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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 […]
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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!”
Billboard is partnering with Session Studio on its January SongDrop contest, which will be judged by ABBA‘s Björn Ulvaeus — with help from staffers from the magazine. Session Studio, which was founded by Ulvaeus, producer Max Martin and songwriter Niclas Molinder, makes a software platform that songwriters, producers and musicians can use to collaborate, distribute and claim credit for their contributions to recordings so they can collect royalties.
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The contest will run until Feb. 6, with the goal of identifying new talent. Ulvaeus will make the final decision on the winner, who’ll receive $1,000, a yearlong ProTools Ultimate Subscription, and a one-year membership to Billboard Pro, the definitive news source of information on the music industry, with more than 250 charts, a daily briefing and special reports. Two runners-up will also receive one-year memberships to Billboard Pro. The winners will also be announced on the Billboard website.
“I haven’t competed in a song contest since Eurovision in 1974, but I can still remember the excitement – and I guess it went pretty well,” said Ulvaeus, who 50 years ago famously won international exposure for his band at the Eurovision Song Contest.
Session Studio runs the SongDrop contest every month, in partnership with another company in the music business each time. The idea is to expose new songwriting talent to industry professionals, as well as music fans.
“At a time when so much about the music business is changing, it all still starts with the song,” says Billboard editorial director Hannah Karp. “With more distractions than ever competing for listeners’ attention, it’s more vital than ever to identify new songwriting talent that can cut through the noise. We hope this SongDrop contest will surface some of tomorrow’s hitmakers.”
Session Studio was founded to make it easier for streaming services to accurately identify the creators and rightsholders of compositions by offering them a way to register for credit as they work. The free app also allows users to assign songwriting credits so they can be tracked online. It has been recognized by various rightsholders and music services, including Universal Music Group, Spotify, TuneCore, SoundCloud, PPL, ASCAP and BMI.
Songwriters who are 18 and up may enter compositions that they have written themselves or with collaborators, including with AI tools. Click here for a complete list of rules.
One of the most engaging singles of Carrie Underwood’s early career was “Cowboy Casanova,” a warning to other women about a “snake with blue eyes” posing for his next victim in a barroom, delivered as big, KISS-quality guitars bashed out power chords underneath.
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Matt Stell’s “Breakin’ In Boots” is the male version of that song. Though the artist says, “I’ve never thought about that,” the similarities are all there: the night-spot locale, the exhortation to another guy about the danger an alluring female patron poses and even a reference to snakeskin. In this case, the serpentine comment is a note about the other man’s leather boots, but it’s easy to see the reptillian innuendo as an allusion to the woman’s forked tongue.
More than anything, it’s Stell paying homage to an item in his own closet.
“Years ago, I bought this pair of boots that I had no business buying,” he says. “It took them, I don’t know, about a year’s time to make ‘em. They drew ‘em to my foot and made ‘em and I remember when those boots came in. I’ll be married and buried in those boots. They’re python.”
The storyline of “Breakin’ In Boots” is personal, too. Stell had spotted a woman at a Nashville bar in March wearing boots that looked quite similar to his. He was in the process of closing his tab, and by the time he was free to go introduce himself and compare footwear, she was gone.
Within a few days, Stell staked out a writers room at Apple Music’s office in Nashville’s Wedgewood-Houston district for a local writing retreat. After a morning co-write, he shared the space that afternoon with writer-producer Joe Fox (“Last Night Lonely”); Los Angeles-based Nate Cyphert (“H.O.L.Y.”); and Ben Stennis (“’Til You Can’t,” “Make You Mine”), who presented the “Breakin’ In Boots” title. Everyone liked it, particularly Stell.
“The great thing about Stell,” says Stennis, “is he knows what he wants to do, and he’s very direct about it.”
The title allowed them to paint a barroom Barbie as someone who gets a kick out of using and abusing men’s emotions, and it was ideal for an aggressive musical framework, which would assist Stell’s concerts. With that in mind, Fox kicked into a four-chord progression on guitar that’s either in the key of C-major or the related A-minor; since each chord keeps rolling into the next, the home base isn’t as clear as it would have been if they were adhering to the rules that guided music-theory icon J.S. Bach.
