Makin’ Tracks

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.”

The lives of country artists’ spouses can be challenging — their partners spend long periods of time on the road, often chew up their home time with business meetings and songwriting appointments, and get interrupted periodically by strangers when the couple is out in public.

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So it’s telling that Lauren Akins, who celebrated her 10th anniversary with Thomas Rhett last October, sweetly defines herself by that relationship in the profile on her Twitter page: “Blessed to be married to my best friend.”

Rhett clearly remains enamored of his wife, documenting their lives together through much of his material, including “Life Changes,” “Look What God Gave Her” and “Star of the Show.” Part of that appreciation is his recognition of the abnormal scenario she freely embraces.

“Anyone married to someone in the spotlight, it takes a very special human being,” he says. “The amount of days I’ve been gone, the amount of times I’ve let work overtake my family life, the amount of times I’ve said yes to stuff that I probably should have said no to — and [she was] there with me the whole way.”

His newest single — “Angels (Don’t Always Have Wings),” which Valory released to country radio via PlayMPE on Jan. 23 — reflects both his gratitude for her and some degree of guilt for his job’s infringements, though Rhett didn’t necessarily intend to be the voice delivering that message.

“Angels” emerged from a co-writing appointment with Teddy Swims, a multigenre singer-songwriter who made Rhett a featured artist on his rhythmic 2021 track “Broke.” “Teddy Swims is like if Chris Stapleton started an R&B band,” Rhett says. “That’s what he sounds like — absolutely insane.”

Rhett aimed to write something that Swims might not typically record: a “frickin’ country ballad that the chorus is just at the tip top of his range,” says Rhett. “Selfishly, I wanted to hear Teddy singing something like that.”

The night before the session, Rhett read a book that raised the possibility of meeting an angel who presents in the physical world as a human being. From that idea, he drifted to the phrase “Angels (Don’t Always Have Wings)” and decided the concept applied to his wife. He introduced that idea during his Nashville writing date with Swims, Josh Thompson (“I’ll Name the Dogs,” “Ain’t Always the Cowboy”) and songwriter-producer Julian Bunetta (“Craving You,” “Beer Can’t Fix”). Everyone bought into it, with Rhett leading the charge.

“You have to stand around with, like, trash cans to pick up all the stuff leaking out of him,” Bunetta says. “You can’t pick it up fast enough. He’s one of the most prolific writers I have ever been around.”

They wrote “Angels” in a waltz time signature, placing the song’s female subject on a pedestal while the singer, self-described as a “mess of a man,” takes responsibility for his own failures and a “selfish heart.” It is, agree Rhett and Bunetta, an exaggeration of Rhett’s character, though Rhett expected Swims to sing it in the end anyway.

“It’s not like every movie that Robert De Niro is in, he had to live,” Bunetta reasons. “The greatest artists have always been able to interpret the song the way it needs to be interpreted. Whether or not they lived that is sort of beside the point.”

They fashioned “Angels” with the music and lyrics working in tandem to wring maximum emotion out of the experience. It starts humbly and conversationally in its opening verses, rising in the chorus to a higher melodic plain. In the process, it uses a fairly small number of words, allowing the phrases — and the song’s heart — to unfold slowly.

“The use of space in songs is good,” Bunetta notes. “Sometimes space says what needs to be said.”The mix of sweet adulation and self-abasement proved dramatic, reaching the climactic, semi-spiritual line in the narrative just before the chorus’ end: “I don’t know why you were patient and wasted good savin’ on me.” The foursome felt a bridge was needed to complete it, and they wrestled with numerous ideas before Thompson asserted himself, using “wings” as both the last word in the chorus and the first word in the bridge.

“He is the least-vocal songwriter that I write with — and by least vocal, I mean the person that is not just shouting out every melody and lyric that comes to his brain,” Rhett says. “I think he kind of allows the write to happen. He just kind of tucks away in a corner with his laptop that’s from 2001 because he’s too old school to upgrade. We got stuck; he just spat out that bridge. And we were just like, ‘That’s what it was supposed to be the whole time.’”

Swims sang over a drum loop and acoustic guitar for the Bunetta-produced demo, but by the next morning, Rhett was already having second thoughts about who should sing it. He checked in with Swims periodically to gauge what was happening with “Angels,” and after several months, got Swims’ permission to keep it for himself. Rhett recorded it with producer Dann Huff (Kane Brown, Brantley Gilbert), who honored the song’s spacious needs.

Rhett, meanwhile, needed private space for his vocal. The chorus tested his falsetto in a way that he had never quite encountered before in the studio, and he wasn’t certain he could capture the song’s vulnerability in front of a producer and engineer. So he holed up in his home studio and sang 60 or 70 takes, which would later be compiled into one vocal.

“I really just wanted to lock myself in that emotion alone and see what would come out,” he says. “The intricacies of my voice breaking up or the falsetto not being perfect — that’s the realness of it.”

After Rhett’s album Where We Started arrived April 1, 2022, his manager, G Major Management founder Virginia Davis, saw particularly strong fan reaction to “Angels,” and she encouraged Bunetta to explore a remix. He redid the bass and drums, and added a piano with a tremolo effect in the opening bars. “I thought that the intro, if we’re going to radio with this song, needed some ear candy to perk your ear up,” says Bunetta.

“Angels” debuted at No. 51 on the Feb. 11 Country Airplay chart and moves to No. 32 in its second week. The song also continues to generate direct messages on social media as fans adopt a song Rhett wrote about his wife as their own.

“It was really cool,” he says, “to watch something so personal resonate on such a large scale with people from different walks of life.”

“Let’s take a trip down memory lane.”
Few expressions are more clichéd. Different usages of “memory lane” or “memory’s lane” began showing up in the late 1800s, and the phrase has become a common way to think of nostalgia.

