Evolution Of The Nashville Songwriter: From Solo Writes To Songwriting Apps

Songwriters are the heartbeat of Nashville and as the city continues to expand, so do the creatives and the way in which they make music. Prior to the 1990s, it was common for songwriters to write songs by themselves. Willie Nelson penned Patsy Cline’s timeless ballad “Crazy,” Bob McDill wrote Don Williams’ reflective “Good Ole Boys Like Me” while Tom T. Hall crafted Jeannie C. Riley’s memorable “Harper Valley P.T.A.” solo.

The way a song is created today is drastically different than the early ’90s when thousands of songwriters flocked to Nashville where they could make a decent living by simply getting an album cut. Blair Daly moved to Nashville in the ’90s and saw early success with John Michael Montgomery (“How Was I to Know,” “Angel In My Eyes”) and more recently Kip Moore (“Beer Money, “Running For You”). Songwriting was more stripped down back then and there was much more co-writing amongst songwriters without artists joining in the room. “These days, the artists not only feel like they want to be a part of the song, but also monetarily, with the lack of album sales, they have to make it up somehow,” Daly tells me while seated in his Nashville studio. “Creatively, you have to work a bit harder to make it work.”

No longer is it just two friends in a room writing a song to pitch to an artist. Now, if Daly and a co-writer booked a writing session with an artist and that artist cancels, they call off the whole session. “In order to get a shot [on the album] you almost need [the artist] to be there and need them to be a part of that song. They help guide the writing,” he says. “Now it is very strategized and thought out.”

In the ’90s it was normal to see only one or two names listed on country song credits, and it would sometimes take as long as eight weeks before studio time was booked to record a demo.

“When I moved to Nashville in 1994 it was still very much, ‘Let’s get together with a couple guitars and see what we come up with,’” says reigning Academy of Country Music songwriter of the year Shane McAnally (Kacey Musgraves’ “Space Cowboy,” Sam Hunt’s “Body Like a Back Road”). “The collaboration process at that point was only a decade old. Before that, these storytellers wrote mostly by themselves. In 2000, you saw a lot more people in the room. Now when you co-write with one other person it shocks people … music has changed and what people want to hear has changed. There's not one way, there are many ways you can do it.”

Today, writing sessions can amass four or five writers including a producer or “track guy” who often sits in the room and helps build the song from start to finish. By the time the songwriters leave they have a professional sounding demo. While today’s efficiency saves record labels and artists money, it has made the job of a session musician more difficult to find.

Liz Rose (Little Big Town’s “Girl Crush,” Taylor Swift’s “White Horse”) started writing by herself in the ’90s — “I’m pen and paper all the way,” she says. And while she sometimes finds herself in the room with songwriter-producers who help steer the song creatively as well as record a flawless sounding demo that could double as a master, she worries about the loss of work for studio musicians.

“The lifeblood of Nashville was built on songwriters and studio musicians and artists,” she says. “How are we going to grow the next Derek Wells if there’s no studio and there’s no songwriters doing demos to play on? I worry about that profession. Studios are closing all the time. We really have to preserve the whole art of songwriting and the art of making real music.”

While Nashville’s studio musicians may be dwindling, so are its songwriters. With the rise of streaming, songwriters aren’t getting paid fairly and many are looking for work elsewhere. Bart Herbison, executive director of the Nashville Songwriters Association International (NSAI), estimates that the number of working songwriters in Nashville has dropped from 4,000 in the ’90s to approximately 1,000 today. He credits the drop off to dwindling record companies, artists writing the majority of their own music, and the economic pressure to write a hit radio single since that’s often the only way a songwriter will see a paycheck.

“When I took the job in 1997, it was the apex year for the American music industry and then piracy started to hit. Then streaming took over,” Herbison says. “The rates for streaming are so low that it was almost like legal piracy. In the mid-’90s, we had approximately 4,000 working songwriters in Nashville making their primary living by writing songs. I believe we lost about 90% of that.”

In the ’90s, Herbison says it was not uncommon for a songwriter to have several of his songs on an album. This would amass to a “healthy five or low six figure income.” Additionally, singles came out more frequently and songwriters had a better chance at hearing a song they penned at radio. Now, singles can take a year to climb the country chart. While Herbison predicts a “long, slow, steady increase” in the money and opportunities for songwriters, he doesn’t think it will be anything like it was in the height of the ’90s. “I'm glad it's better, but I don't want to paint the picture that it’s fixed,” he says.

With many songwriters leaving the profession and it being more difficult to orchestrate co-writes, Richard Casper and Kevin McCarty designed an app to help connect songwriters. We Should Write Sometime uses geolocation to help users find co-writers nearby and much like dating apps Tinder and Bumble, the app allows users to swipe left or right on profiles, which lists songwriting specialties, instruments played and links to music. The app has seen a surge of 577% in overall downloads across the United States, Canada, and Australia during the current quarantine due to the coronavirus pandemic with 61% growth in number of sessions per day per user.

“Songwriters are searching for new ways to connect right now since they can't go out and network,” Casper explains. “We have solved that problem.” Adds McCarty, “With everyone in isolation, there is that need and desire to be connected with others. And especially in songwriting, it's crucial to collaborate. WSWS has given them a free tool and a very easy way to find co-writers and to connect with other songwriters.”  

Nashville is often referred to as a “10-year town” in which it sometimes takes a decade for a songwriter to see success. McCarty hopes the app will help amateur songwriters progress faster in their career as well as allow their music to be heard with the use of We Should Write Sometime.

