songwriting
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04/19/2024
R.E.M. will be the ninth collective of three or more songwriters to be inducted. Seven of them are performing groups. The other two teams worked behind-the-scenes.
04/19/2024
Mary J. Blige knows a fellow truth teller when she sees one. The R&B superstar opened up to People recently about Flavor Flav’s comments comparing her to Taylor Swift, in the sense that they both write about relatable life experiences. “I mean, I love Taylor Swift. She sings about what’s going on in her life,” […]
In January 2023, when Los Angeles-based songwriter David Arkwright accepted his Roc Nation-signed colleague Natania Lalwani‘s invitation to visit her home city of Mumbai, he thought, “Let’s go see India! This could be fun.” The next thing he knew, he was commuting two hours a day through heavy traffic to work 18-hour studio sessions all month with the singer-rapper King, whose 2022 hit “Maan Meri Jaan” has 446 million Spotify streams.
“King walked in, and he started to sing,” recalls Arkwright, who wound up taking two additional trips to India last year to work on King’s October album New Life. “We just went, ‘Aaaaaand we’re writing.’ After that, it was like, ‘Hi, nice to meet you.’”
With its population of 1.4 billion, India is one of the biggest potential international markets for streaming hits — and it’s just emerging as a music business powerhouse after years of dealing with online piracy and stream-ripping. So top publishers are funding trips for veteran Western songwriters like Arkwright to combine their pop skills with regional stars. And it’s not just India. In October, publisher Warner Chappell sent U.S. country songwriters to Sao Paulo, Brazil, for a camp that generated potential hits for top regional sertanejo stars. And U.S. songwriters have spent the last decade traveling to South Korea and Japan, working with regional labels to write K-pop and J-pop hits.
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“With the way socials are going, the world is such a smaller place, whether we’re talking Korea or India or Brazil,” says J.Que Smith, a Grammy-nominated L.A. songwriter who has co-written for Beyoncé and Justin Bieber and recently penned Japanese girl group XG‘s hit “Shooting Star.” “Thirty years ago, we weren’t really caught up on what India was doing, and India didn’t know what we were doing. But now that’s very different.”
For decades in the record industry, the only Western stars who could break internationally were those who could ship physical records to far-away countries — from Cheap Trick in Japan to Michael Jackson in Europe. In the streaming era, that has changed. K-pop stars, as well as Latin-music breakouts like “Despacito,” have demonstrated that international successes can emerge from anywhere, not just North America or Europe. Coachella showed this international breadth in April with headliners such as Mexico’s Peso Pluma and Carin León, South Korea’s ATEEZ and LE SSERAFIM, Colombia’s J Balvin, Argentina’s Bizarrap and South Africa’s Tyla, says Marc Geiger, the former William Morris head of music who is now head of SaveLive, which invests in independent live music clubs. “Music has turned into the Olympics,” Geiger says.
Roughly 14 years ago, Harvey Mason, Jr., a producer and songwriter who has worked with Michael Jackson, Aretha Franklin and Justin Timberlake, accepted an invitation from South Korea’s SM Entertainment to work with a half-dozen other Los Angeles songwriters to crank out what became hits for K-Pop groups like Girls’ Generation and EXO. “We kind of just did what we did and took their sounds and took our sounds and put them together,” recalls Mason, now CEO of The Recording Academy, who continues to collaborate with K-pop artists. “New music markets are being developed and becoming more healthy and vibrant. Look at Africa — you’ve got 1.4 billion people on the continent, and they consume so much music. As the infrastructure of the industry starts to build, you’re going to see regional hits becoming just as important as hits in the U.S.”
India is perhaps the most fertile region for music-streaming opportunity: Total streams in 2023 were more than 1 trillion, second only to the U.S., according to Luminate, and the country ranked first in volume growth, well outpacing the U.S., Indonesia and Brazil. Then again, a monthly Spotify account in India costs roughly $1.42, so the revenues for artists, labels and other rightsholders aren’t yet as robust as they are in the U.S. and elsewhere. “The revenue generated for a track always depends on where it is streamed and what the end-user is paying for the subscription in that specific geography,” says Ludovic Pouilly, senior vp of music industry relations for Deezer, a streaming service available in more than 185 countries (though not in India).
