him a heads-up when it’s scheduled to air on their stations.
“It’s a special moment. It kind of makes me tear up a little bit, even though it’s a rockin’ song,” Mirenda says. “Knowing all the stuff that I had to go through personally and that my family had to go through to get to this point, it’s worth it.”
Wherever the journey winds up.
Much of country music’s story is embedded in the road.
The genre is obsessed with pickup trucks, artists are necessarily reliant on tour buses, and a passel of key recordings — from Hank Williams’ “Lost Highway” to Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again” — are tied up in travel.
So is Jordan Harvey’s “Along for the Ride,” a sunshiny piece of ear candy that distills a commute from Alabama to Nashville into a three-minute musical journey with inspirational debts to Keith Urban, Rascal Flatts, Lionel Richie and Beyoncé.
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“I’m a very melody-driven human,” says Harvey, a Scottish-born former member of King Calaway. “Melody makes you feel, and then it’s the lyric that takes you over the line.”
“Along for the Ride” is built around an ultra-hooky chorus melody that Harvey developed while driving north with his fiancée, Madison Fendley, from her parents’ home in lower Alabama for a songwriting session on Feb. 10, 2022. The upbeat musical phrases worked in tandem with a series of “pushes” — three instrumental notes that propel the energy from one phrase to the next. Those pushes borrowed from the syncopation of Richie’s “All Night Long (All Night).” And the images for Harvey’s song likewise came straight out of Fendley’s joy while riding in the passenger seat.
“This Beyoncé song came on, and she’s singing along and her hands are out the window, and I’m like, ‘You’re the most beautiful person,’ ” he remembers. “I was back out to the write that night, and I knew there was something there.”
Songwriter-producer Jason Massey (Kelsea Ballerini, Mickey Guyton) hosted the appointment, which included James McNair (“Going, Going, Gone,” “Lovin’ On You”), in a studio on his property. “There’s a chicken pen with like 10 chickens — you couldn’t get much more country than that, could you?” deadpans Harvey. “As you’re writing a song, you hear the chickens — ‘B-caw, b-caw’ — which was pretty awesome, and pretty random.”
Harvey introduced his musical foundation, which was quickly moved to the most prominent part of the song. “Jordan was humming that melody maybe an octave below where it is [now], thinking it was like a verse,” Massey recalls. “We’re like, ‘That sounds like a chorus.’ ”
Harvey relayed how positive and inspired the trip had been and noted that he wanted to write a song with an automotive vibe along the lines of Urban’s “Days Go By” or Rascal Flatts’ “Fast Cars and Freedom.” McNair offered the title, and when they fished for a setup line, McNair also served the full twist: “I may have my hands on the wheel/ But I’m just along for the ride.” Key in making it work was to present it in a way that fans could relate to either of the song’s two characters in present tense.
“I remember trying to describe her enough to make it feel good, where it puts the listener [in the role of] the guy driving, or the girl that’s along for the ride,” says McNair. “And we wanted to keep it very fiercely in the moment.”
Harvey was conscientious about populating the song with images that fit his relationship — it recognizes her Alabama roots, for example — and he hinted at her background as a dancer with an entertainment-related phrase in the chorus. “I’ve never heard anyone say, ‘Paparazzi Hollywood smile’ in a country song,” he says. “It phonetically matches the first line, and it felt right to put it in there when we sang it. It just pops off the tongue.”
They pitched the opening lines much lower than the chorus, creating a natural arc in the song’s construction, and McNair fashioned a key pre-chorus line, “Hearts burnin’ hotter than the gasoline,” that was so strong they reused it for a bridge.
“What really separates a great song from just an undeniable song is if you can have different parts that you can pull out of the song and they’re equally as hooky — like, hooky verse, hooky pre-chorus and hooky chorus,” says McNair. “That phrasing, how it goes into the pre-chorus, once we landed on that, that’s when we knew we had it locked in.”
Massey started lightly producing the demo during the co-write, then worked in more depth later, with keyboards, bass, guitar and programmed drums. He also included a banjo, treating it with an echo effect that transforms its clunky nature into a sound that emulates the glitter of a paparazzi-inhabited red carpet or the stars “fallin’ like diamonds” in verse two.
“The verse definitely has some more reverb, and I think it’s filtered out some high frequencies,” he says. “So the banjo in the verse is a different treatment than the banjo on the chorus.”