Old Dominion’s new single, which Arista Nashville released to country radio via PlayMPE on Jan. 4, puts a fresh coat of paint on that time-worn “Memory Lane” idea. It exists because three band members — lead singer Matthew Ramsey and guitarists Brad Tursi and Trevor Rosen — were open to it when Jessie Jo Dillon (“Break Up in the End,” “10,000 Hours”) brought it up during a Jan. 24, 2022, appointment at Tursi’s house.

“Whenever you’re in a room full of very successful songwriters and someone throws out something that’s so clichéd, there’s a reason, and they may not even know it,” Ramsey says. “You definitely pay attention to it — because, of course, it’s clichéd. But why is that sticking out right now? So it makes us kind of all sit down and go, ‘All right, forget the clichéd. Why is this title here in this room with us?’”

Tursi actually started the creative chain before his co-writers arrived that day, building a short rhythmic track around an acoustic guitar and kick drum.

“After you write a million songs on the guitar, it starts to become hard to think of a different rhythm,” says Tursi. “I knew those guys — and girl — were coming to my house, and I tried to pull up a little drum program that has a different rhythm than you would play on a guitar. I just kind of found that little groove, that acoustic part in the intro. It was two chords and the loop, and that’s what I played them when they got there.”

It sounds vaguely similar in spirit to the rolling guitar in “Gentle on My Mind,” a song John Hartford wrote based on the traveling plot of the 1965 movie Dr. Zhivago. Dillon thought “Memory Lane,” logged in a page of titles on her phone, was an appropriate match.

“He had this beat that was real fast and kind of pulsing,” she says. “I wouldn’t really think to do that idea that way naturally, but it gave the song so much energy, and I think it feels driving — kind of like you’re driving down memory lane.”

Dillon originally generated the title during her own battle with nostalgia. She was getting over a relationship with another songwriter, and she still missed him significantly.

“When I hear that song, I picture exactly where it was — the house and the place, for me,” she recalls. “I think the guys had their own versions of that as well in their minds when we were writing it.”

One of the guys — likely Rosen — came up with the opening line, “If I could buy a house on Memory Lane,” and Ramsey chimed in with quick rhymes: “I’d put my money down, and I’d sign my name.” They envisioned a corner lot, but never identified the cross street. (It’s tempting to think it’s Lonely Street, which would put Memory Lane in the same neighborhood as Heartbreak Hotel.)

Since that “Memory Lane” title appears in the opening line, it made sense to repeat it in the first line of every successive verse. But that also posed a problem when they reached the chorus; it wouldn’t make sense to repeat the title at the end of the chorus and the beginning of the next verse. So they didn’t included the title in the song’s key stanza.

“It would have been corny to try to somehow wrap the chorus back up into that line,” explains Rosen. “It allows the chorus to just give the images, and it’s such a release when it falls back into that line [in the next verse]. There’s no need to say it in the chorus.”

In fact, they held out the tension at the end of the chorus, creating an extra line over an unresolved chord, while a fantasy from the past — “We’d never let go, and we’d never be over” — plays out in the story. Emphasizing that tension, staying locked in the memory, reminded Rosen of the movie Inception.“It’s a really trippy sci-fi movie where they figure out how to go into other people’s dreams,” he says. “But sometimes when they’re in a dream, they don’t know [it]. It felt like being in that movie, where if I could just live in this [dream], I wouldn’t care if I came back to reality.”

Since the chorus is designed to circle back to the verse, they couldn’t end “Memory Lane” with the chorus. So they concluded by repeating the first verse and changing the lyrics in the back half of that section to “We’d never fade, never fade, never fade…”

Old Dominion, including bassist Geoff Sprung and drummer Whit Sellers, recorded “Memory Lane” with producer Shane McAnally (Sam Hunt, Midland) at Shrimpboat Sound Studio in Key West, Fla., a facility with an appropriately nostalgic atmosphere.

“It’s this little, unassuming cinder block building that no one knows what’s going on on the inside or pays any attention to, but it’s Jimmy Buffett’s studio,” says Ramsey. “You walk in there, and it’s like a time capsule of his career. There’s Jimmy Buffett memorabilia and all these old Polaroids everywhere. It’s like stepping back in time, and it’s a very creative little vortex.”

Instead of following the band’s typical recording process, in which it plays as much of the track as possible together, “Memory Lane” was built piece by piece over programmed percussion. Sellers replaced most of the synthetic rhythms with real drums after everyone else did their parts, a reversal of the typical order.

Ramsey was challenged by the lead vocal’s phrasing — “It’s really tough to find a place to take your breath and keep going,” he says — and Tursi developed a guitar solo that feels as much like a journey as the rest of the track. “What happens with me is one of those times when we’re running it down, I’ll just take a solo and then spend another 15 minutes trying to beat it,” Tursi says. “And then everyone goes, ‘The first one is the best one.’ I’m never satisfied with anything.”

When Old Dominion played it as a full band for the first time on Jan. 19 in Evansville, Ind., Tursi extended the performance with an adventurous 90-second closing solo after the “never fades” lyric ended. Meanwhile, “Memory Lane” travels to No. 33 on the Country Airplay chart dated Feb. 4.

“It just felt like it was strong and artistic and commercial, and it had the right balance of everything,” Tursi says.

And it brings a fresh attitude to a very familiar phrase from the past.

Surprise!
Chris Young’s “Looking for You” — which RCA Nashville released to country radio via PlayMPE on Jan. 12 — traverses familiar subject matter for the singer, set in the same sort of nightclub that has provided the focal point for “Lonely Eyes,” “Neon” and the Mitchell Tenpenny duet “At the End of a Bar.” But the results are not what one would expect.