In 2023, Asian recorded-music revenue increased 14.9%, according to IFPI, its fourth straight year of double-digit growth, while revenues in the Middle East and North Africa rose 14.4% and Latin America’s 10-year boom continued with a 19.4% jump. Major music companies are making heavy investment bets in these regions — Sony Music bought top Brazilian indie label Som Livre for $255 million in 2021, for example, to try to dominate the world’s ninth-largest music market, whose revenues increased 13.4% in 2023, according to the IFPI.
For publishers, the world market has become so robust that many are making like Arkwright and Smith and supplementing their song-royalty income from once-reliable U.S. markets with suddenly-reliable work in Asia and Brazil. “Five years ago, pop songs were huge in America, and it was easy to export our writers. It’s a bit harder now, because there’s a local hip-hop culture where Nordic writers are not as good to be in,” says Lars Karlsson, managing director of Warner Chappell Music Scandinavia, a region famous for pop mega-songwriters such as Sweden’s Max Martin. “It’s beautiful to have emerging markets open up for us.” Adds Ryan Press, Warner Chappell’s North American president: “For a while, it felt like you had to have success in the U.S., and that dictated everything. Now that’s not the case.”
In 2022, Universal Music Publishing Group launched an A&R team, the Global Creative Group, to plan cross-cultural collaborations such as a recent K-pop songwriting camp in Los Angeles and a country-and-Latin-music camp in Mexico City. It sent Elena Rose, a Venezuelan-American songwriter from Miami who co-wrote last year’s Becky G–Karol G hit “Mamiii,” to Morocco to collaborate with singer-songwriter Manal — and wound up with a duet and a reworked album. “It wasn’t like, ‘We’re going to send our Western producers to colonize some unsuspecting territory,’” says David Gray, the UMPG exec who leads the group. “It was, ‘We’ve got a great Latin artist and a great artist in Morocco, let’s put them together.’ This is not about imposing Western creative styles onto another country.”
Dominated by the Bollywood film industry and plagued for years with online piracy, India has struggled to develop its own recorded-music business, despite a period of Indipop and Punjabi pop hits in the ’80s and ’90s. But Universal and Sony have had offices in India for years, and Warner Music expanded its presence there in 2020, installing Jay Mehta as managing director; earlier this year, Reservoir Media signed publishing deals, including catalogs and future works, for Indian rappers MC Altaf and D’Evil. India is the 14th-biggest music market, increasing revenues by 15.3% in 2023.
Over the last few years, according to New Delhi-born singer-songwriter Subhi, the music business in India has broadened from strict Bollywood-industry guidelines to artists and music companies with a broader palette to create songs. That shift has led to more regional hits — and interest from major record labels and publishers, and more collaborations, like a songwriting camp Subhi attended through Anara Publishing and a co-writing session with a U.K. producer she’d met at a separate camp. “It’s a huge market to cater to, but also, slowly, we’re building an audience for independent music,” says Subhi, who is based in L.A. and Chicago. “It’s only the beginning.”
A regional star in India, King is a “sign that Indian music will have an increasing impact and influence on the global charts,” as the general manager of his label, Warner Music Middle East, said in 2023’s IFPI report. Now that King’s 2020 hit, “Tu Aake Dekhle,” has scored 395 million Spotify plays, Bhavy Anand, one of his managers, says, “We’ve been getting a lot of attention from international songwriters and publishers and media houses. This was unheard-of three years, four years [ago].”
Working with Warner’s Mehta, King’s team saw an opportunity to cross over from regional hits to international stardom, and recorded a new version of “Maan Meri Jaan,” with vocals in both Hindi and English. The label contacted Lalwani, the Mumbai-born songwriter who lives in Los Angeles. “I wanted to make it very effortless — Hindi and English isn’t something that’s always put together,” Lalwani says. Later, the label enlisted a U.S. pop star, Nick Jonas, to add duet vocals for the new version released in April.
