Music

Plenty of country songs have rested through the years on the drinking habits of the lonely. Merle Haggard’s “Misery and Gin,” Moe Bandy’s “Barstool Mountain” and The Charlie Daniels Band’s “Drinkin’ My Baby Goodbye” all find broken-hearted men numbing their hurt with a little liquid medication at the tavern.

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It’s a good bet that the vast majority of country listeners know at least something about that plot, which makes them likely to appreciate Vincent Mason’s first radio single, “Wish You Well,” in which the singer processes the passing of an old relationship by downing a few at the bar.

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“This guy and this story, I’ve definitely lived it — and definitely lived it recently,” Mason says. “But I think it’s better than to try to get it back.”

The scenario is well-suited for a steel-soaked ballad, though “Wish You Well” defies that expectation. It trips along behind a buzzy guitar at a speedy pace, the melody flying by so quickly it’s easy to miss most of the words and catch only pieces of the story before it becomes familiar.

“Right from the beginning, it’s got that acoustic riff, and it’s moving really quick,” Mason notes. “I’m a big John Mayer fan — I came up on that when I was learning how to play guitar — so that slap flick kind of pattern on the guitar, it’s fun for me to play.”

The song owes its existence to the title of songwriter Blake Pendergrass (“Relapse,” “Days That End in Y”) and the tenacity of co-writer Geoff Warburton (“Best Thing Since Backroads,” “But I Got a Beer in My Hand”). Pendergrass stumbled across the hook during a brainstorming session, with the “wish you well” payoff line mashing up a common courtesy with a well drink. He envisioned a series of wishes in the song, with the singer attempting to escape his lack of fulfillment by downing the house whiskey instead of a particular brand. He introduced the idea during a songwriting session around the fall of 2022, receiving a mostly cool reception. Warburton was in the room that day, and he liked it enough that he continued to ask about it periodically over the next year.

Finally, during a four-person writing appointment on Oct. 3, 2023, at a studio owned by writer-producer Chris LaCorte (“23,” “Wind Up Missin’ You”), Warburton asked about “Wish You Well” again. This time, the collective response was enthusiastic, and they dug into it with abandon as Warburton kicked into a rapid groove on guitar. They tackled the chorus first, loading up the opening lines with a half-dozen wishes — “Wish you would call/ Wish you would miss me” — in a fairly repetitive cadence.

“That first half of the chorus came out pretty fast in the room,” Warburton remembers. “Everyone was ping-ponging ideas, and it just kept falling into place really fast.”

After following that wishful tack for four busy lines, they shifted into syncopated rhythms in the next four, simultaneously changing the lyrical focus as they barreled to the “wish you well” drink at the end.“Once we had that first half,” Warburton says, “we’re like, ‘OK, maybe we chill on the wish stuff.’ ”

After a pause, they repeated the hook for good measure.

“There’s a lot of information in the chorus,” says co-writer Jessie Jo Dillon (“10,000 Hours,” “Am I Okay?”). “I always think when a song does that, you need to either let the song breathe or repeat the hook as a tag because someone just had to digest a lot of information.”

The chorus took up enough real estate that they had little space left for the verses. Still, they compressed more wishful thinking into those stanzas. The opening line has the guy drinking three shots, parallel to a “Jim Beam genie” granting him three wishes. Pendergrass wasn’t certain that would go over when he suggested it. “I got a little bit of pushback on stuff like that,” he says. “I love doing weird, kind of quirky lines like that. Thankfully, they let me run down that road a little bit.”

Jim Beam is a small contradiction: The song hinges on a generic well drink, but the genie employs a specific brand. “He’s like, ‘Maybe I’ll start with the good stuff,’ ” Dillon says with a laugh. “Then, he’s wasting all his quarters on the jukebox, so he has to scale it back. I’ve so been there.”

That jukebox makes its appearance in the ultra-short second verse, and they specifically named an old-fashioned model instead of a modern, digital version — to rhyme “quarter” with “order,” and to carry out the wishing motif: The guy is throwing coins in a music machine instead of a fountain. “Who wants to sing about typing in your Apple Pay on the TouchTunes on your iPhone?” LaCorte asks rhetorically. “It’s a little less poetic.”

For a quickie bridge, they extended the wish motif – at closing time: He’s still alone and decides to wish upon a “2 a.m. star.” While the words pass fast throughout the song, they flow smoothly, allowing the listener to get absorbed in its musicality. “That’s one of my main priorities when I’m writing, is that I want to make sure that there’s nothing that sounds unnatural in the phrases,” Pendergrass says.

LaCorte whipped up a sparse, mostly acoustic demo with Pendergass singing lead. And Warburton developed a simple, melodic guitar riff. “I’d just been noodling,” Warburton recalls. “Chris was like, ‘Oh, what’s that? Put that in there.’ ”

“Wish You Well” became a favorite for Hang Your Hat Music GM/executive vp Jake Gear, who was hired as Universal Music Group Nashville vp of A&R in March 2024. Around then, he gave the demo to Mason, who was signed to MCA Nashville, without any kind of suggestion that he might want to cut it.

But Mason fixated on it and, after a month of listening, committed to it. The demo was strong enough that they used it as the foundation for the master recording, and the guitar was so rhythmic that they flirted with skipping drums. Ultimately, Aaron Sterling added parts, first playing cajon, though he gradually moved to a more standard kit.

“We were kind of like, ‘Play the drums, but don’t draw attention to the drums,’ ” Mason recalls.Mason had trouble making the words feel distinct when he cut the lead vocal, so he came back twice, and they cut the tempo both times, finally settling at 169 beats per minute, about six beats slower than the original pace.

“It’s a very wordy song, a very fast song, and there’s a lot of syncopation to that melody,” LaCorte explains. “It takes a lot [of] reps so [that] it comes out naturally. But it definitely helped once we backed it down a few clicks.”

Justin Schipper overdubbed steel and Dobro, and Josh Reedy from Thomas Rhett’s road band delivered harmonies, which get a stark highlight in the final chorus in engineer Dave Clauss’ mix. The track was so commercial that MCA took it to country radio on Feb. 13, making it Mason’s first cut that was serviced to broadcasters. It’s at No. 56 after three charted weeks on the Country Airplay list dated March 29.

“Growing up listening to country radio, I think you kind of just know,” Mason reasons. “It’s just got that X factor and that little bit of a hit thing, and I think it has the best chance on a first listen to grab people’s ear.”