For starters, despite a widespread belief that lasting relationships can’t be found in a bar, “Looking” celebrates a guy who discovered a longtime love when he wasn’t actually seeking one in a night spot. Additionally, the song takes a surprising turn at the end of the chorus, injecting a chord that normally wouldn’t work and stamping it with a decidedly unusual melodic twist.

“It feels unexpected,” Young says. “And it’s one of the reasons I love the song so much.”

“Looking for You” got started while his co-writers were waiting for Young on May 22, 2022, at the Middle Tennessee home studio of songwriter-producer Chris DeStefano (“From the Ground Up,” “Something in the Water”). James McNair (“Lovin’ On You,” “Going, Going, Gone”) had the “Looking for You” title, accompanied by a plot that contrasts with the similar-sounding title of Johnny Lee’s “Lookin’ for Love.” Where the guy in Lee’s Urban Cowboy classic had spent much of his life searching for romance “in all the wrong places,” the protagonist in McNair’s idea wasn’t looking at all.

“I remember him kind of disclaiming it,” says Emily Weisband (“Jealous of Myself,” “All for You”). “’It’s not going to blow your mind,’” she recalls McNair saying. “’But it could be a great, uptempo country vibe. I think it might be something.’”

They fashioned it primarily as a two-chord country song, building off the “Looking for You” title with a series of single-guy pursuits, including “looking for a feeling,” “looking for an up-all-night-long” and “looking for a sunrise leading to a sunset.”

The chorus was half finished when Young arrived. That part of the melody relied on syncopated waterfall intervals to cast a sense of adventure, but it needed a change in direction to bring it home. After mostly alternating between the tonic chord and the four chord up to that point, DeStefano took a risk. He lobbed a hit-or-miss four-minor chord, one that would either be a musical goldmine or a sonic train wreck.

“It’s a little bit of a one-bullet gun,” he says. “Sometimes I’ll just kind of throw it out there and see if it feels right, if everybody in the room is digging it, because it’s a commitment. In that situation, everybody was like, ‘Oh, we’ve got to do that.’ So it was like, ‘OK, I trust y’all. Let’s do it.’ ”

The minor chord changed what would typically be an E note to an E-flat — only a half-step difference, but that small alteration created a significant misdirection. Young fitted a melody to the new section, landing directly on that E-flat, the very note that changed the song’s course. It created an enormous amount of musical tension.

But it also arrived at the perfect time for the song’s message, following a “right out of the blue” lyric with an out-of-the-blue sonic flow.

“A lot of songs will end on a ‘ta-da,’ you know — a major chord, and you’re like, ‘Oh, there’s the hook. There it is,’ ” says McNair. “But this one ends on kind of a half ‘ta-da,’ where you’re kind of hanging on the edge.”

They had said pretty much everything that needed to be said with that maneuver — the words and the music both yelled “surprise!” — so they kept the song’s lyrics to a minimum. When they reached the bridge, instead of introducing any new vocabulary, they borrowed two lines from the pre-chorus near the beginning of the song and paired them with one more four-minor chord, repeating the tension caused by that simple E-flat.

“You do something once, it could be an accident,” DeStefano says. “You do it twice, it’s intentional.” 

The song was mostly written before DeStefano started building a track to support it, but that happened quickly. He didn’t just develop a demo: He created almost the entire final master before his co-writers left.

“People don’t realize just how good he is unless you’ve been in a room with him,” says Young. “He’s probably top five — one of the fastest editors on ProTools that I’ve ever seen. Just on the fly, he’s laying stuff down, so by the time that we’re done writing it, it is done. And that’s not to say that he’s just sitting there building the track. He’s coming up with melodies, coming up with guitar parts, interjecting lyrics. He’s an all-around [talent].”

DeStefano established a pulsing foundation, alternating — sometimes combining — guitar, programmed keyboards and/or banjo to evolve the sound underneath the melody even as the beat moved forward. He also played a short guitar solo that used a series of flatted notes, complementing the attitude from the four-minor chord. 

Weisband tossed in harmonies and some ad-libs to support Young’s lead vocal, with one of those off-the-cuff ideas forming what became a key musical hook. DeStefano pitch-shifted that phrase into a higher octave, generating a sort of electronic Mariah Carey sound. “I sound like a little alien on there,” Weisband jokes. 

Juxtaposed with Young’s lead vocal, the effect brings contrasting elements together in a unique way. “She’s got an amazing voice, and she has a lot of pop sensibility,” says McNair. “His tone is such a rich, country, smooth tone. Mixed with her, the blend of those was really cool.”

The waterfall chorus melody and the tense E-flat in the four-minor chord are unusual enough that they’ll likely challenge fans who sing along with “Looking for You” — though in Young’s experience, repetition solves that issue. “I ended up singing the song the entire day of the video shoot over and over and over,” he says. “So it’s just ingrained in my head.”

The song’s inherent surprises invariably won over Young and his associates, and RCA Nashville made it the lead single from his forthcoming project. “Looking for You” will go for adds on Jan. 23.

“I loved it, and then the label loved it and other songwriter friends of mine that I played it for loved it,” says Young. “It was like the same response every time because when they got to the end of that chorus, everybody was like, ‘Ah, that’s cool.’ ”

Not a shock, since most people like surprises. But it confirmed for Young that the risks in “Looking for You” were likely to pay off: “That’s what I needed to hear.”