“If you understand Bach, you could definitely understand Matt Stell,” Fox deadpans.
Stell wanted to drop John Anderson’s “Straight Tequila Night” in the opening line – that 1992 chart-topper documented a similarly bitter beauty – and it set a proper tone, but the writing wasn’t entirely linear. They bounced a bit between the opening verse and chorus.
“It’s like tightening up the lug nuts on a tire you’re changing,” Stell says. “You get them all started, and then you cinch ‘em down in kind of a star pattern. You don’t go one after the other. Somehow that kind of works.”
Midway through the chorus, they ID’d the woman as a “cowboy killer” who’s “shootin’” bourbon.
“Cowboy Killer” was a title Stell had tried to write previously – it’s also been the hook for album cuts by Jason Aldean and by Ian Munsick and Ryan Charles. And Dustin Lynch named his current album Killed the Cowboy.
“We all grew up talking about Marlboros being cowboy killers, at least in Georgia,” Stennis says. “We knew cigarettes are called cowboy killers, and so we kind of just thought calling a girl a cowboy killer instead was kind of cool.”
It certainly implies that she’s smokin’…
“Smokin’ cigarettes or just smokin’ beautiful,” Stennis quips. “Either one.”
The writing progressed without a lot of setbacks, but “Boots” still needed a bridge, and maybe a little more work on the second verse. Apple, unfortunately, was closing up shop for the day, and since they had maybe just a half-hour of work left, they went out to Stell’s Ford F-150 in the parking lot and kept writing there in public, undeterred by the prospect of passersby hearing their unfinished work.
“I didn’t really think about it at the time,” Cyphert says. “But I think we were excited about the song and were pretty wrapped up in it. We already had the chorus where we knew there’s something here. So I think that we didn’t even put that much thought into who could have heard or who was walking about.”
Despite that public-facing scenario, the parking lot is where “Boots” reached its most vulnerable moment. They fashioned a bridge that temporarily broke the repetitive chord structure, and the singer doubled down on his warning that the smokin’-hot woman would leave potential suitors broken. He implied that he had firsthand knowledge.
“Bridges are always my favorite part of the song,” Cyphert notes. “I think it’s nice to give a listener one more new little piece of something before you launch them back into a chorus, and in this case, I feel like the bridge is the most emotional part of the song. It’s kind of the soft side of the whole situation.”In the ensuing days, Stennis built a demo with a four-on-the-floor drum pattern that felt sort of danceable. Stell liked it, but had other ideas, and asked Fox to work something up with a little more of a rock tone. Fox infused more dynamics into it, paring back at the end of the first verse to a haunting piano background, which made the launch of the anthemic chorus even more pronounced. He also developed a down chorus for the post-bridge section, and rolled in a high-energy banjo part on the chorus to amp it even further.
“There’s a banjo on meth cranking through that song,” Stennis says.
Stell began using “Breakin’ In Boots” as the closer for his concerts almost immediately, replacing “Shut The Truck Up.” They subsequently recorded the final master at the Black River compound on Nashville’s Music Row during the summer with a cadre of studio musicians playing on top of Fox’s demo. Most of his playing on that demo bit the dust, though some of it remained intact.
“I would have programmed drums, but those would be replaced,” Fox says. “It was mostly the little things [that stayed in] — the baritone electric guitar that’s in there, that’s my guitar from the demo. Same with some of the other guitars that are in there, and there was my banjo from the demo.”
RECORDS Nashville released “Breakin’ In Boots” to digital service providers on Oct. 6, then shipped it to country radio via PlayMPE on Nov. 6. The woman who inspired it will likely never know she’s the subject.
And Stell still doesn’t know if she really is the heartbreaker the song implies.
“She could have very well been,” he allows. “I never got a chance to find out.”
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Imagine worrying that you’d reached your creative songwriting peak before you could even legally order a beer. That’s the existential dread Billie Eilish said she suffered before Barbie director Greta Gerwig came knocking with an assignment.