For Arkwright, collaborating with artists outside North America and Europe is a crucial way to diversify his songwriting business. “People there are doing things that no one is doing here. I want to partner with those people,” he says. “I wish it could be like in the ’80s, where you could have a Michael Jackson B-side and buy a house in Malibu. But you have to look at things differently. You have to look at new and emerging markets.”
Lately, most Western songwriters want to work with K-pop or J-pop acts. But Beckuh Boom — the American songwriter behind hits for BLACKPINK and Twice — remembers when that wasn’t the case. “When I started taking trips to Seoul back in 2012, everyone I talked to about it kind of laughed at me or just didn’t get it,” she says. “They’d say, ‘Why would you waste your time? They’re not even close to the biggest market.’”
It took the global breakthroughs of Korean acts like BTS and BLACKPINK and Japanese acts like XG a few years later for Western talent to take the songwriting opportunities in Asia’s two largest pop markets as seriously as Boom had. Now, they are among the most lucrative and sought-after gigs in the global publishing business, drawing in top American hitmakers like Ryan Tedder, Victoria Monet and Jacob Kasher “JKash” Hindlin.
But to land a hit in Korea or Japan, Western songwriters have to conform to the local ways of doing business, and both markets have clear distinctions from the American industry. Typically, this involves English-language demos being funneled to a native, local-language songwriter, who then re-writes or translates most, or all, of the original lyrics into Korean or Japanese, earning them a songwriting credit in the process. Some sources estimate that roughly 80% of K-pop songs and 30%-40% of J-pop songs released today have ties to American or other Western sources — usually with totally different lyrics.
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“When demos are sent to Korean labels, they are almost always in English,” says Kevin Woo, a former K-pop idol who now works as a songwriter and has translated English demos into Korean. “That’s how we first hear the songs as artists and idols — in English. Then we pick whichever track we vibe with, and then they get that song translated into Korean.” Japanese music executives say this is similar to how it works in J-pop.
This is a fast-growing part of the job description for Korean or Japanese writers, as more songs are imported from Westerners each year. Naoki Osada, founder/CEO of Avex USA, the Japanese entertainment powerhouse’s American branch, says that since he started in the Japanese music industry 20 years ago, the number of songs written by Americans has more than doubled.
To adapt these English-lyric pitches, Young Chance, a Korean songwriter and producer, says “we usually keep the title of the song from the demo, but then when we translate, we take a different perspective on the same title.” In Japan, where speaking English as a second language is less common and there is less emphasis on capturing a global audience overall, it is even more important to rework the words of a Western demo to fit the needs of the local listener.
Common words and phrases like “let’s go” or “boom,” or slang like “Westside,” which are often derived from American rap music, might still make the cut in a K-pop or J-pop song, but that’s about it. Unless, of course, it’s a song intended to be a Western crossover hit, like BTS’s Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 “Dynamite” or BLACKPINK’s “Ice Cream” featuring Selena Gomez — both of which were penned entirely by Americans and kept in English.
Chance says he recently finished a “word-for-word English translation” that is coming out with a “major Korean act” soon, but says this approach to re-writing is far less common, given the difficulties of fitting the same story and meaning into the same meter and rhyme as before. Because Western songwriters now expect their lyrics to be tossed almost entirely, lyric writing is not highly emphasized when writing pitches for K-pop and J-pop.
There are other distinctions between K-pop and Western songwriting. Torsen Ingvaldsen, an independent A&R who is part of the growing class of middlemen that connect Western writers to Korean idols, says translated K-pop songs often also edit out explicit words or inappropriate themes. This, he says, is due to the young age of the average K-pop superfan, as well as cultural differences — though Jung Kook’s recent, sexually-charged single “Seven” may foreshadow changing attitudes towards explicit themes in Korea.