After rising to No. 3 on Billboard‘s Country Airplay chart with his debut single, “Don’t Come Lookin’,” Jackson Dean can expect to get plenty of attention with his follow-up.
“Fearless,” which Big Machine released to country radio on Dec. 12 via PlayMPE, takes advantage of that focus by showing off the 22-year-old’s vocal range. The verses harness a Waylon Jennings-like gruffness in his lower range while the chorus showcases a Chris Cornell-ish ferocity in Dean’s upper reaches. There’s a distinct separation between those two sections of “Fearless,” which makes the chorus stand out when it arrives. But it also helps to tell the story behind the protagonist’s confession: an honest, desperate, manly expression of the life-changing power of his mate.

“It is a big jump from the verse to the chorus because not only does it mark, ‘Oh, here it is,’ but just screaming at the top of your lungs, you feel this [sentiment],” Dean says. “I feel like a lot of people would get that.”

New as Dean might be to most of America’s country audience, “Fearless” — originally titled “I’m Fearless” — has a little age on it. He co-wrote it on Nov. 6, 2019, with Jonathan Sherwood and songwriter-producer Luke Dick (“Gold,” “Settling Down”) in a home studio Dick owned in East Nashville.

“He’s always got like some sort of order on the way,” says Sherwood. “An hour into the session, he’s like, ‘Oh, by the way, I ordered burgers. So we’ve got three burgers coming in here in about 45 minutes.’ It kind of gives us incentive to work harder at that moment, and I’ve just always admired that.”

Dick also brought the foundational idea to the appointment. He had a rough percussion track with spacious guitar arpeggios and a target for the song’s narrative: “I’m fearless except when it comes to you.”

“There’s no play on words,” Dean says. “The whole thing is just pounding your chest, and then a moment of vulnerability.”

They dug in first on that chorus, the singer boasting of the fears he does not possess: no fear of heights, no fear of the dark, no fear of fighting. But the song conveys those ideas obliquely: “I’ll jump off the ledges, burn all the bridges, walk on the edges.” The results were a little different than the original version, mostly because they made good use of the letter “s.”

“Those were all one-syllable rhymes when we first started writing, like ‘I’ll jump off the ledge, burn every bridge, walk on the edge,’ and it just wasn’t sticking,” remembers Sherwood. “Luke was like, ‘Let’s just make it plural.’ And it worked.”

As did another phrase in that chorus, “ride in the echoes,” that Dean originated, but can’t fully explain.“Truthfully,” he says, “I just thought it sounded dope.”

“I would argue that it means the echoes of self-doubt, the echoes of gossip that could be spoken about you,” Sherwood counters. “I’m just going to ride it rather than letting it be something that brings me down.”

When they had enough of that chorus worked out, they turned to the song’s opening, and Dick asked Dean a simple question: “What’s the most scared you’ve ever been in your life?” Dean recalled visiting his grandfather’s grave around age 11. One of the man’s catchphrases had been to charge people for good advice: “That’ll be 25 cents.” So Dean stuck a quarter between the headstone and the grass, and the coin instantly disappeared. Even after digging, he couldn’t find it, and that spooky cemetery encounter informed the ghostly opening lines of “Fearless.”

As the lyric progresses, the dark tone shifts from the mystery of spirits to the mystery of love: The protagonist recognizes he’s most fearful of losing his woman and simultaneously admits that her strength keeps him from fearing all those other demons. As they developed the verse melody that accompanied that tale, they also had a better idea of where the chorus could go, and they raised its peak moments, in great part because Dean could handle it.

“Jack has that kind of range, even though on the top end of it, I feel like it’s asking a lot of a singer,” says Dick. “Sometimes I think, ‘Why in the hell would you try to make another singer do that?’ I mean, even though it’s fun in the room, it’s not a practical thing to do.”

Shortly after the song’s creation, Dick produced the master version of “Fearless” at Sound Emporium with an A-list band building on Dick’s original guitar arpeggios. Between Justin Schipper’s pedal steel and Kenny Greenberg’s lap steel, the musicians framed Dean’s vocal with an appropriately haunting texture, and Dick worked out a simple but twisty guitar solo on his own time that provided short relief from the song’s intensity.

“When I get off in my own world, it may take me two hours to come up with a solo,” Dick says. “I don’t know the instrument well enough to sit there and rip, you know, 100 solos, one after another.”

That version was released online in 2021 and included on Dean’s album Greenbroke, released March 11, 2022. The power of its message and the showcase it provided for Dean’s vocals made “Fearless” an ideal single choice — though after singing it live for several years, he had a beefier take on it. So Dick booked Blackbird Studio before the end of 2022, and Dean recut his performance with subtle changes. He swallows the hook (“except when it comes you”) more dramatically, injects more growl into other segments of the chorus and holds out a long, desolate note in the final stanza.

“He’s just grown a lot as a singer,” notes Dick. “He was not on the road [in 2019], and when you start making something your own, it just makes sense to want to try it again when you have the opportunity. And I was happy to hear him sing it again.”

They did some other touch-ups, too, heightening the lap steel’s presence, threading a little more acoustic guitar into the chorus and inserting an extra beat after the bridge, filling it with a scraping sort of sound. The song — which is tagged with a Jan. 23 add date — provides a greater portrait of Dean’s capabilities.

“My biggest influences are like Cornell, [Robert] Plant, [Chris] Stapleton, that kind of stuff,” Dean says. “I don’t have the same high register as them. But I can get up there on occasion. A display of that here and there is what I want to do.”

It’s not a song that will change the world, but it might well change a listener’s mood for three and a half minutes.
Tyler Hubbard’s second solo single – “Dancin’ in the Country,” released to country radio by EMI Nashville on Nov. 21 via PlayMPE – is 21st-century redneck disco, a four-on-the-four backbeat topped with a joyous melody, carefree lyrics and an unfettered country band, freed to play smart fills and jaw-dropping passages that defy the genre’s historically conservative approach to arrangements.