Massey called on several other musicians to make individual changes for the final version. Evan Hutchings replaced the programmed drums with a real kit, while Justin Ostrander fitted in a short solo that ends with twin Southern-rock inspired guitars. Alex Wright added extra keyboard textures, too. Harvey cut his rangy vocals on his own back in Alabama, though after Massey got the file, he persuaded Harvey to do a second remote vocal session, where they Americanized some of his enunciations a little more.
“When he initially sent me the vocals, I don’t even remember how he pronounced ‘paparazzi,’ but it was really weird,” recalls Massey with a laugh. “It was just not how we pronounce it here. I sat on the phone trying to coach him on that for a minute.”
Harvey did a separate version of the end of verse two, changing the melody and dovetailing with his own chorus performance, and he piled up more than seven different tracks with ad-libs. Massey contributed extra harmony vocals. Harvey heard final mixes of “Along for the Ride” during his radio promotion tour — he listened to one key version in the middle of a busy airport — and he got important feedback in those station visits.
“I had this song in my arsenal. Everyone loved the song — I really loved the song — there was no denying that this was going to be a single,” Harvey says. “But when I started doing my radio tour, people at radio said, ‘Oh my God, man, we’re dying for tempo.’ My second station, I played it and the guy was like, ‘Give it to me right now, I’ll play it.’ ”
Broken Bow released it to country radio via PlayMPE on Valentine’s Day. After developing “Along for the Ride” through the pandemic, performing it for actual crowds on the road underscores his belief in the song’s melodic power.
“Just seeing people like, ‘Well, I love this,’” he says. “It’s so rewarding when it’s a pen and pencil on a desk, or in a studio with a guitar and a couple of boys. But to take it out and have a finished product that people want, that’s the best feeling in the world.”
People don’t come with an owner’s manual, but if they did, the checklist might look something like the words in Ashley McBryde’s new single, “Light On in the Kitchen.”
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Much like Tim McGraw’s “Humble and Kind,” written by Lori McKenna, “Kitchen” is a compendium of wisdom handed down from a mother to her kids. But where “Humble” was relayed from Mom’s point of view, the advice in “Kitchen” is seen through the recipient’s eyes. And those eyes may well be teary.
“Mom and her sister and I are really close, and we say it to each other, just to remind one another that we’re on each other’s minds,” McBryde says. “Instead of just saying, ‘All right, I love you. I’ll talk to you later. Bye,’ we’ll say, ‘Hey, I’m going to leave the kitchen light on for you tonight.’ I don’t know why it’s so stirring. It tugs on something.”
That something is the stuff that successful families are made of: the generational mentoring, the caring for relatives, the sense that there’s someone offering protection. Those are the nuts and bolts of love and connection.
“Light On in the Kitchen” arrived in the world at a time when connection was being tested. McBryde wrote it with Connie Harrington (“I Drive Your Truck,” “Mine Would Be You”) and Jessi Alexander (“Don’t Think Jesus,” “Never Say Never”) on June 9, 2020. It was three months into the pandemic, 15 days after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police and eight days after the Trump administration used chemicals to disperse a crowd of protesters for a controversial photo op in front of a Washington, D.C., church.
“I just remember that being such a dark time,” says Alexander. “It was dark for me, just being stuck at home and feeling like I’m lost. I mean, songwriting is such a part of who I am. It was a weird time, but what a beautiful light’s come out of it.”
They masked up and met in person to write two songs in Midtown Nashville — “It was tumbleweeds down Music Row,” Alexander recalls. Harrington got one of the day’s titles from a story in The Magnolia Journal, a quarterly magazine published by Chip and Joanna Gaines, co-hosts of HGTV’s Fixer Upper. The “light on in the kitchen” line resonated with her own experiences.
“If I have guests that get up in the night, I want them to be able to go to the kitchen because that’s where everything you need is,” she says. “No matter how little your kitchen is, or how many people are there, and how much room might be elsewhere in the home, everybody ends up in the kitchen.”
Alexander threaded a simple chord progression as they began to fashion a series of homey thoughts from the top “left-hand corner of the page,” says McBryde. “I love it when songs happen this way.”
The verses provide details on smart self-care, the first two choruses feature hints at building relationships, and the final chorus changes a few lines to focus on living independently if that right relationship never quite appears. Significant time spent alone, oddly enough, improves the chances of living successfully with someone else.