On the business side, Western songwriters know that when they pitch Korean and Japanese labels, they will have to give up a significant amount of publishing to local lyricists that they will likely never meet or work with directly. In Korea, it’s common to give up 12.5% to the person who re-writes the lyrics. “Sometimes they ask for a little more, but this is almost such a hard and fast rule it is often not even negotiated,” says Mary Megan Peer, CEO of peermusic, an indie publisher with offices in Korea and Japan. In Japan, however, 50% is typically expected, due to differences in the publishing industries of Western countries and that of Japan.
“In Japan, publishing is completely divided into two halves: one lyric, one melody,” says Osada. “Copyright ownership is 50/50 and it is fixed.” In America, songwriters are often also the producers — crafting lyrics, melody and track — and they work on all three elements with other creatives in the same session. In Japan, songwriters and producers take a much different approach. “There are three roles: one is the producer, who is also called the ‘track maker’ or arranger,” says Osada. “Some topliners do lyrics and melody, but there are people that exist who only write lyrics. Each of the three works alone in their own room by themselves, and then they send the completed demo. It’s not like Western writers where they all work together.”
The Korean publishing business lies somewhere in the middle, given its stronger and longer-term ties to Western music. There is still a clear distinction between the roles of producer and songwriter, like in Japan, and toplining is a major focus of the Korean songwriter’s vocation, but the way lyrics are weighted is not the same.
Western songwriters largely believe these opportunities abroad are well worth it, even though up to half of their publishing is given away. In a time when the popularity of streaming has undercut songwriters’ potential earnings in the United States and other Western nations, pop audiences in Korea and Japan still purchase full albums, physically and digitally, meaning “the publishing money [in Korea and Japan] really is unlike anything else for a writer,” says Ingvaldsen.
But why do Japanese and Korean labels use so many songs from Western songwriters when their local industries are thriving? First, J-pop and K-pop have always found inspiration from American music, especially bubblegum pop and rap, so many believe working with Western — especially American — talent is a natural fit. Taking foreign pitch records also might increase a K-pop or J-pop act’s ability to capture the attention (and dollars) of the music market abroad as well as at home.
Ingvaldsen also personally believes that there’s a “lack of songwriters locally. I’ve found there’s only a few major [Korean] songwriters that participate on everything from every major label.” Osada says that in Japan the cohort of working songwriters is “more condensed for sure.” He adds it’s a more “hidden role” in Japan’s industry as well. “I see big differences in the personality of writers there and in the U.S. In the U.S. there are writers that are almost like artists — very creatively outgoing, outspoken. Japanese writers and producers are introverts.”
A Seoul-based songwriter, who wished to remain anonymous, echoes that sentiment. “There’s not a lot of Korean writers that actually work on the big hit songs — that goes to the Western industry,” he says. “The big labels work with [fewer] Korean songwriters.”
And this trend shows no signs of stopping, as the biggest Japanese and Korean labels continue to strengthen their ties to the West, particularly in the United States. Hajime Harada, an A&R at Avex USA, says that “since I started at Avex USA in 2022, the percentage of U.S. songs that have landed with Japanese artists has easily doubled.” His boss, Osada, believes this is thanks to Avex’s increasing investment in their American outpost in West Hollywood, Calif. Korean music companies have also aligned closer with the Western music business: In late March, HYBE struck a new distribution deal with Universal Music Group, while JYP has a partnership with Republic and Starship Entertainment has a deal with Columbia, to name a few.
Nascent AI technology might also present more opportunities for lyric rewrites in the future. Woo was recently hired by AI voice synthesis start-up Hooky and American pop artist Lauv to translate the singer-songwriter’s new single “Love U Like That” into Korean. Woo then sang his own Korean version of the tune and Lauv’s voice was mapped on top of it using Hooky’s technology as a way to cut down on the difficult process of Lauv learning Korean pronunciation. “I think these kinds of opportunities will grow for [bilingual songwriters] in the future as AI grows,” says Woo.