It’s generated from Hubbard’s home life, where rambunctious energy is welcome.

“Every night after dinner, we have a dance party,” he says. “A lot of times I’m playing them songs that I’ve written, and when the kids love the songs, whether it’s songs I’ve written or other songs, it just makes them feel good and want to dance.”

Hubbard brought a story about that experience into the room and submitted it as a guiding principle when he wrote the song on Nov. 3, 2021, at a Black River studio. Originally, the writing session was booked with fellow composers Jon Nite (“Pick Me Up,” “You Didn’t”) and Ross Copperman (“Gold,” “I Lived It”), but Hubbard amped it up a few days early when he invited Keith Urban to sit in.

“I don’t think I even slept the night before,” Nite recalls, “because I was all keyed up on the nerves of like, ‘Do not screw this up.’“

Nite wasn’t sure if they were writing for Urban or for Florida Georgia Line – he didn’t know until sometime during the co-write that Hubbard was cutting some solo material – and it wasn’t fully verbalized during the process. “The whole time I was laughing because I felt like I was writing for the song,” Nite says. “Keith would be like, ‘This would be great for Tyler’ when Tyler was in the bathroom. And then Tyler would be like, ‘This would be great for Keith’ when Keith was in the bathroom.”

It took a bit to find a direction, though Hubbard was definitely in a mood to write something cheery and upbeat, and he had the “Dancin’ in the Country” title as workable idea. Copperman built a rhythm track, and Urban kicked into a guitar groove that launched with a C chord, complicated by an extra D note that creates dissonance with two of the three foundational tones in that chord.

“That [note] is what’s giving you the disco vibes,” Copperman says.

They fashioned the chorus first, starting with the title and capping the stanza by repeating it two more times. In between, the melody pushes forward with a relentless repetition, each of the first four verses ending with the same melody. It’s an approach that wouldn’t work in another setting – it would have killed a thoughtful ballad like “The House That Built Me” – but it enhances the sing-along quality of “Dancin’ in the Country.”

“It’s an ear worm, and it’s hooky, and it’s really repetitive,” Hubbard agrees. “But it still feels right, you know. It feels appropriate.”

When they developed the verses, the narrative began in a bar, where a couple yearns for a little privacy. They end up in a pasture, playing “some Alabama and Jackson” – presumably, Alan Jackson, though with the danceable beat, one could make a case for Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson or even Outkast’s “Ms. Jackson.”

With the plot serving up a little romance in a field, it’s tempting to call it a bro-country story, though it stays away from the drunken-group dynamic. And it bears some authenticity for Nite, whose first date with his wife ended with the two of them dancing in a field along Soncy Road in Amarillo, Texas during their high-school years.

“That’s where I fell in love with my wife,” he says. “We were out there listening to George Strait on the radio. Our trucks were parked off the edge of this road, and we were just watching stars.” (Romantic sidebar: Some time later, Nite draped flowers over the fence posts and barbed wire in that same location to propose.)

The musical format of “Dancin’ in the Country” got an extra boost of energy from a hip-hop-like pre-chorus. The supporting instruments dropped out, except for a volley of tribal toms and a growling bass, and that chord-less section makes the chorus feel like a blast of sound when the whole band re-emerges. “It just felt like we needed that musical break,” Copperman says. “Maybe that’s why the nursery-rhyme chorus works. You drop out all the chords, and then the chorus hits, and it feels so good.”         

Hubbard laid down a vocal for the demo, then split for a late-afternoon appointment, though before he did, Urban created some clarity about which artist would keep “Dancin’ in the Country.” “When we got finished writing, Keith said, ‘I think we just wrote your first single,’” Hubbard remembers. “It was nice that Keith put his stamp of approval on it.”

Urban and Copperman stayed for another two hours, playing with a multitude of sounds and instruments as they completed the demo, stopping occasionally to ask Nite if he thought what they were doing was working. “It was like watching an artist paint the Mona Lisa,” Nite says.

Hubbard co-produced the final version with Jordan M. Schmidt (Mitchell Tenpenny, Ingrid Andress) at Ocean Way in Nashville, assembling an A-list team of musicians and letting them follow Urban’s template from the demo. Bassist Jimmie Lee Sloas provides the melodic movement in the intro and offers a few uncharacteristically bold fills, guitarist Rob McNelley recreated a key riff and fashioned a compact burning solo, and banjo player Ilya Toshinskiy wraps the whole package with a wicked flurry of notes.

“What got me into playing and learning instruments was hearing cool s–t and just being like, ‘How did they play that?’ and then sitting there and trying to learn it,” Schmidt says. “Sometimes I feel like as producers we can dumb stuff down so much, but I’ve really taken the opposite approach now. Like, ‘Let’s inspire newer generations to be players and come up with that s–t, because that’s awesome.’”

Justin Schipper’s steel added a little extra country flavor to offset the dance groove in what proved to be a drama-free experience. “We just had a lot of fun,” Schmidt says of the tracking date. “There wasn’t really anything crazy that happened. It was just a great energy, and it felt like a good new start for T-Hub.”

“Dancin’ in the Country” made its debut on Billboard‘s Country Airplay chart dated Dec. 10, 2022 and steps to No. 40 on the Jan. 14 list. Hubbard is convinced that the good-time vibe that music generates in his household is the right tonic for a much wider audience.

“We’re at this point in culture and our lives where everybody needs an escape from reality for three-and-a-half minutes,” Hubbard says. “That’s kind of the intention behind this song.”

Given that Brad Rempel’s hometown of La Crete, Alberta, is closer to the North Pole than any other country artist’s, High Valley is perhaps better qualified than any other act in the format to cut Christmas songs.
Although, truth be told, Rempel is hard-pressed to get overly sentimental about the holiday. He’s not a Scrooge about it, but he’s often underwhelmed by the music.