“Until you really get along with yourself, and reconcile your demons, and learn who you are apart from anybody else, you won’t be at your best and optimal,” Harrington reasons. “Everyone needs to do that, in my opinion.”
After a parade of images and hurdles — pancakes after midnight, runny noses and weight issues, among them — that last chorus encourages listeners to stand up for themselves: “If somethin’ tries to hold you back/Get up and give it hell.” It’s an example of a mentor plotting their own obsolescence.
“As a mom, if you’ve done a good job, they don’t need you anymore,” says Alexander. “That’s the ‘light on in the kitchen’ for me — my daughter and I and my sons actually had this conversation the other night: ‘Always, you can call me. There’s nothing you can say that would keep me from helping you if you needed it.’”
When producer Jay Joyce (Eric Church, Miranda Lambert) heard “Kitchen,” McBryde’s team already had it scoped out as a likely single. Joyce felt pressured to make it radio-friendly, though he fought that tendency. “It’s hard not to think that way,” he says, “particularly if they put that on you.”
They cut “Kitchen” at Joyce’s Neon Cross Studios during February 2022 in East Nashville using McBryde’s band: electric guitarist Matt Helmkamp, mandolinist Chris Harris, bassist Chris Sancho and drummer Quinn Hill. The challenge was to make the supporting arrangement interesting without distracting from the lyrics. McBryde had already finished recording her Lindeville album, and knowing it would be released first, they had freedom to take their time in getting “Kitchen” right.
The mandolin brought a bluegrass element to its folk foundation, while Helmkamp applied a contrasting blues guitar to the proceedings. Those instruments deftly bracketed the song, though McBryde eventually recognized an unintended symbolism. “It’s a big guitar and a little mandolin,” she says. “And it’s a big woman and a smaller girl having a conversation.”
Hill’s percussion part relied mostly — if not entirely — on the snare and kick drum, dialed intentionally into a thinner sound. “I think I’m filtering the top end of the drums,” says Joyce. “They’re very dark and sort of muffled, so they’re not getting in the way of the vocals.”
McBryde recorded the bulk of her vocals live with the band, getting a more cohesive performance out of the entire ensemble. “When somebody’s really singing, then the players play better,” Joyce reasons. “There’s a million questions that are answered naturally in your own mind — how hard to play, when to play, when not to. When somebody like her is really performing, it just makes it easy.”
It was not necessarily easy for McBryde, who wrote “Kitchen” with the longest notes — on the phrases “trust yourself” and “love yourself” — in an uncomfortable section of her voice. “I don’t know where other women’s vocal break is, but the difference between chest voice and head voice is just right there on that damn line,” she says. “It’s so on-brand for me to be like, ‘Here’s the line, I’ll put my toes on it.’”
McBryde topped off the recording with finger-picking on acoustic guitar. She performed it live for the first time on Feb. 24 at TempleLive in Fort Smith, Ark. During the day, she sang it for her mom, though it took three tries before she could get through it. McBryde held it together onstage that night, introducing it to fans a day after Warner Music Nashville released it to country radio via PlayMPE. “Light On in the Kitchen” occupies the No. 41 spot on the Country Airplay chart dated April 1.
As a contemplative ballad, it’s a bit unusual as a first single from a forthcoming album — but it speaks volumes for its long-term possibilities.
“I didn’t see that coming,” McBryde says. “I’m so happy for that to be the life that this song lives — to not only be on the album, but also to be the song [about which] we say, ‘This is the foot that we’re going to stick forward.’”
It’s like audio caffeine.
Repeated listens to Kassi Ashton’s new single, “Drive You out of My Mind,” can create the same effect as too much coffee: elevating heart rates, rhythmically overstimulating the brain and infusing a general sense of urgency, all in the best way. It’s a relentless piece of work, an intense ball of focused energy.
“It is,” Ashton agrees, “a speeding ticket waiting to happen.”
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It’s also the result of a concentrated period in which the singer-songwriter tried to satisfy MCA Nashville/Interscope executives by writing an obvious single. Her recordings to that point were cohesive and agreeable, but she still needed to crack the commercial code. They gave her two and a half months.“Panic ensues,” remembers Ashton. “I wrote six or seven days a week for 10 weeks trying to write singles, and I remember writing this one and going, ‘This is it. There’s no way that this is not.’ I remember being so excited and giddy because you feel released from the tension and the nerves trying to write to a specific spot.”
