Music

Country music has its share of talented biographers: Robert K. Oermann, Barry Mazor and Holly George-Warren, just to name a few. They are able to boil a life in the genre down to a few hundred pages. But not everyone gets that kind of space to document their history. Musicians have been known to convey their experiences in three or four minutes — a challenge, to be sure.

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George Birge, coming off back-to-back Country Airplay hits with “Mind on You” (No. 2, 2023) and “Cowboy Songs” (No. 1, 2024), engaged in that very exercise for his latest single, “It Won’t Be Long.”

“I was ready to take another step as an artist,” Birge reflects. “I found a little bit of a lane of stuff that was working for me. But I also wanted to continue to grow as I got a deeper connection with my fans, and kind of pull back the curtain a little bit more and maybe tell a little bit more of a story and showcase a little bit more in my life.”

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Over the course of 2024, he attempted several times to do that very thing, but none of those efforts seemed to land. That changed during a co-writing session on Oct. 22 at the Liz Rose Music offices in Nashville, where Joe Fox (“Last Night Lonely,” “Breakin’ In Boots”) had a room with a piano. The appointment that day also included Chase McGill (“Next Thing You Know,” “5 Foot 9”) and Trannie Anderson (“Heart Like a Truck,” “Wild Horses and Wildflowers”), writing with Birge for the first time after bumping into him regularly on the golf course. Anderson, it turned out, had an idea they all thought was workable, but before they got too far, McGill felt he should speak up.

McGill’s oldest daughter was a few weeks from turning 7, and just a few days earlier, he had had a discussion with his wife, Kara, about how fast their world seemed to be going. It inspired a hook, “Life might be a lot of things/ But it won’t be long.”

“I instantly was like, ‘That’s it. That’s what I’ve been looking for,’ ” Birge says. “And everybody’s like, ‘If you’re in, let’s chase it.’ ”

Even Anderson, whose idea was scrapped by that turn of events, was up for it. “We wrote exactly what he needed, right when he needed it,” she says. “It’s so rare that it happens that way.”

Since they knew what the song’s payoff line would be, they dug in on the opening line, turning the “It won’t be long…” hook into a repetitive device. The writers became Birge’s biographers, questioning him about key moments in his relationship with Kara. Those events — their first meeting, their first kiss in a parking lot, their first child — were folded into the piece, capturing the story of their relationship.

“As a songwriter, I’ve kind of learned that the more specific and personal you are, the more relatable a song usually is,” Fox notes. “That’s why it’s so cool with George on this one. A lot of it’s his details, but you wouldn’t know that listening to it. I mean, anyone listening to it could put their details in there.”

Indeed, Birge’s renovation of a dilapidated house, taken down to the studs, isn’t everyone’s experience, but anyone who has done even a minor home makeover can relate. “Any kind of remodeling you do, man, no one forgets that,” McGill says.

They also incorporated Birge’s Little League background, weaving in his No. 7 uniform, as well as his son’s use of the same number. They spent a half-hour on that vignette. “That was the line that took the longest to flesh out,” Birge recalls. “There’s a cadence change to it, and we wanted that line to really pop because it meant a lot seeing your last name [on a uniform] at the plate again. It’s a new version of you. It’s a new chapter. There’s nothing like your kids imitating you.”

The bridge would tie three Birge generations together, while the chorus provided an interpretation of the narrative. Halfway through that stanza, the phrasing and melody change just enough to spotlight the key point of “It Won’t Be Long”: a challenge to the listener to “take the risk” on a life-changing relationship.

“I always like a more drastic melodic change on the second half of a chorus,” Anderson says. “I tend to structure a lot of my songs that way, and I think everyone kind of wanted that to happen.”

“It Won’t Be Long” was written primarily on guitar, but as they finished the work, Fox segued to the piano, which he thought would better reflect the song’s emotional content. He layered that piano part with guitar to create the foundation for a spare demo, with Birge addressing the lead vocal almost as a narration and Anderson shadowing with a single harmony.

It wouldn’t be long before the song made its initial impact. Within hours, Birge’s team was doing figurative handstands over it, and by the end of the week, they had designated it as his next single and even picked an add date. And Fox was enlisted to produce it.

Fox used Birge’s lead vocal from that demo, as well as Anderson’s harmonies, and built a new instrumental framework one piece at a time. Fox played guitars and bass, hired Jerry Roe to deliver a light drum part, got David Dorn to redo the piano and brought in Justin Schipper for atmospheric steel guitar and Dobro. Fox also snuck a single synthesizer note underneath that plays throughout the entire song, even remaining in place when it clashes with the accompanying chord. It provides a barely perceptible, movie-like tension.

“I kind of went for the cinematic thing the whole way through,” Fox says. “It’s one of the first times I put strings in a radio country song.” He did have Birge return to the studio to update his vocal, though he only changed a couple of notes. “We fixed, like, two words,” Fox says. “The way he pronounced them just wasn’t super clear. We just added plosives to the words.”

The production impressed his co-writers, who had suspected Fox would make sure the song’s message remained central to the final recording.

“One of the hardest things to do on these types of songs is use restraint,” McGill says. “It’s so easy to go throw a huge, [amped-up] drum kit on there — big pop and snare — and make it a big banger. Sometimes, with lyrics like these, it’s best just to let it sit right there so the words can sink in. And I think they did an awesome job of that.”

RECORDS Nashville released Birge’s musical biography to country radio via PlayMPE on Jan. 16, anticipating that “It Won’t Be Long” will deepen his connection with listeners as they relate their life stories to his, even if he had only four minutes to create the arc.

“It’s all real life,” Birge says. “It was just picking the stories that pop the most, whittling them down to fit perfectly into the song.”