Music

In the chorus of his latest single, “Burn It Down,” Parker McCollum fantasizes intensely about reducing the memories of a freshly ended relationship to “smoldering coals.”

It’s a subtly unique idea, that word “smolder.” It’s not particularly obscure, but it’s not one that appears in songs every day, and it’s a key entry point to the tone of “Burn It Down.” The production is an all-out blaze by the time it reaches a guitar solo more than two minutes through its three-minute, 36-second running time. But it’s a slow burn getting there, and McCollum credits producer Jon Randall (Dierks Bentley, Miranda Lambert) for that patient pacing.

“I wanted the first [chorus] to really just floor it,” McCollum says. “He was like, ‘Man, you just got to make them wait, you just got to make them wait.’ And I remember being like, ‘I think he’s got to give it to them.’ Now when I hear it in the store or on the radio or whatever, I’m glad we waited to grow.”

McCollum’s enthusiasm is the opposite of the attitude he brought to the writing session when he hosted the Love Junkies — a.k.a. songwriters Liz Rose (“You Belong With Me,” “Girl Crush”), Lori McKenna (“Humble and Kind,” “It All Comes Out in the Wash”) and Hillary Lindsey (“Blue Ain’t Your Color,” “Ghost Story”) — at his Nashville home on Sept. 27, 2022.

“I was burned out, and I so did not want to be a songwriter at all for several months,” he remembers.
His album Never Enough, released May 12, was already finished, and when Rose arrived first, he confessed to her in the kitchen that he wasn’t sure why they were even writing. It wasn’t an encouraging start.

“I’m thinking, ‘Oh, thanks, you know. We’re all here,’ ” she recalls. “And then I thought, ‘You know, Parker, you say that, but you know what always happens. You write that song that you didn’t have, and you can’t believe that you wrote [it].’ He goes, ‘I know. How many times has that happened?’ 

Neither told McKenna or Lindsey he wasn’t into it, and once the actual work began, they spent about a half-hour just talking and strumming guitars. At some point, he worked into a slow-boiling groove and repeated the phrase “Burn it down” as if it were a mantra. “I love songs like that,” says Lindsey. “But it felt like the emotion wasn’t all the way there.”

McCollum soon shifted into another gear, filling in extra lines after each “Burn it down”: “ ’Til it’s ashes and smoke,” “To the smoldering coals,” “ ’Til I don’t want you no more.”

“It’s almost like it’s an answer to ‘Burn it down,’ ” Lindsey says. “It just started to develop.”

As they inserted those extra lines between the “Burn it down” phrases, McCollum began to see its bigger-picture potential, and that’s when he became fully engaged.

“He was just sitting down in a chair — I feel like it was an armchair vibe, like one of those cushy armchairs,” says Lindsey. “But he threw his hand back. It was as if he were onstage, and he was like, ‘Burn it,’ and he started visualizing what he wanted onstage. He was like, ‘Oh my gosh, y’all. I think we’re on to something. I need this. I need this visually. I need the fire in the back. I need this energy for my set.’ It all just started coming together, and when he threw his arm back, I was like, ‘Hell, yeah. You throw that arm back, partner.’”

They wrote a good part of the chorus, then shifted back to the beginning, where McCollum developed a symbolic line about an ex scattering the goodbye across the lawn. The protagonist finds himself stuck with a house full of memories. “Burn it down,” he concludes. Then in verse two, he considers the bed and the passion it represented. “Burn it down.”

By the time they got to the third verse, they focused more closely on vanquishing abstractions rather than physical items, and that brought more clarity to the song’s metaphoric disposition.

“My drummer was telling me he actually knows a guy who burned down his girlfriend’s house,” notes McCollum. “He’s literally going to go to prison for a considerable amount of time, and I kind of made the joke, ‘I hope he hasn’t been listening to my song.’ I don’t think anybody has listened to the song and actually done it, I would hope. I guess in today’s world, you never know.”

They made a guitar/vocal work tape at the end of the session with Lindsey providing harmony. Ahead of the third chorus, Lindsey freestyled another smoldering “Burn it, burn it,” teeing up the finale. McCollum brought that rough recording to Randall, who prefers that bare-bones format.

“I love listening to the work tapes,” Randall says. “Because I’ve spent enough time as a writer and I know what goes on in those rooms, I can get a pretty good idea of what the mindset was just because I kind of know the process. And I think that that works in my favor, more than it doesn’t.”

Randall recognized McKenna was using an alternate guitar tuning and wanted to re-create its open, droning sound during the tracking date at Nashville’s Blackbird Studios. Session player Jedd Hughes invented a staccato counterpoint riff, and the band built up gradually with each new stanza, primarily from drummer Chad Cromwell’s ascending intensity: After two verses, the kick drum joins subtly at the chorus, and the full kit is employed by verse three. The searing guitar solo brings the entire band to its maximum point and, after a quieter bridge, maxes out again for the finale.

Engineer F. Reid Shippen helped even more in post-production, adding a shaker at verse two and, most notably, running McCollum’s voice through a filter during the first two verses. The effect hollows out his tone and emphasizes the consonants and breaths in his performance. “I think his vocal is smoldering,” says Rose. “The whole song is, honestly, the tempo and the mood of the track, and the way he’s singing it. It’s a lot of smoldering.”

When MCA Nashville decided to make it a single, Randall did a quick, more typical, remix that dropped the vocal filtering and ramped up the sound before the first chorus. By then, everyone agreed that the slow-building approach was right for this release.

“Everybody kind of fought me on it, and I think everybody thought I was crazy to not go big on the first chorus,” Randall says. “But eventually everybody came back and said, ‘The coolest part of the song is that it waits to get big.’ Which breaks [with] the way everybody thinks in town.”

Country radio received the single via PlayMPE on June 5, and it moves to No. 45 on the Country Airplay chart dated Aug. 5. “Burn It Down” seems positioned for a long, smoldering life rather than flaming out in a flash, which would aptly reflect both the slow build McCollum experienced on the day he wrote it and the arrangement that Randall oversaw.

“He’s such a seasoned veteran,” McCollum says. “He knew exactly what he was doing. I was the young guy trying to bust it out real quick, and he was right. He usually is.”