“Drive You out of My Mind” was composed across two appointments, the first taking place at the home studio of songwriter-producer Todd Clark, a New Zealand-born creative whose résumé spans both pop music (Dua Lipa, Gavin DeGraw) and country (Little Big Town, Tucker Beathard). Ashton arrived at that first session with a major piece of the musical foundation solved.
“I had almost the entire chorus melody,” Ashton says. “I think I had some sparse words about neon lights, you know, generic filler things. But I find sometimes the chorus melodies can be difficult for me. So when I had a whole melody, I was just so stoked.”
Songwriter Travis Wood, who has landed cuts with Jordan Davis and Jake Owen, contributed a title that fit the propulsive nature of her melody, though it took a bit to get there.
“We probably spent, Kassi and I, the first half of the day arguing about what to write,” recalls Wood. “Kassi and I are a little bit in opposition with each other creatively. But we also get along really well at the same time, so we were able to be very honest with each other about what we didn’t want to do. She’s a bit of a bulldozer. And I might be guilty of that sometimes.”
Wood had been carrying the title “Drive You out of My Mind” for two or three years, but he felt as if its word play — a twist on a common phrase, “You’re driving me out of my mind” — was out of step in many co-writes. It suited all three writers on this occasion, and they attacked the chorus first.
Clark placed it in a minor key and developed a descending chord progression. But where most repeating progressions in modern country use a four-chord pattern, this one covered six. Thus, when the chorus ran through that sequence twice, the section took a while to reach its finale.
“Part of the reason why the chorus is probably so long is because that chord progression is a long progression,” Clark says. “You felt like one round of the chorus wasn’t going to be enough.”
That also meant the verses would have to stay comparatively short. Spurred by her co-writers to name an uptempo country song by a female that influenced her in the last 10 years, Ashton mentioned the Miranda Lambert single “Mama’s Broken Heart.” They referenced it in the first verse and ended up creating a melodic structure with a similar vibe: a bouncy verse melody that contrasts with the straight-ahead flow of the chorus.
The text of “Drive” would include numerous images of a physical escape route experienced while trying to outrun a memory: a cloud of dust, “Chevy wild horses,” a ghost town, flashing blue lights and a “needle hittin’ 90.”
Ashton and Wood clashed particularly over the hook’s setup line, in which she contemplates what might happen if “this heart forgets to break.” They decided to keep it in place and readdress it in the second writing session. Wood ultimately agreed on their return that it was the right line.
“That’s the last line before the hook,” he says. “That’s generally the line that you spend the most time debating with any co-writer.”
Clark mapped out the demo, fitting it with indie-sounding guitars, then handing it off to producer Luke Laird (Kacey Musgraves, Sam Hunt). He cut the first master version of “Drive” on Feb. 26, 2021, at Nashville’s Sound Emporium, employing drummer Jerry Roe to insert some humanity into its tenacious percussion track alongside the rock guitar tones.
“It almost has like this disco feel,” says Laird, “but how do you do that and keep it not sounding just like an electronic drum track but bring the live thing? We were just, the whole time, trying to marry the two parts.”
Ashton was surprised when the label bypassed “Drive,” picking “Boys in Pickup Trucks” as her first radio-targeted single in 2021. But as she launched her radio promotion tour, programmers’ ears typically perked up when she played “Drive” acoustically. Their feedback validated her belief in it, and she had Clark take another crack at producing it. He called on guitarist Derek Wells to downplay the indie feel and imprint a hint of western sound with slide guitar parts. And Ashton, having grown more familiar with it, rerecorded her lead vocal, emphasizing different words and finding the most ideal places to breathe in those persistent choruses. She broke each chorus into smaller sections to accomplish that.
“She definitely leveled it up,” Clark says. “There’s just a different energy to it because it’s a lot of words. It’s a lot of fast singing, and you’re looking for moments in those vocals where you can put some juice into all the words. I think it definitely got better.”
The label “freaked out,” she says, over the most recent version and released it to country radio via PlayMPE on Feb. 23. Its caffeine-level energy, coupled with its inherent bite, gives “Drive” a lot of potential. “It’s got kind of that minory thing, but then it’s uptempo,” says Laird. “It’s kind of like when songs have a sad lyric, but it’s fun music. I like that juxtaposition. This song… it’s not sad, but it has that minor-y thing against the super-uptempo, which I think is just always a cool combo.”
