SAMPLE SONG STORIES FROM SONGS OF NASHVILLE:
Merle Haggard – “I don’t have any idea what caused me to write ‘Mama Tried,’ I don’t know why I wrote ‘The Bottle Let Me Down.’ My best friend Freddy Powers and I lived during the 1980s on houseboats out on Lake Shasta. We wrote songs all the time out there, it’s one of the most beautiful places in the world.”
Jelly Roll – “I was in my early teens whenever I really started to realize I had a gift for making music, when I realized I had a way of putting words together, I was probably 13, 14. When I go into the studio and you hear it and you feel it and you flow with it. It’s like a puzzle for me when I write. I just take rhyme words and fill in the blanks, because I came up free-styling.”
Dean Dillon – “I’d had that idea for a while, ‘You’re as smooth as Tennessee Whiskey,’ I think that’s about all I had of it, and we sat down and wrote that song. I had the melody for ‘Smooth as Tennessee Whiskey, Sweet as Strawberry Wine.’ ”
Drew Parker – “When I met Luke Combs, he was driving a Dodge Neon. So literally every aspect of ‘Doin’ It’ when we wrote it was true and that so many people related to that song!”
Americana legend Jim Lauderdale – “With George Strait, I’ve got either fourteen or fifteen, so he’s cut the most of anybody among alot of people that have recorded my songs. So every time I would get with a co-writer where we’d here ‘Strait’s going in next week,’ it was always ‘Let’s write something’, and there were many times where my co-writer and I would go, ‘This is a smash hit for George!’ ”
Vince Gill – “I don’t think a lot of people know the history of that ‘Pretty Little Adriana,’ but the inspiration behind it was: I was home watching the news, and this was back in the early 1990s, and a young African American girl had been killed in a drive-by shooting, which you never really saw happen much here. I saw the pictures of this kid on TV with a beautiful smile, and it was actually Adrienne, but I needed an extra syllable for the song to make sense so I changed her name to Adriana.”
Liz Rose – “After Taylor Swift had our first writing session, I walked out of there saying, ‘Well, what was I doing there?’ because Taylor was so fast and knew what she wanted to say, but it was a great hang. She’s a story teller. She had such a great imagination, and she could take an idea or an emotion and turn it into a song and tell a story. We wrote every week, and some days we would write a couple songs.”
Clint Black – “ ‘Killing Time’ was about the waiting game of, ‘I’ve got my deal, the album is pretty much, basically done and we’re still playing for $50 a night, and it that seems to be taking forever!’ Hayden and I were playing duo gigs, and were driving up to one north of Houston one day, just talking about how long it’s taking and I said, ‘Well, I just hope it happens soon because this killin’ time is killin’ me,’ and we looked at each other and said, ‘That’s a song!’”