Music

As a former firefighter, it’s easy to think of Tyler Braden as a community-minded guy who’s not afraid of perilous situations.

That background provides automatic authenticity for “Devil You Know,” a country single with strong, early-2000s rock overtones. The sound is dangerous, and so is the message to any listener who might test the singer’s limits: “Don’t mistake my kindness for weakness.”

“I’m not gonna be some person that’s gonna flip the switch very easily and yell all the time and be angry,” Braden says. “But at the same time, I’m not gonna let myself be pushed around.”

“Devil You Know” is “the anthem for the underdogs,” says writer-artist Graham Barham, and that’s an appropriate sort of song to emerge from the creative crew behind it. Braden is a developing Warner Music Nashville artist, and all four of the song’s Warner Chappell writers – Barham, Jon Hall, Zack Dyer and writer-producer Sam Martinez – are experiencing personal landmarks with “Devil.”

“We’re all underdogs,” notes Barham, a Sony Music Nashville artist. “This is all our first song on radio as writers. And I think this is one of Tyler’s best ones to date. So I mean, for this to be the anthem for us to come out with is really freaking cool.”

Barham is actually the artist they were targeting when the four writers met up at Warner Chappell in July 2023. None of them brought any specific ideas to the appointment, but they knew they wanted to create something dark. Hall leaned into an unsettling chord progression, and Martinez tweaked it just a hair.

“The last chord in the progression is kind of ambiguous,” Martinez says, noting that it’s neither a major nor a minor triad. “It’s kind of a rock thing from the ‘90s and 2000s. Like, that one chord in this song is actually suspended, and there is no third.”

Martinez layered the sound with a repetitive, three-note pattern on acoustic guitar that became an identifiable part of the intro. That hook never quite resolves, adding to the tension. Barham started singing a melody that would become the chorus, though they still didn’t have any words or message.

As they sorted through concepts, Hall thought the word “devil” fit, and Dyer started scrolling through titles he’d saved on his phone.

“I came across this ‘Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t’ [idea],” Dyer recalls. “We had this rhythmic thing on the end of [one] line, and I was just kind of messing with different titles in that spot. And I was like, ‘What about this idea? It kind of works with some of the lines we’re messing with,’ and we just rolled with that.”

Initially, they tried to make it a song about picking between different types of alcohol – bourbon, gin, tequila, etc. – to find the devil of choice. But it morphed into a good-guy-with-a-quiet-power story. “Everybody’s got their tipping point,” Hall reasons, “and without being a fighting song, it does a good job of politely saying, “I’ll kick your ass if you if you mess with that side of me.’”

They wrote the bulk of the chorus first, promising the listener that “there’s a hell on the other side” if the good guy gets crossed. With a couple lines unfinished in the middle of that chorus, they turned to the opening verse, creating a plot in which the singer owns his quiet-hero image. But when it broke into a melodically ascendant pre-chorus, the attitude changed with the melody – it’s where they introduced the “don’t mistake my kindness for weakness” line.

Unlike most country songs, they didn’t include any “furniture” – no specific items that provide a sense of time or place. The closest they came was in verse two, as the protagonist dares the listener: “Go on pull the trigger/ Try your luck.” Given the song’s menacing tone, it could be perceived as a real gun.

“That’s definitely a metaphor,” Barham says. “I got better s–t to do than kill people.”

“Songwriting,” he adds, “we exaggerate everything.”

The unfinished lyric they had left in the chorus finally got completed during a break when Hall and Dyer shot hoops on the Warner Chappell basketball court. “That lyric came to me: ‘Dare you to light that fuse/ ‘Cause I can be a loose cannon,’” Hall says.

The fuse and cannon lined up allegorically, while “fuse” and “loose” established an internal rhyme that indirectly enhanced the song’s rough-cut nature. “It just adds this new element with the cannon not rhyming,” Hall explains. “It makes it pretty cool.”

Martinez produced the demo with Barham singing lead and Hall handling the bulk of the harmonies. As they finished the preliminary work at Warner Chappell, they collectively agreed that it needed a post-chorus. They settled on a haunting, rising melody, all of them singing in unison. When Martinez finished the demo later, Barham suggested using that section in the intro, too, underscoring the song’s darkness.

In October, Braden spent a day listening to outside songs, and “Devil You Know” stood out. He contacted Martinez about recording his voice in place of Barham’s on the demo to see how it sounded. They booked a date at Nashville’s Starstruck Studios and treated it like a master session with Martinez paying attention to every vocal detail. Braden mostly replicated Barham’s melodic nuances, though he brought a smoky rock resonance that replaced Barham’s twang.

“It wasn’t [always] my first melodic instinct, so I would do it differently and Sam would stop me because he really liked the original,” Braden says. “He kind of honed in on it, and so it took kind of a real focus.”

Martinez wasn’t a total taskmaster. Braden sang the word “dust” idiosyncratically in the first verse – it sounds like “doost” – and Martinez kept that enunciation. “It does have a funky little thing to it,” Martinez allows. “Those are the things that give us that much more identity.”

Braden’s team thought highly of the performance and wanted to tease it on social media. Some of the songwriters were nervous – if it didn’t go over, it was likely that no one else would be willing to cut it – but they ultimately decided Braden was worth the risk. “He sounds amazing on it,” Dyer says. “He sang his ass off. We’re just like, ‘Let them have it.’”

Braden shot a video in what looks like the woods in mid-January; it’s actually about 15 feet from his back porch. “A lot of people would comment, ‘You’re copying Oliver Anthony,’ I guess because of the beard and the trees,” Braden says with a laugh.

Indeed a lot of people saw it – that first video has 3.5 million views on TikTok alone – and Warner wanted a master recording for quick release. Martinez had little more than a week to pull it off. He used Braden’s existing vocals, the group vocals from the demo and about half of the demo’s instrumental parts, including the repeating three-note guitar hook. He brought in musicians to cut new parts one at a time, beginning with fiddler Kyle Pudenz, who injected Cajun spirit into the rock texture.

“Devil You Know” went to digital service providers Feb. 2, scoring 25.5 million plays on Spotify, and WMN shipped it to country radio via PlayMPE on March 26. It ranks No. 33 on the Hot Country Songs chart dated May 25, giving underdogs a biting song they can call their own.

“It’s been cool to watch people that say, ‘Hey, this is our anthem,’” Braden notes. “The best part of music in general is that we can all hear the same song, and it means something different to every one of us.”