Ashton believes “Drive You out of My Mind,” which she performed for Country Radio Seminar during a March 14 label showcase at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, will connect her with the audience more authentically than any of her previous releases.
“It’s not a new me,” she notes. “It’s the me that was under a bunch of shit that I had to dig up. It’s the me [from] where I started a long time ago, before I let trends or opinions [interfere]. And so that makes me really excited because that also makes it feel timeless.”
It’s amazing how fast two minutes and 55 seconds can go.
That’s the amount of time it takes Jordan Davis to follow the life of a relationship — from confirmed bachelor, to husband, to father, to grandfather — in “Next Thing You Know,” a moderately unconventional ballad that practically has awards-circuit contender stamped on it. MCA Nashville released it to country radio via PlayMPE on Feb. 6 based on the reaction from fans, who frequently confess in YouTube comments that the song makes them cry. That response is not much different from the reaction of the four men who created it.
“I’m not the only one that probably had a few tears in the writing room,” Davis says. “That usually means you’re writing something real.”
“Next Thing” was basically a last-minute bonus as Davis worked on his Bluebird Days album, released Feb. 17. Greylan James (“Happy Does,” “For What It’s Worth”), Chase McGill (“5 Foot 9,” “Never Say Never”) and Josh Osborne (“What He Didn’t Do,” “Body Like a Back Road”) had a co-writing session booked at Universal Music Publishing Nashville for June 14, 2022, and Davis was added to the appointment just a couple of days before it took place. He had a June 21 recording session on his schedule, and the implication put pressure on the group to come up with something great.
“If we do it, we get a cut,” recalls James. “If we don’t, we’ve missed an easy opportunity.”
McGill had the title, “Next Thing You Know,” when they gathered in a basement writing room, and he saw it originally as a device for a tale about a couple who meets in a bar — the guy swears he’s staying single; next thing you know, he’s not. Davis liked the idea but wanted to shoot for something bigger: not just the first exchange of glances, but the whole sweep of a lifetime romance.
Everyone agreed, though they knew it was an ambitious concept. They briefly took time to lay out the chapters up front, making sure they had a sense of the journey.
“On a song like this, it felt like we needed to have a little bit of a road map before we got too far into it,” McGill says. “Fairly quickly into writing a life song, you think, ‘OK, if we spend 47 seconds of the song being 21, then we’re not going to get a lot of life in there.’ So kind of delicately, you have to think about how we get [in] the really important parts and yet move time along.”
The “Next Thing You Know” title became a significant part of the story. Each verse used the phrase twice to set up a change in perspective or life circumstances, allowing them to speed through some moments and linger on others. And one of them suggested that if they really wanted to pack a lot of life into the piece, they should make the lyrics in every chorus different and cover more events.
“That’s usually the kiss of death, if we change stuff,” says James. “We’re like, ‘Are we?’ We’re all looking around the room, just waiting for somebody to go there, and Jordan’s like, ‘I’ll do three different choruses. I don’t care. Let’s do it.’ ”
McGill and James played interlocking guitar parts, creating a “Meanwhile Back at Mama’s” musical vibe, and they headed down the road with the couple marrying in the first chorus, leaning on Davis’ own experiences to tell the narrative. “The best man giving the half-drunk speech — that was me,” he admits. “I probably had a few too many cocktails before I gave my best-man speech for my brother.”
The second-chorus scene in the hospital nursery, the singer dressed in scrubs and talking with the doctor, provoked some of the tears in the room. “I do specifically remember our doctor,” says McGill. “I might have looked a little faint or something, and I just remember him going, ‘How you doing there, Dad?’ It hit me right then: ‘Holy crap, this is real, man. I’m fixing to be a dad.’ ”
The protagonist’s kid heads off to college at the end of that stanza — “It’s amazing how fast 17 years go” — and next thing you know, the couple is back to two again, experiencing life as grandparents, with the story falling off before it reaches an obvious conclusion. “We didn’t kill anybody in the song, which we’re very proud of when we’re talking about life,” James says.
All four writers sang along to a guitar-only work tape with plans to do something more elaborate, but Davis didn’t have time to do another vocal for it over the next week — and didn’t need to. The group’s performance was highly emotional, and it sold the song perfectly. “The second I turned it in to my team, everybody was kind of like, ‘We need to get this out,’ ” recalls Davis.
