Makin’ Tracks

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 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.”

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.”