Rose calls the app “brilliant” and says it’s a great way to meet people, especially young writers who can’t go to bars. “We used to go to bars, to open mic nights, and that’s where we met each other. That’s how Taylor [Swift] and I got together. She heard me do two songs at a writers round,” she says. “We used to go out and actually meet each other and say, ‘I love that song you wrote. Would you like to write sometime?’”

For newcomer Cleve Wilson, a former Belmont student who has a co-writing credit on the title track to Thomas Rhett’s 2019 Country Music Association-nominated album Center Point Road, his first major cut happened rather serendipitously. After writing the instrumental part of what would become “Center Point Road” in his dorm room freshman year, his manager Dan Weisman played the song in a meeting. Jesse Frasure (Rhett’s “Crash and Burn,” “Remember You Young”) heard the song through the walls of his Nashville publishing company Rhythm House and asked Weisman to send it to him, commenting that it sounded like the NBA Finals theme song. Shortly after, Wilson received an email from Frasure asking if Rhett could cut the song.

Wilson, who studied jazz for three years before attending Belmont, recalls writing “Center Point Road” in April 2017 during a period of sadness his freshman year. Walking back to his dorm one night, he heard strings in his head and put the song together. A songwriter, producer and mixer himself, Wilson doesn’t want to be pigeon-holed when he writes songs. “There’s a system here that is very unique to Nashville and we’re all here to make music,” Wilson adds. “I just want to do as much as possible. Studying jazz was so important for me because it opened my ears to all the possibilities. There’s more work to be done and I’m ready.”

Frasure, meanwhile, took a different approach to his songwriting career. Growing up in a musical family and playing guitar, the Detroit native began DJing while attending Michigan State. He always knew he wanted to work in music but didn’t know in what capacity. Intimidated by the songwriting scene when he first moved to Nashville, he got an internship at a publishing company and loved the idea of working with and signing songwriters and developing their careers. While he pursued this profession as his day job, he’d work on tracks and remixes on the side as well as DJ. Early collaborators included Meghan Trainor, Chris Stapleton and Shay Mooney of Dan + Shay.

“Chris and I would get together and do old soul jams and things we could pitch to Bruno Mars. It happened organically where the town was shifting to some of these people that were not so straightforward country,” Frasure says. Rhett liked “Crash and Burn,” a pop song Frasure and Stapleton co-wrote, and the pair began working together which is when Frasure’s production career launched.

“The town was evolving and changing to what was going on in the rest of the world for decades as far as the writer-producer started happening more and more in town. There was a trend shift because prior to that you would write a song, put a worktape together, then we'd book a demo session. With writer-producers people were going home with a recording that same day,” Frasure says. “I saw how efficient it was. It became this new thing that Nashville discovered that the rest of the world had been cued on forever.”

Frasure estimates that the Nashville “track guy” came onto the scene around 2013 with a shift in the artist culture. Newer acts were listening to music differently than those before them. These acts were listening to multiple genres on a daily basis and, as a result, were influenced by country, pop and hip-hop when getting into the writing room. While songwriters like Luke Laird (“Head Over Boots,” “Talladega”) and Ross Copperman (“Beat of the Music,” “John Cougar, John Deere, John 3:16”) were early on the trend of producing in the writing room, quickly every publisher in town was signing producer-writers. “[Producer-writers] are an essential part of the song creation process and it's changed the way Nashville works forever,” Frasure says.

Nicolle Galyon (“Tequila,” “Automatic”) admits that if it hadn’t been for the track guy she doesn’t know if she would have made it as a songwriter. “I was always the girl at the piano doing the music and the lyrics and that's really what got me my publishing deal and got my career going,” she says. “But I didn't start having success until I started getting paired with people who were physically doing the music. I realized through that process that if I could just focus on an idea, concept and lyric, that the room was better served.

“A track guy is someone that can make a track, but we would be foolish to think that that's all that they can do because a lot of the producers and a lot of track guys that I know — for instance take a Jimmy Robbins (“Beachin’,” “homecoming queen?”) or a Corey Crowder (“I’m Comin’ Over,” Think of You”) — they've had an artist career. They can play instruments, they can write lyrics, they've done all of those things in addition to now they can produce as well,” she explains.

Galyon adds that the writing room is more efficient today and the pace in which she writes songs is much faster than when she signed her first publishing deal 12 years ago. She agrees with Daly’s assessment that songwriting is much more deliberate today.

Whether there’s a producer in the room or sole lyricists one thing is clear: the lyric is what still drives country music. Dan + Shay’s Dan Smyers says while he’s noticed a shift in the writing room since he moved to Nashville in 2010 to include more track guys, the songwriting community can’t deny the power of these producers in a co-write. “We can’t neglect the music. The producing and the sounds are very important as well. Sometimes it’s super inspiring to hear somebody who’s proficient on the keys or may be laying down a certain beat, setting a groove that can inspire a song. Those people deserve the songwriting credit too,” Smyers says.

As Nashville’s writing rooms continue to evolve, so do the acts that come to town to write. Daly, whose credits include country, rock and pop, says artists from other genres are now making Nashville a priority when writing for a new album. “They see Nashville as an equal now and it’s a long time coming,” Daly says. “In 1996, ’97, we did not have half of the major rock bands on the radio coming to Nashville to either write or record their [album]. Now you've got household bands that are asking their labels to send them here again, because we're writing real songs. We're on a level playing field now which has taken a while, but I'm happy to see the change and acceptance that Nashville is not just a one-trick pony.”

Adds Frasure, “Nashville is an amazing ‘it’ city now for all kinds of collaborators. We have a little bit of something for everybody. What an awesome time to be a music creator. I think it’s a very special time in Nashville.”