Producer Paul DiGiovanni recognized that the words needed to carry the song, and was careful to keep the studio band restrained even as it moved the sonic narrative forward.
“It was all about the biggest moment being that last chorus, but we still didn’t want the song to be too huge,” he notes. “How do we get from zero to, say, 40, and slowly accelerate in between there? That was the whole key. We didn’t want to go zero to 60, we didn’t want to go zero to 100. We really wanted to just have a smooth runway to get us up to that last biggest chorus but still not be overbearing, not to get in the way of that vocal.”
Ilya Toshinskiy played the acoustic guitar part twice — once for the left channel and again for the right to create a depth of sound without using too many notes. Drummer Nir Z also loosened the screws on the snare, playing with his bare hands to develop a bongo sound. Other percussive elements, like shaker, tambourine and a programmed sound that approximates the African talking drum, subtly fill in gaps without covering the vocal. Guitarist Derek Wells topped it off with a mysterious, atmospheric solo that underscores the inspirational weight of the story.
“It’s very dreamy; there’s a lot of delay and reverb,” says DiGiovanni. “It’s not like a ‘Here comes the guitar player to the front of the stage’ moment. It just adds a little bit of a mood to the track.”
“Tucson Too Late” was originally slotted as the second Bluebird Days single, but listeners were already streaming the fire out of “Next Thing.” When Davis saw the audience’s overwhelming reaction to it on the first few dates of his new tour, the label called an audible. It commands No. 19 on the Hot Country Songs chart dated March 11 after 25 weeks on the list and rises to No. 42 in its third week on Country Airplay. Davis is learning to let it elicit tears in his live shows without breaking down himself.
“You just kind of have to remember there’s probably somebody here that came tonight to hear this song, so get it together and present it well,” he says. “That’s what I tell myself every night. I see how special this song is.”
Dustin Lynch’s new single, “Stars Like Confetti,” could have long-term consequences for his bottom line.
On one hand, if it succeeds, it could keep fans buying tickets to see Lynch sing it live for years. On the other hand, if “Confetti” becomes a signature song, it pretty much requires he blast celebratory bits of paper and mylar into his concert audiences nightly. And that comes with a cost.
“If this song becomes a hit, I guarantee you we’re going to need more trucks [to get] confetti blowers behind the stage every night,” he says.
That’s just one of the extra expenses. “Not only do you have to get it there, you’ve got to have people to operate it,” he adds. “And then with something like confetti, you have to have a cleanup crew. All those things go into the equation.”
“Stars Like Confetti” actually has its roots in Thomas Rhett’s concert productions — and in a family vacation. He and his wife, Lauren Akins, took their kids to Montana, and the state lived up to its Big Sky Country nickname, impressing one of his daughters. “In Montana, you see stars for years,” Rhett notes. “The light pollution in Montana is like zero, and so we were looking up at the stars, and Willa Gray said something like ‘Hey, that looks like the confetti from your show.’ ”
The comment became a teachable moment. “We just started to have a conversation about how God made the stars and how some of those stars are really old,” he says. “And sometimes those stars aren’t there anymore, but we’re just now seeing the light from the star. I’m not a scientist, but I was trying to tell her the scientific facts about stars, as well as I knew.”
Naturally, Rhett logged “Stars Like Confetti” as a possible song title, and he popped it out early in the pandemic during a Zoom songwriting session with Zach Crowell (“Body Like a Back Road,” “Sunrise, Sunburn, Sunset”) and Josh Thompson (“I’ll Name the Dogs,” “Ain’t Always the Cowboy”) on April 17, 2020. It was Crowell’s first experience writing via the video hookup, and he remembers it being awkward. But the nuts and bolts of the process — attempting to match words and music in a way that sticks with listeners — was pretty much the same.
“What in the world do we rhyme ‘confetti’ with?” asks Crowell rhetorically. “Do we say ‘Yeti’ in there? I’m surprised we didn’t.”
“Stars Like Confetti” suggests a cheery topic, though the narrative needed to fit the sound of the words and the down-to-earth mentality of the typical country plotline. “‘Confetti’,” Crowell says, “is a softer word, so we needed to kind of probably tell the story of a guy and a girl kind of thing.”
So they embraced a narrative about a young couple enjoying the same sky Rhett’s family saw in Montana. “I love that picture of looking at the star-filled skies and feeling like God was literally just taking a handful of confetti, just throwing it out over the universe,” says Rhett. “It turned into this love song about an epic night on a back road.”