Osada could see it working for Japanese audiences, too, who have appreciated Japanese translations of K-pop in the past and may be open to AI making those translations more commonplace. “I think there’s some market there,” Osada says. “Japanese people see lyrics as a very important factor in enjoying songs, so I think local-language translation could help.”
As the music market becomes increasingly global, publishing professionals are confident the trend of pitching Western records to Eastern talent will keep expanding, with some even looking to China and India as possible future frontiers. “The money [in exporting pitch records] is just too good to ignore,” says Ingvladsen.
So long disco balls and platform shoes, hello square dancing and cowboy boots. Beyoncé officially ushered in a new era with the Friday, March 29 release of Cowboy Carter, her eighth album and a changing of the guard following 2022’s critically acclaimed Renaissance. Born out of an experience Bey had “years ago where [she] did […]
Ariana Grande is the latest singer-songwriter to get her own “Written By” playlist on Spotify. The playlist includes Grande’s biggest hits, including “7 Rings,” “Thank U Next,” “Dangerous Woman” and “we can’t be friends (wait for your love,)” as well as songs she has written for other artists. The playlist shines a light on Grande’s talents in […]
Billboard‘s newest cover star PartyNextDoor hasn’t just established himself as an alternative R&B auteur over the last decade, but he’s also cemented himself as one of pop music’s most sought-out hitmakers. After becoming the first recording artist signed to Drake‘s OVO label in 2013, Party has made hit after hit with The Boy. He provided […]
In “What Am I Gonna Do,” the opening track on Chris Stapleton’s current Higher album, a broken-hearted man revels in a barroom jukebox that incessantly plays “That’s the Way Love Goes.”
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That song celebrates two anniversaries this month: 50 years since Johnny Rodriguez topped Hot Country Songs with his version on Feb. 16, 1974, and 40 years since Merle Haggard took it to No. 1 on Feb. 11, 1984. In fact, Haggard’s performance netted the only solo Grammy Award of his career.
It’s a good bet that many country fans — and, perhaps, a few current country artists -— don’t actually know “That’s the Way Love Goes.” It’s an even better bet that fewer know much about one of its writers, Country Music Hall of Fame member Lefty Frizzell, who nonetheless is inarguably one of the architects of the classic male country sound. His influence has filtered down to some members of the present generation of artists, even if they’re not aware of it.
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“They could have got it from [Randy] Travis or [Johnny] Paycheck,” says Country Hall of Fame and Museum senior writer-editor Michael McCall. “A lot of the phrasing that he did is so common in country music, but they may not know why they phrase that way or where it started.”
Frizzell is likely best known for the first single — and biggest hit — of his career, the 1950 release “If You’ve Got the Money, I’ve Got the Time.” A brisk, rousing honky-tonk number, it spent three weeks at No. 1. Willie Nelson also earned a No. 1 single with his 1976 cover, and the tune eventually joined the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999.
But it’s just one of several Frizzell songs that earned significant updates through the years. John Anderson’s version of “I Love You a Thousand Ways” charted in 1981, Dwight Yoakam’s reworking of “Always Late With Your Kisses” hit the top 10 in 1988, Irish band The Chieftains enlisted Mick Jagger for the title track of the 1995 album The Long Black Veil, and Keith Whitley delivered a key remake of “I Never Go Around Mirrors.” For the latter song, Whitley — who usually blasted Frizzell’s music in the back of his bus before he took the stage — persuaded Frizzell’s “Mirrors” co-writer, Sanger D. “Whitey” Shafer (“All My Ex’s Live in Texas,” “I Wonder Do You Think of Me”), to compose a second verse.
“Keith was such a huge Lefty fan, he actually went that morning to Lefty’s grave and read the verse over his grave before he went to the studio to cut it,” recalls Whitley’s former steel guitarist-road manager, producer Carson Chamberlain (Zach Top, Billy Currington).