“It’s always kind of a joke among my friends that, ‘Well, you live up there near Santa Claus. You should love Christmas stuff,’ ” he says. “There’s nowhere on Earth that feels more like Christmas than northern Canada. You can literally skate on frozen ponds and ride snowmobiles, you know, watch the snow falling down. I mean, everything about it is kind of your stereotypical Hallmark Christmas movie kind of vibes.”

Rempel’s resistance to holiday tracks may have played a role in making High Valley’s new seasonal release, “Back Home Christmas,” an engaging, and pandemically appropriate, piece for 2022. When he showed up at Full Circle Studio — the workplace of songwriter-producer Seth Mosley (for King & Country, Michael W. Smith) — on May 23, the assignment was to craft new yuletide material with Jon Nite (“Pick Me Up,” “You Didn’t”) and Zach Kale (“I Hope,” “The Good Ones”). And Rempel admitted up front that they would have to clear a rather high bar.

“I was like, ‘Hey, full disclosure, guys: I’m not a huge fan of Christmas music,’ ” recalls Rempel with a laugh. “Jon and Zach were like, ‘OK,’ and then they pretend-like packed up their guitars and walked out of the room. And I was like, ‘But I love a great Christmas song. I just want to make sure this feels like a legitimate High Valley song and not just your token “Here Comes Santa Claus” type of deal.’ ”

As it turns out, Rempel was feeling disconnected from his roots as he considered Christmas. La Crete isn’t easy to reach (flying from Nashville to Edmonton takes seven to 11 hours, and then it’s a four-plus-hour drive north from there), and under COVID-19 circumstances, he hadn’t been home since 2019. He felt a need to return for this year’s holidays, and Mosley suggested they get in the spirit by writing something in 6/8 time.

 “For me, 6/8 just always feels like Christmas,” Mosley explains. “It automatically just puts you in a more nostalgic head frame.”

Indeed, the holiday songs written in waltz-time signatures 6/8 and 3/4 — “Silver Bells,” “The First Noel,” “We Three Kings” and “Happy Xmas (War Is Over),” just to name a few — have a classic feel about them. Mosley developed a chord progression for that format, called up plug-in sounds of sleigh bells and church bells, and turned the lights down to mimic the feel of a Tennessee Christmas. And they found a musical style with an old-world vibe.

“I remember playing some Celtic-y stuff, kind of an Irish singalong — almost like a reverent drinking song or like a hymn,” says Nite. “That helped change the direction of the sound.”

Rempel’s desire to get back to Canada for the holiday resonated throughout the room as they began to craft a story.

“I wanted to feel that feeling of going back home when you’re just out of high school and you go to college, and you go back that first or second time,” Nite says. “There’s something magical about when you’re 18 or 20 years old, you’re coming back for the first time after leaving town. It’s so amazing to come back home and be like, ‘OK, this is a safe place that made me who I am. These people love me no matter what.’ ”

Even though the song was about returning somewhere, it took some work to nail down a hook that would serve as the song’s destination. “At one point, we were like, ‘I’ll be back on Christmas,’ ” remembers Kale. “ ‘Back Home Christmas’ seems to land that hook a lot better and makes you feel something — just the word ‘home.’ We started writing toward that.”

The first lines of the chorus — “I miss those O holy silent nights/Popcorn-on-pine-tree traditions” — knitted the titles of two classic carols together, setting up an occasional theme: phrases from “Joy to the World,” “The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire)” and “Away in a Manger” all find their way into the lyric, though they’re dropped in as casual conversation rather than obvious puns.

They avoided Santa Claus entirely, and the only mention of gifts wasn’t about what might be under the tree; it was a simple recognition that the one gift Mama wanted was for her son to be home. Appropriately, the bridge ramped up to a highly rhythmic fever, celebrating a sacred Christmas Eve church ceremony while capturing the sense of arrival.

“If you’re on that journey, on the way back home, the last mile and a half or two miles, it’s the excitement of seeing the people that you love,” Kale says. “I think that energy, we unknowingly put into the bridge.”

Mosley layered instruments onto the demo that day, and a fair amount of those sounds remained on “Back Home Christmas” all the way through to its release. “He is some kind of savant,” says Rempel. “It’s insane.”

Meanwhile, High Valley guitarist Raymond Klassen whipped up a scenic sonic side trip with an effective Dobro solo. Additionally, a group of around seven musicians gathered in Santa hats to sing an anthemic, Coldplay-like signature theme, stacked over a unison mandolin and electric guitar, creating an easy singalong for listeners who share the “Back Home” spirit.

Mosley brought the whole thing to a close with a church bell effect that brightened the ending but also leaves the listener with a complex cluster of notes. “Any time there’s a tubular bell, it’s always really hard to make them be perfectly in tune because a tubular bell has like five harmonic notes to it,” he explains. “I actually use it a lot in production, but you have to use them in the right spot. It’s one of those things where you can’t really tune it. Otherwise, it sounds fake.”

“Back Home Christmas” sounds quite authentic; it’s a fairly universal topic, and Rempel’s desire to get back to Canada is real, allowing the song to pass even his holiday-music skepticism. He released it to terrestrial radio through his Cage Free label and Sony Music Canada on Nov. 11 via PlayMPE. And yes, after three years away, Rempel and his family will be back in La Crete for Christmas.

“I was able to book flights for my family just a few weeks ago, and I was able to call my mom and let her know that,” Rempel says. “That’s definitely, definitely special.” 