They stuffed a bundle of images into the verses, providing enough background to get a sense of the couple and the setting: drinking beers in a rusty, cherry-red pickup on a dirt road, with perfume and physical connection encouraging passion. The pre-chorus used an ascendant melody to provide a sense that the mood and images were leading the listener somewhere. “It’s kind of a tension creator,” Crowell says. “Get ready for the chorus.”
In classic form, that chorus has a singalong quality, rolling optimistically toward its hooky payoff: “Stars like confetti — ah, ah.” The tag cinches the commercial effect, the two “ahs” giving it a punchy finality, with a scooped note in the middle providing an ideal “ah” separation. It was a T-Rhett move.
“During 2020, I was on a big kick of trying to find songs that what you thought was the hook actually wasn’t the hook,” he recalls. “When I listen to ‘Uptown Funk,’ Bruno Mars, ‘Uptown Funk’ is not the hook. The hook is [the horn riff]. That’s the part that you remember. And like, ‘Barefoot Blue Jean Night’ — ‘Whoa-oh-oh, we were livin’ it up’ — you remember the ‘whoas’ way more than you remember ‘on a barefoot blue jean night.’ ”
When they finished writing, Rhett recorded a vocal over acoustic guitar. Crowell started layering instrumental parts over that work tape to build the demo, calling on multi-instrumentalist Devin Malone for an assist. They created most of the final production in the process, and they fully expected Rhett to record it. But he never did.
“I don’t know why I didn’t cut it, to be honest,” says Rhett. “I don’t even recall why that wasn’t in the running. Sometimes I do think that God will just kind of put you off something because it wasn’t for you, because it was for somebody else.”
Once it was clear that Rhett was passing on “Confetti,” Crowell sent a copy of it to Lynch, who was partying with friends on his boat when it arrived on his phone. The group gave him immediate feedback.
“Thomas Rhett was actually singing the demo whenever we heard it for the first time, and everybody loved it,” Lynch remembers. “The best gauge you can have is whenever people that hear a song want to hear it again later in the day, and that was the case with ‘Stars Like Confetti.’ It was a great sign and a great starting point.”
Crowell and Malone used the demo as a foundation for the master recording, keeping an estimated 95% of it in place. Crowell brought in live drums and a handful of other instrumental parts, and the end product included appropriate spare touches — short bursts of guitars and steel that darted in and out of the verses behind the melody, creating a sonic stars-like-confetti effect. Lynch delivered his lead vocal with relative ease.
Broken Bow was bullish on “Stars Like Confetti” from first listen and finally released it to country radio via PlayMPE on Dec. 16, 2022. It rises to No. 45 in its fifth week on Billboard‘s Country Airplay chart. As it moves upward, it seems likely that “Confetti” — bolstered by real-life production and airborne paper bits — could be suitable for American holiday celebrations and parades as 2023 unfolds.
“I’m sure those opportunities are going to present themselves,” says Lynch. “It does sit very well for wonderful TV moments, you know. With all it lends itself to, we can really spice things up with the performance. I’m hoping it connects and we’re offered those opportunities.”
Defining love is one of the unspoken duties of songwriters across generations.
Depending on the source, love is a wonderful thing, love is a rose, love is thicker than water, or love is a many-splendored thing. Of course, thousands of songs about heartache suggest that even if love really is like oxygen — as was suggested by Sweet — we may not all be breathing the same air.
“Love looks like a cheesy, happy Disney World to some people,” Ingrid Andress reasons, “and love looks like a slow build to other people.”
Sometimes love looks different to the same person after they’ve gone through a breakup. Andress earned her first hit, the Grammy-nominated “More Hearts Than Mine,” with a storyline that imagined bringing a beau home to meet the parents. That song was about a real boyfriend, and he had not met her folks at the time she released it. The relationship eventually bit the dust.
“It was one of those random things where I was just like, ‘I don’t think this is working’ — which at the time seemed crazy, because we had been together for a minute,” she says. “Everybody was like, ‘Oh, you’ll get back together.’ Like, ‘No, I don’t think so.’ And then I met somebody new, and I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, this is like night-and-day difference. I think this was the thing that I was missing from this first one.’ ”
Andress and pop singer-songwriter Julia Michaels had been threatening to write together for a while, and when their schedules finally matched up, with an appointment at the home of Nashville songwriter-producer Sam Ellis (“Lady Like,” “What If I Never Get Over You”), the two women discovered they were at the same place in their dating cycles.