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Frizzell was an innovative country singer, and his performance of “Always Late (With Your Kisses)” perhaps best reveals the three techniques that set him apart from his competitors when he arrived on the national scene. The most obvious change he introduced was the curls and bends that embellished an occasional note. But he also wrote many of his songs with a melody that dipped into his rich lower range just enough to make a statement by showing the breadth of his voice. The most subtle of his three techniques came in his phrasing; Frizzell would, at times, start a line at a loud volume before trailing off by the end — not because he had run out of breath, but because it captured the mood of that particular thought.
“I don’t remember him ever really singing the same song the same way twice,” says his younger brother, David Frizzell, who is working on a documentary that’s likely to be released this year. “He always had a little different curl here than he did the last time, or a little different way of pronouncing or singing a line, or taking a word and making it three or four syllables. So no matter what he sings, he came off Lefty.”
Haggard, Anderson, Nelson, Whitley, Travis, Gene Watson, George Strait and George Jones were among those who incorporated at least one of Lefty’s techniques into their own performance style. Moe Bandy, for whom Lefty wrote the 1975 hit “Bandy the Rodeo Clown,” acknowledged the genre’s debt to Frizzell by singing “There’s a lot of Leftys now with different names” on his 1980 single “Yesterday Once More.” Ironically, Bandy was heavily influenced by Frizzell, but didn’t actually sound much like him.
“I had my own style, and I didn’t like it,” Bandy says. “I wanted to sound like Lefty and all those people — but I finally got used to it, and I liked it. But at first, I was trying to do all that stuff that Lefty and Hank and all them people were doing. Finally, I found out no matter what I do, I come out as Moe Bandy.”
In the decades since then, plenty of artists took cues from Haggard, Travis and Jones, et al, and borrowed some of the techniques others had developed by emulating Frizzell. Josh Turner, Trace Adkins, Tracy Lawrence, Garth Brooks, Dylan Scott, Toby Keith, Joe Diffie, Daryle Singletary, Scotty McCreery and Cody Johnson are just some of the singers to whom parts of Lefty’s approach have been bequeathed.
“He inspired all these people that didn’t even know they was inspired by him,” notes Bandy. “It’s funny how music passes down.”
New artist Ryan Larkins sees himself among the beneficiaries. His debut single, “King of Country Music,” cites Saginaw, Mich., in its opening verse as an oblique homage to Frizzell, whose last No. 1 single was the 1964 release “Saginaw, Michigan.” He mines his lower register in a manner that Frizzell would likely have appreciated.
“Lefty is one of those guys, I don’t think about him as much I should,” Larkins says. “You can’t really put it into words just the way he would bend some of those notes and draw out certain words. I feel like nobody else would sing it that way.”
Larkins detects Frizzell’s influence in the enunciations of bluegrass-tinged Shawn Camp and the low notes of Blake Shelton, who illustrates the hand-me-down nature of Lefty’s skills. “Lefty was very influenced by Jimmie Rodgers, like the yodeling kind of thing, and I can hear that,” says Larkins. “It’s funny how every generation takes something from the last one, and to think that Blake Shelton is being influenced by Jimmie Rodgers in a roundabout way — it’s an interesting thought.”
Nicknamed for a fierce punch he delivered as a schoolyard scrapper, Frizzell’s life was a tough one, some of the hardship self-inflicted. He was imprisoned at age 19 for statutory rape, signed a series of bad contracts that cost him as much as 50% of his income and developed a persistent alcohol problem. And his significant creative influence haunted him, as he heard his style approximated by so many other artists through the years. He died in 1975 at age 47 from a stroke, never really receiving full credit for his innovations during his lifetime.
Decades later, his style continues to have a faint, but surprising, impact on the genre through the vocal approach of a younger generation that doesn’t actually know he’s a significant source. “He had his own way of doing it,” David recalls. “He just was so different than anybody else that I’ve ever been around.”
He was different until everybody else became a little bit like Lefty. That’s the way love goes.
The history of the rodeo is closely intertwined with country music, to the point that it has played a role in a fair amount of the genre’s hits.
