We love hearing the stories about how the songwriters in Nashville write their songs and never before has a book so comprehensive been written about the songwriters who make up the majority of the hits we hear on the radio or tracks that get recorded on hundreds of albums a year. Nashville-based biographer and author Jake Brown decided it was time to write a book which focused on the songwriters and the songs, giving fans and the world at large a deep look into how songs were written. Below, you'll see an exclusive excerpt from Jake Brown's New book Nashville Songwriter: The Inside Stories Behind Country Music's Greatest Hits. The excerpt from the book (below) discusses how Bill Anderson came to write Brad Paisley's (pictured above) CMA Award-winning chart-topping hit "Whiskey Lullaby" with singer/songwriter Jon Randall.
Excerpt From Nashville Songwriter: The Inside Stories Behind Country Music's Greatest Hits:
“Whisperin” Bill Anderson on the writing of of the 2005 Country Music Association’s “Song of the Year” winner the Brad Paisley hit “Whiskey Lullaby,” While there are some co-writes where one writer will write a lot more than the other writer, and that’s fine—we all realize that and don’t count words and split things like that—but that was a case of Jon really having something to contribute, and I felt like I had something to contribute, and we put it together, and at the end of the day we had a song. Somebody told me years ago, “If you’re going to write about frying onions, make the reader or listener smell those onions,” and I think that’s good advice. In the case of “Whiskey Lullaby,” Jon Randall and I got together to write one morning, and I came in and said, “I’ve got an idea to write a song called ‘Midnight Cigarette.’ Can you imagine a cigarette just sitting on an ashtray at midnight? Nobody’s smoking it or paying it any attention, and it just sort of burns out and goes out all by itself, and liken that to a relationship—it wasn’t like you hit a wall or anything, it just burned out, it just went away.” And he loved that idea, and had been going through a lot of personal things in his life, and a lot of bad things—he lost his writing and recording deals and was going through a divorce and was really down—and admittedly had gone off on a drinking binge for a while. So he came in, and I asked him, “What have you been doing?” and he said, “Well, I put the bottle to my head and pulled the trigger a few times,” and next thing I’m going, “Forget the midnight cigarette! I love put the bottle to the head and pulled the trigger!” So what we did was we combined my line, “She put him out like the burning end of a midnight cigarette,” as the opening line of “Whiskey Lullaby,” and it worked really well. And then, of course, the line that everyone remembers is, “Put the bottle to his head and pulled the trigger,” so that was probably an example of co-writing in its purest form, where both people contribute pretty much equally to the process. We didn’t think we’d ever get someone to record it, because people weren’t lined up down the street looking for double-suicide drinking songs, so it sat on the shelf for five years. I’ll tell you who put it on hold first and you probably won’t believe it: we wrote the song in 2000, and the first act to put that song was hold was the Dixie Chicks. And I could hear them doing it, but of course their career imploded in the meantime. Then Brad Paisley heard it—and we did not write the song as a duet, it was written just as a song to be sung by one person—and Brad called me one day on the phone, and said, “I’ve been listening to this ‘Whiskey Lullaby,’ what would you think if I brought a girl to sing on that second verse?” And I said, “I’ve never thought of that. Who do you have in mind?” And he said, “Well, I think there’s only two people who could do it, and I would like to have one of those: Alison Krauss or Dolly Parton.” And I told him, “Well, you don’t have to ask my permission to do that, because I love them both!” So next thing I knew, they worked out all the contract stuff with Alison and everything fell into place.
Below, you can find out how Jake Brown came to write Nashville Songwriter:
After living in Nashville almost 15 years while working primarily with rock artists (Heart, Motorhead, Joe Satriani, etc) and producers, I began working 3 years ago on this project based around my discovery of one of the best-kept secrets on Music City: that the majority of hits were NOT written by the country stars who take them to # 1, but in fact, were written or co-written by an elite club of Music Row songwriters, so I began reaching out to get the true stories behind country music's biggest and most enduring hits. What followed has been one of the most thrilling writing adventures of my life, and a bible of sorts for hopefully multiple generations of country music fans wanting to know more about where the soundtrack of their lives came from, and advice about the songwriting process itself."
You can now purchase a copy of Nashville Songwriter from Amazon.com
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