Music

In Jordan Davis’ 2023 single “Tucson Too Late,” the singer races to the airport, hoping to save a relationship.

His latest, “Turn This Truck Around,” reverses direction. In this case, he’s driving away, attempting to end a partnership. It’s similar in storyline to Glen Campbell’s 1968 release “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” though there are sharp differences. “Truck” sounds tougher and technology makes it more likely the woman he’s leaving can initiate a conversation that will make the guy cave.

“‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix,’ you’ve got to find a pay phone, even if you want to make the call,” Davis notes. “Now we’re carrying our phones around.”

The only actual travel involved in writing “Turn This Truck Around” was the four songwriters’ commutes to Nashville’s Anthem Entertainment on Dec. 7, 2024, and the family trips they rekindled in conversation. Davis talked about chauffeuring his three kids (he and his wife, Kristen, have since added a fourth), and Warner Music Nashville artist Devin Dawson recounted a ride he and his twin brother, writer-producer Jacob Durrett, took to the Six Flags theme park in Vallejo, Calif., when they were young.

“My brother and I are in the back seat, just being little hellions and picking on each other and shit,” Dawson says. “I remember [Mom] saying, ‘Don’t make me turn this car around.’ ”

Those images didn’t take on significance until Jake Mitchell (“One Beer,” “Some Girls”) introduced a pulsing track he had developed with a simple chord progression. It had a Tom Petty air about it, and discussion about the driving beat led to talk about driving imagery. Dawson brought the earlier conversation back up with a slight revision to the vehicle, “Turn This Truck Around.” The work was fairly easy.

“It doesn’t feel like we talked about what the idea would be that much,” Mitchell offers. “It kind of just came out. And I feel like we didn’t put too much story in there. It’s more so just about that moment when you’re thinking to yourself, ‘Don’t do it, don’t do it. Don’t go back.’ ”

The chorus melody emerged first, and Josh Thompson (“Drowns the Whiskey,” “Wasted On You”) provided the setup line, with the protagonist proclaiming he was on his way “long as your memory/ Don’t make me turn this truck around.” Davis wanted a starting line for the story, and they crafted one — “This time I said it and I meant it” — that indicated the relationship had been in trouble for some time. From there, they bounced back to the chorus before patching the whole plot together. Verse one provided a sense of the journey, focused on the brakes and the gas station stops. Verse two brought the listener inside the cab, where the singer wrestles with the love songs on the radio and fears that a text message will undermine his determination. It’s never clear if he’ll go through with the breakup or give in.

“I kind of love the little bit of open-endedness in that lyric,” Davis says.

They brought the tension to a climax in the bridge — though not the kind of bridge one encounters on the road. 

“I’ve written with [people who] said bridges are made for burning and jumping off of,” Davis quips. “There are some songs where the bridge just feels like it’s useless, but this one I was pretty proud of. It really kind of helps the song out.”

It allows for a mention of “memory lane” — “ ‘Memory Lane’ had to be in that song,” Davis says — but it also uses musical elements to amp up the drama.

“The bridge is my favorite part of the song,” Dawson says. “I think it just really lets all that emotion spill out of the melody, and the way he sings it — [near] the top of his range there — it really dumps the desperation out.”

Mitchell produced the demo, which introduced several new ideas. He inserted sound effects of a door slamming, boots walking and an ignition starting, though none of those made it into the final product. And at Dawson’s suggestion, he employed a halftime feel on the bridge. They all thought they had a winner, and Mitchell didn’t want to take a risk that any element in the recording would turn off even one decision-maker who would be evaluating its potential.

“It’s usually got to go past A&R managers,” he reasons. “They play it for all kinds of people in their teams, and sometimes, whether people realize it or not, they can not like a song because of the way a vocalist says words. Even if they don’t think about it that way, they could just be like, ‘I don’t know about that one,’ and that one voice could make an artist doubt the song and not want to do it.”

Davis left the appointment confident that they had written a hit. He had never felt that way about a song before and never lost faith in “Truck.”

Producer Paul DiGiovanni (Travis Denning, Alana Springsteen) appreciated its Petty-like foundation — “My favorite artist of all time right there,” he says — and he made a point of highlighting the persistent eighth notes that were key to many of Petty’s recordings during a tracking session at Sound Stage on Music Row. 

Mitchell’s demo had presented the song’s substance well — “He knocked it out of the park,” DiGiovanni says — and the final production essentially worked its way to the bridge.

“Some bridges are just like, ‘Hey, let’s change my brain chemistry for 10 seconds so you can put me back into the chorus,’ ” DiGiovanni explains. “That is the climax of the song. It’s the most desperate part and it’s a pretty long bridge. So I feel like that’s as important as the chorus in the song, and I knew we needed to put some emphasis on that.”

As uncluttered as the arrangement feels, it adds small touches and extra voices throughout, many of them felt subliminally. It includes, for example, a quiet, filtered-out synth part that sounds like wood blocks at the end of the choruses and a barely audible pulse synthesizer and Hammond B-3 that operate as a danger signal at the bridge’s conclusion.

“It just builds as it goes,” DiGiovanni says. “Like the background vocal stacks — the first chorus, there’s four; the second chorus, there’s six; the last one, there’s 12. It’s just things to pad it and give it a little bit more beef as it goes on.”

Despite the angsty bridge, it was one of the easiest vocal performances of Davis’ career. “Usually, I go in and cut vocals for two hours,” he says. “I went in to just sing two songs one day, this being one of them. It was like 20 minutes. Paul is looking at me like, ‘All right, man. Anything else? You good?’ That was a good day.”

So was April 5. He played “Turn This Truck Around” live for the first time during the Tortuga Music Festival in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. The audience responded as if it was familiar, and it confirmed Davis’ belief it should be a single. MCA Nashville released it to country radio via PlayMPE on Oct. 13. Fans may respond as if the song is preordained; the results of the storyline are not.

“The hero in this song — I love the fact that he’s not 100% sure that he’s the hero,” Davis says. “Eventually, her memory is going to catch up to you, no matter how far you drive.”