George Strait’s “Amarillo by Morning,” Moe Bandy’s “Bandy the Rodeo Clown,” Suzy Bogguss’ “Someday Soon,” Dan Seals’ “Everything That Glitters (Is Not Gold)” and Garth Brooks’ “Rodeo” and “Much Too Young (To Feel This Damn Old)” embraced the sport’s lifestyle for their storylines. And the rodeo provided a useful metaphor in Leon Everette’s “Midnight Rodeo,” Jake Owen’s “Eight Second Ride” and Vern Gosdin’s “This Ain’t My First Rodeo.”
Gosdin’s title, which was built on a familiar adage, gets reversed in Restless Road’s new single, “Last Rodeo,” applying images from the arena to a broken relationship.
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“I’ve always heard people talk about, you know, ‘This isn’t my first rodeo,’ ” says group member Colton Pack, “but I’ve never heard anybody do the flip and the play on words of saying, ‘It’s not my last rodeo.’ ”
That changed when Pack spotted some form of the “last rodeo” phrase in public, most likely on a T-shirt, and he logged it into his phone as a potential hook. He unpacked it on April 3, 2023, when the band had a co-writing session with Trannie Anderson (“Heart Like a Truck,” “Wildflowers and Wild Horses”) at the home studio of songwriter-producer Lindsay Rimes (“World on Fire,” “Love You Back”) in West Nashville. The appointment was a challenge. Anderson had a last-minute lunch with Lainey Wilson to celebrate “Heart Like a Truck,” and to accommodate it, they started at 9 a.m.
“In our world, that might as well be frickin’ 4 a.m.,” Restless Road’s Zach Beeken notes.
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They felt pressure, given that they had a tight three hours to make something happen, but Pack’s “this ain’t my last rodeo” suggestion gave them something strong to work with out of the gate. The phrase applied to someone rebounding after getting dumped, and it fit the perseverance the band needed to keep pushing forward after its formation in 2013 on NBC’s The X Factor.
“I’m not a cowboy at all,” says tenor Garrett Nichols. “I didn’t grow up around riding bulls or riding broncos, but every time we would spit out a lyric, I could definitely see into it. I related to the past heartbreak stuff, I related to ‘Back in the saddle, back on the road’ [or] ‘I might be bruised, but I ain’t broke.’ I just thought about all the different times that we’ve tried to do this and that, and it didn’t work out, and we just kept going.”
They dove into the chorus first, bookending the stanza with the hook at the front and the back. They filled it with an anthemic melody designed to showcase their harmonies, with Nichols on the high end and Beeken in the lower register.
“One of our biggest challenges, being a trio and doing what we do, is finding a key for the song that works for everybody’s voice,” Beeken says. “We’ll find the key we can push Garrett to, to where it’s like, ‘This is as high as it can go, I can’t go any higher,’ trying to find the range for him because the chorus is the part of the song you want to soar and smack the hardest.”
Once they had a good overview of the chorus, they were better able to start solving pieces of the puzzle in other sections, too. “We kind of worked on different sections,” says Anderson. “I remember getting the chorus structure kind of figured out and filling in most of the lines, but then singing the verse for a while. I remember popcorning a little bit.”
They loaded the text with rodeo and cowboy allegory, though the words fit so easily that the references aren’t always obvious.
“It needed rodeo language, but not so much that it took the raw emotion out of it,” Anderson says. “And there was a lot of raw emotion in the room writing the song because of what they’ve been through as a band, but also, Zach had just gone through a breakup and was able to write through that [experience], too. Finding the balance of raw emotion and playing on the metaphor was a pretty natural thing.”
Once the verses became clearer, they popcorned back to the chorus to tie up some of the loose ends, but a mistake actually improved it. That section originally began on the downbeat of a measure, but they sang the hook this time as a pickup to the next line, and it changed how the rest of the chorus unfolded.
“This drops harder in the chorus, [with] the music cutting out and then hitting the chorus [hard],” Rimes says. “We had some of the lyric in there, but we had to add stuff in, in the middle of the chorus. We kind of had a bit more space because it was starting earlier than before.”