Absence, it is said, makes the heart grow fonder, and touring musicians ought to know.
The travel, the time spent waiting and prepping in the dressing room and the let-down moments after the show is over are all windows of time ripe for gnawing self-reflection and what-ifs. Time apart can indeed change a heart, and Russell Dickerson figured that out roughly a decade ago, when a breakup with Kailey Seymour forced him to confront a gaping hole as he traversed the club circuit as a newly single man.

“We had just broken up, and I was looking for anybody,” he remembers. “I was like, ‘I’m going to be out here on the road. Might as well see if I can find a wife out here.’ It didn’t work. But at the time, we were just playing crappy bar after crappy bar. I’m giving it my all, nobody’s showing up, I’m lonely, I just left my future wife back in Nashville.”

A lot turned around on that particular tour. Dickerson’s mindset changed; they reunited and married in May 2013. Kailey was the inspiration — and the videographer — for his first hit, the 2017 single “Yours,” and she’s again a looming figure in the plot of “God Gave Me a Girl,” penned during several days of focused songwriting last spring at the Middle Tennessee home of songwriter Ashley Gorley (“She Had Me at Heads Carolina,” “Take My Name”). 

On the second or third day of the retreat, after they had written several songs and emotional walls were down, Zach Crowell (“Body Like a Back Road,” “Waves”) suggested a solid potential title, “God Gave Me a Hometown,” that the quartet started playing with and reshaping. In the process, Dickerson turned it into “God Gave Me a Girl,” a title that checked at least two boxes for him.

“I love alliteration,” he says, “and my reputation precedes myself as the love song guy.”

Chase McGill (“5 Foot 9,” “Never Say Never”), working with an electric guitar borrowed from Crowell, started playing with a random tone — a little glassy, a little dirty — and created a melancholy riff that rises slowly before tumbling back to its starting point. Gorley toyed with the word “gave” — “God gave me a girl, girl gave me a kiss/Kiss gave me a feelin’ that I still get” — and halfway through the chorus, they knew they were on to something with a worthwhile lyrical bent and a melody that fits, climbing as it progresses through the initial lines of the chorus.

“The key to melodies is where it’s repetitive, but changes,” says Gorley. “I know that sounds crazy, but it has a little bit of rise where it’s repeating the rhythm, but then the melody changes and has tension and release.

“I want you to almost be able to sing along during the first chorus,” he continues, “like where you can kind of join in when you’re singing a song and you don’t really know it.”

As they kept building the lyric around shades of the word “give,” it changed tense and reversed roles between the couple: “She gave me her hand, I gave her a ring.” And finally at the end, the singer credits the Almighty for shifting his viewpoint: “I knew what I wanted but He knew better/ God gave me a girl.”

“I almost wanted God to come out of nowhere, because that’s kind of how it happens for me,” McGill says. “You’re going along, you’re doing your thing, and then God interjects. Then from that point on, it’s a progression of the changes in your life.”

The song’s progression is a familiar one to many adult men. The protagonist spends part of verse one trolling at night — “I gave my all to those empty bars” is a direct reference to Dickerson’s touring when he and Kailey had broken up — and by verse two, after the divine intervention, his friends adjust slowly to his shifting priorities. By the bridge, he pledges to “give her the world” after recognizing some sort of destiny brought the couple together.

“I feel like it was God who changed my mind, that convinced me that this was my wife,” says Dickerson, further connecting the song to his actual life. “As soon as I broke up with her in college, all the peace left my body. And that’s just a spiritual thing, like I was being convinced that she’s my wife, this is happening, we’re doing it.”

At the end of the March 30 writing session, Crowell produced a demo built around Dickerson’s vocal and McGill’s guitar work. At some juncture over the next few months, the vocal was mistakenly erased, and Dickerson recorded another version.

But that also meant he had more repetition before the tracking session at Nashville’s Sound Stage on June 22. Crowell and Dickerson co-produced the date, fashioning an arrangement that gradually unfolds from the original demo’s sound — the glassy guitar and programmed percussion — to a full band. The musical elements all help to keep it from becoming overly mushy.

“That probably goes back to that guitar riff and that guitar tone,” Crowell says. “It’s not so pretty, light and fluffy, and the other production stuff I did hopefully all ties into it. If it’s a pretty poem as a lyric, it’s nice that the track may have a little bit of a slight edge to it that makes it a good Russell Dickerson song.”

The other production elements included some cloudy, atmospheric sounds and a slide guitar that lend a slightly mysterious aura.

“The mystery is definitely a good thing,” says Crowell. “There’s a little tension in it, but it’s not a bunch of dark, eerie chords or anything. It’s all still hopeful.”

Ultimately, “God Gave Me a Girl” embraces the natural femininity of a love song, offset with a touch of grit. “It doesn’t feel like a ballad,” Gorley says. “I’m a piano guy, so every day, I fight the temptation of writing a ballad. To just write a love song on piano, super slow, every day would be great, but I’ve worked that out of my system. And so I’m always looking for some way for it to feel fun or celebratory or something like that. This one pulls that off.”

The writers weren’t the only fans. “Our real test for songs is always playing them for our girls,” says McGill. “My four-year-old and three-year-old are old enough where they can sing along with Daddy’s songs and whatnot. Me and my wife can always tell if they request it in the car. When they did that, I was like, ‘Maybe we got a little hit here.’ ”

Triple Tigers released “God Gave Me a Girl” to country radio on Nov. 18. Dickerson felt they had a commercial winner on their hands even before they finished writing it, and its release suggests his assessment that day still holds true: “I think we’re headed to hitty city with this one.” 

Thanksgiving was a major life marker for Kelsea Ballerini.
Recently divorced from Morgan Evans, she had had possession of her new home — purchased from fellow country star Kacey Musgraves — for less than a week, and she was already planning to host a holiday soirée with friends.