“Her and I had recently gotten out of bad relationships, and then we had both randomly just started falling in love with new people, so it was very organic,” Andress recalls. “We were telling our story and our journey to how we got there, because we both at the time we were just in such a happy place romantically.”
But not in a Disney-level happy place. The opening verses reflect on the bad relationship experiences — manipulation, gaslighting and jealousy — as if they had recorded parts of a visit with an analyst.“The verses are like a full therapy session, for sure,” says Andress.
Conversations with a therapist are often unpredictable, and the “Feel Like This” writers were similarly unsure where the song was going. Ellis had developed a careful, vulnerable piano foundation, and it provided an appropriate framework to explore the unknown.
“It was just sort of a big pile of lyrics,” he says. “We had to find what the song wanted to be out of that.”The verses got the most attention early, and a four-line pre-chorus, which occurs twice, makes a nifty transition from the verses’ contemplative look backward into the present-day enfoldment of this new, seemingly unprecedented relationship. But instead of an anthemic, I-see-stars celebration, the chorus offers restrained, sensible contentment.
“It’s kind of a low chorus,” says Ellis. “It lifts, but it doesn’t hit you huge, melodically. It’s just — the pocket is cool, and that’s what those two do so well.”
They struggled temporarily to find an appropriate tone for that section that would balance optimism with cautious realism. Ellis broke away for a bit to the kitchen, and when he returned, Andress and Michaels had eased into “homemade cookin’ ” and “backyard kissin’,” portraying love at a comfort-food level while working up to the vulnerability that it supports.
“I thought I knew what/ I knew what love was,” Andress sings at the chorus’ peak before a desperate admission: “Guess I didn’t know at all.” They still didn’t have a title, but as they tried to define this reassuring emotion, Michaels blurted the chorus’ defining line: “I think love’s supposed to feel like this.”“Feel Like This” wasn’t the kind of bumper-sticker phrase that typically works for a country song title — “My songwriter brain would never allow that,” says Andress. “Sounds boring” — but it worked for this particular piece, hinting at its positivity without going over the top.
“We’re both emo songwriters,” Andress says, comparing her work to Michaels. “I thought we were going to write a sad song that day, and we did not.”
Rather than write a bridge, they left a section for some vocal inspiration after the second chorus. Ellis oversaw a demo built around piano and kick drum, and got Andress to lay down a lead vocal, which would ultimately become the performance that appears on the master recording, her voice cracking appropriately near the end of the chorus. She also ad-libbed atmospheric lines to create a bridge, essentially establishing a short space without lyrics that gives the listener time to absorb the psychological lessons that had already transpired.
“With Ingrid, it’s always awesome when we write,” says Ellis. “Sometimes we’re like, ‘Oh, I don’t have a bridge yet,’ so I’ll just kind of play through the song just to get a vocal down, and I’ll leave a big section where something could come up. Nine times out of ten, Ingrid will sing something that ends up being this whole new hook or this whole new melody.”
Ellis did more production work on it in the short run, finishing an estimated 70% of the production. But Andress was hardly ready to assemble her next project.
“It kind of got left in demo world for a couple of years while she was figuring out the next record,” he says. “Once we decided that this was going to go on the record, we kind of cracked open the session again and took inventory of where we wanted to go.”
Multi-instrumentalist Devin Malone and Ellis developed all the parts, with Malone adding both the suspenseful steel guitar and the weighty, melancholy cello. Ellis plucked single ganjo notes to provide subtle, spacious rhythmic enhancements in the second verse and to offset the mood a bit.
“The plucking was intentional,” Andress says. “It brings a lightness to the section. It keeps it elevated. It keeps it moving.”
Atlantic/Warner Music Nashville elevated “Feel Like This” to single status, releasing it to country radio via PlayMPE on Jan. 31. It’s accompanied by a motorcycle-themed video that matches the subtleties of the song’s emotional journey. Instead of a happily-ever-after fairytale, “Feel Like This” is an adult approach to the mysteries of relationships.
“Dark comes with light,” says Andress. “You can’t have one without the other, so this song feels true to me in balance. I relate to it because I want to know the gritty stuff before we get to the good stuff.”