Rimes filled that space with an obvious audience-participation part, threading an easy-to-remember “ride, ride, ride” lyric, ideally designed for pumping fists in the air on an arena floor.
They wrote it quickly enough that Anderson made her lunch with Wilson, and Rimes continued working with Restless Road on a demo. Beeken sang the first verse; Pack took the second, one octave higher; and the full force of the harmonies raised the impact even more on the chorus.
The band joked about adding a neighing horse to the intro, and Rimes quickly inserted that sound from his plug-in collection. When the group prodded further about having a horse galloping off in the closing moments, Rimes pulled up that effect, too. They never expected to keep those sounds, though they provide another means of separating “Last Rodeo” from the pack.
“We just thought that was hysterical when we made the demo,” recalls Rimes. “But it stayed in there, and then we got used to it. It’s actually pretty cool.”
The band had a 3 p.m. appointment with the label, and when the group left the studio, Rimes finished the demo and sent it in the middle of the meeting. As a result, RCA approved it for the next session within hours of being written.
They recorded the final version at Nashville’s Soundstage, mixing in new parts from studio players with some of the remnants from Rimes’ demo, including arena-level drums. Restless Road likewise bolstered its original demo vocals with additional takes, filling out the chorus harmonies by doubling all three guys’ voices. Beeken also slipped in a unison part one octave below the melody, thickening the whole sound.
Nichols, in addition to singing high harmonies, contributed a signature whistle — with shades of ’60s Sergio Leone western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. “I don’t know why, but I’m just really good at whistling,” Nichols says. “We did it a couple times, put some reverb on it and then just slapped it in.”
RCA Nashville released “Last Rodeo” to country radio via PlayMPE on Dec. 11 with an official add date of Jan. 29. Its message, filtered through an image of a cowboy getting back in the saddle after being thrown, is fairly universal; resilience is a highly admired quality, for Restless Road and for everyone else.
“The chorus can apply to anything in life,” Pack says, “whether that be a relationship, whether that be somebody standing in the way of a dream, whether that be telling yourself, ‘You know what? I can bounce back.’ ”
Songwriters of North America (SONA), a songwriter advocacy organization, has launched a New York chapter. Along with the new branch, the organization has also announced new developments in its leadership.
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News of a New York chapter follows months of planning by SONA to successfully create an East Coast hub. The organization held a meeting in September in Manhattan with local songwriters and publishers to talk about the possibility of establishing a New York SONA chapter and to find new board members. At that meeting, the group also discussed BMI’s then-potential sale to New Mountain Capital for a reported $1.7 billion and how that might affect its membership.
According to today’s announcement, Camus Celli has been tapped to oversee the New York chapter. Additionally, Kellie Brown has been named SONA’s new COO. Erin McAnally has been appointed to Executive Director. In this role McAnally will oversee SONA’s advocacy, membership and education initiatives. Linda Bloss-Baum has been added to the board.
Michelle Lewis will continue to serve as SONA’s CEO, but she will now oversee both SONA and the SONA Foundation, which are sister organizations with separate boards and missions.
“I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to work with and build upon the strong foundation laid by such formidable advocates who work to protect and lift up songwriting as a profession,” says McAnally, executive director, SONA. “SONA provides a powerful nexus where advocacy, education, and songwriting meet, and the organization wholly aligns with so many of my life’s passions.”
“SONA’s original co-founders and I believe, as we grow from a friend-group of songwriters and composers advocating for our rights to an established, sustainable trade association and advocacy group, our most important, defining characteristic is that we remain creator-led,” adds Lewis, CEO of SONA and The SONA Foundation. “So, in selecting my successor, we looked for someone with a policy brain and a creator heart. I’m so happy and grateful to have found that unique combination in Erin McAnally. In addition, we have always imagined our growth would lead us to having a presence in DC and NY. It took eight years of hard work and growing pains to get here, but we are so excited to reach this goal! Welcome to the SONA-verse Camus and Linda!”