Single people naturally rely on their compadres in a big way, and Ballerini is set up to do that, not only in her personal life, but also in her latest career move. “If You Go Down (I’m Goin’ Down Too),” which Black River released to country radio via PlayMPE on Nov. 15, is a “besties” single, a track focused on two women with a shared, rambunctious history. If the title generates thoughts of Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon driving off the cliff in Thelma & Louise or the song’s murder reference leads to thoughts of the Dixie Chicks single “Goodbye Earl,” then it’s working as intended.

“We just started talking about Thelma & Louise, and [“Earl” characters] Marianne and Wanda, and these really beautiful best-friend stories that had a tinge of murder attached,” Ballerini remembers. “Me and my girlfriends will all listen to Crime Junkie and text each other every Monday after we listen to the podcast. And if we have a girls’ night, we’re going to watch some kind of true-crime documentary.”

Ballerini had that Thelma & Louise conversation with two male friends — songwriters Julian Bunetta (“Craving You,” “Look What God Gave Her”) and Shane McAnally (“Body Like a Back Road,” “One Night Standards”), who co-produced her current Subject to Change — during the final stages of the album’s production this summer. They felt they had enough material to make a solid album, but they mapped out one last “Hail Mary” writing day on the chance that they could craft a song that would beat what they had already cut. That morning, they penned “I Can’t Help Myself” with Josh Osborne (“I Was on a Boat That Day,” “Merry Go ’Round”); after he left, they had one more hour to work, and they reviewed the topics that might be absent from Subject to Change.

“There was a big, missing puzzle piece, and that was a song that honors my friendships,” she recalls. “Friends was a huge theme on my last record — the two lyrics that popped up the most on that Kelsea record were ‘home’ and ‘friends.’ And so it was like I was doing a disservice to a pillar in my life to not have a song that carried that through.”

Bunetta found a groove with a celebratory attitude, driving home a simple, fast-paced chord progression that provided a foundation for the story. He kept at that rhythm, bolstered by a distinct chop, for much of the write. “I got this funny little guitalele that is my fun writing guitar that songs just seem to pour out of,” he says. “It’s just a fun little nylon-string, so it’s easy on the hands.”

They instinctively locked in on a melody that reflected the attitude. The lines in the opening verse start primarily with an ascendant passage, ending in a flood of syllables. The chorus flips that pattern a bit, descending in its opening moments and making longer notes more prominent. That cheery setting gave them plenty of leeway to go dark with the plot.

“The juxtaposition of lyric and music, if you can get them right [as] opposing forces, it always makes it a bit more intriguing and multilayered than sad music/sad lyric,” notes Bunetta.

The first line — “I’ve known you since Brad and Angelina” — used a celebrity couple rather than a calendar year to provide a sense of the friendship’s longevity. And it also tied the lyric further to Thelma & Louise because that movie introduced the world to a shirtless Brad Pitt. The rest of the lyric embraced holding secrets and hiding evidence as the two women look after each other’s reputations in a mutually beneficial manner: “Dirt on you is dirt on me,” Ballerini sings at the start of the chorus.

The song continues to traverse an outlaw path, with an imaginary bank robbery and a “getaway Mercedes” — shades of Bonnie and Clyde — plus an additional pledge to lie on her girlfriend’s behalf should their crime spree take the ultimate twist: “Hypothetically, if you ever kill your husband …”

They introduced subtle variation to the structure of “Go Down” by playing with the final line of the choruses, singing “If you go down, I’m goin’ down too” once at the end of the first chorus, twice to wrap the second and three times when they reached the fourth (and final) chorus.

Ballerini sang over Bunetta’s guitalele for the demo, though all three writers agreed that the lyrics might be misordered. In fact, when they met up again the next day to record “Go Down” at Starstruck Studios on Music Row, they swapped two of the verses and delayed a lyrical change in the chorus — “Our bodies are buried, and they’re in the same ditch” — until the final chorus, instead of the second; it made more sense for that reference to come after the “kill your husband” thought.

Most of the instruments were acoustic — only one electric baritone guitar is present among two acoustics, a mandolin and a Dobro. Drummer Evan Hutchings plays the snare with brushes instead of sticks, and bassist Craig Young borrowed Bunetta’s Kala U-bass, which enhanced that acoustic motif.

“It sounds kind of like an upright bass, but it’s still got like some give in the in the notes, meaning that they bend a lot because of the way that those rubber strings are, so it just fit the texture perfectly,” Bunetta says. “I happened to bring it out and kept it in my car because I just had a feeling that we’d use it.”

They brought in Jenee Fleenor later to overdub a fiddle part, and she filled in half of the original solo section, creating a trade-off between fiddle and mandolin. “We really wanted to lean into a very ’90s country feel, and so we brought in fiddle for the song, which I think to me makes it,” says Ballerini. “That’s also why there’s a Chicks reference to it, which everyone picks up on, which was absolutely intentional. I didn’t want to make it sound like anything else on the record. I wanted it to be its own moment.”

Ballerini spent roughly two hours on the vocal. The notes weren’t particularly difficult, but she worked very specifically on providing lines that sounded like an aural wink, ensuring that the listener would not take the song’s criminal streak seriously.

“You can almost see her acting it out,” Bunetta says. “It was a very visual thing, [the way] the vocal was being shaped.”

Black River assigned “If You Go Down” a Dec. 5 add date, issuing an uptempo single to radio at a time of year when ballads are a little more prevalent. Meanwhile, the running-buddies theme mirrors the new period in her personal life when friends will play a bigger role than they have for several years.

“Sometimes you put out a single because you think that it’s the most radio-friendly, and sometimes you put out a single because it’s actually reflective of where you’re at in your life,” she says. “And then sometimes, both things can be true.”