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“I honestly was concerned that it was over for me. We’d been trying and it wasn’t doing what it usually would do in me. I was honestly like, ‘Damn, maybe I hit my peak and I don’t know how to write anymore?,’” Eilish told The Hollywood Reporter for its Hit Squad songwriter roundtable, where she talked about inspiration, frustration, first songs and cringe-y lyrics with fellow songwriters/singers Dua Lipa, Olivia Rodrigo, Jon Batiste, Cynthia Erivo and Julia Michaels.
Eilish, 21, said she was struggling to find fresh inspiration before the call came from Gerwig in January with the Barbie soundtrack assignment. The result, of course, was Eilish’s haunting ballad “What Was I Made For?,” which not only hit Nov. 14 on the Billboard Hot 100, but also garnered the seven-time Grammy Award winner another five nominations for the 2024 Grammys.
“Greta saved me, really, honestly,” Eilish said of the track she wrote with songwriting partner brother Finneas. “It brought us out of it and immediately we were inspired and wrote so much more after that.” And though we have not year heard what else they cooked up for Eilish as-yet-untitled third album, the story of struggle opened the door for Eilish to describe the making of the song in greater detail.
Eilish said she and Finneas were in the studio on a rainy January day the day after they first saw the movie — whose soundtrack garnered 11 Grammy nominations overall — at a time when they were super-stuck. “It was just a day of nothing. It was just idea after idea after idea of just no ideas. Nothing was happening. It was the least creative,” she said of the unproductive six-hour session.
Then Finneas suggested they try to write the Barbie assignment, which Billie was not psyched to take on after such a frustrating day. “I was like, ‘What? You think after the day of garbage we’ve just made, we’re going to make a perfect song for something that needs something really good?,’” she asked. “I was like, ‘I don’t even have that in me.’”
Though the siblings had struck Oscar gold before with their James Bond theme “No Time to Die,” Eilish didn’t think she had “something astounding” in her. But once Finneas began playing the piano, Eilish — sitting on a couch with a handheld mic — started singing as the brother and sister talked about the “floating elegance of [Barbie] and her ability to be so smooth and beautiful and perfect all the time. And then the juxtaposition of her suddenly falling and [she] can’t do everything perfectly.”
That inspired the line “I used to float, now I just fall down,” which led to the song’s title and a breakthrough. “Then we were both asking the question after that and we did that in probably five minutes. It was like it was God. It was just the most perfect example to me of true inspiration and connection,” she said. “It was living in me that whole day, but it wasn’t coming out of me. We didn’t go into it knowing at all what we were going to make or if we were going to make anything. And it was just so clear that we needed to.”
Rodrigo, 20, weighed in on how writing the song “Can’t Catch Me Now” for the new Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes prequel took her out of her comfort zone in the best way. “It was so much fun. Most of my songs are very diaristic in nature and kind of about my life. It was such a fun challenge to watch this movie through the eyes of this character and try to capture herperience through my words and my voice,” she said. “There’s so much inspiration in restricting yourself sometimes.”
Lipa said her experience writing the Barbie song “Dance the Night” was, from the beginning, “the most fun experience. It was something that I hadn’t done before.” She said soundtrack producer Mark Ronson DM’d her on Instagram saying the script was hilarious and he wanted her to write a song for its iconic dance sequence.
“I was like, ‘This is an absolute no-brainer. One thousand percent yes,’” she said. “It’s so much about stereotypical Barbie having an existential crisis and finding out what it’s like to experience the human condition and the way that we are as people and the emotions that we feel. And constantly striving for perfection but not quite reaching it, striving for something deeper in a way. Greta was saying how inspired by disco she was. I just thought about disco and the community it brings, and the way it brings people together. It was always a genre of music that was such a release when things weren’t going well in the world.”
The discussion also had Erivo dissecting the first lyric she wrote at 16 for a South African girl group and Rodrigo’s first effort, a “feminist anthem” called “Superman” she wrote at 14 about how she didn’t need a Superman to come and save her. Dua Lipa remembered a song she wrote at 4 or 5 in her native Albanian she’d sing around the house with lyrics about wanting to be just like her mom.
As you might expect, Eilish’s first attempt, at 8, featured some typically dark lyrics: “I’m going down, down, down into the black hole, sweeping up your soul today …”