A country way of life, Episode 18 (Shane McAnally, Derek Wells, Jim Collins)
Author: Jonny Brick.
Producer: Shane McAnally
Where to start with Shane McAnally: songwriter, producer, co-writer of the musical Shucked, Barbara Mandrell superfan and, alongside his husband Michael, supremo of publishing company SMACKsongs?
How about with the album from 2000 that McAnally put out on Curb Records? Three of its singles went to radio but those were his only successes as an artist. He moved to LA for a few years before returning to Nashville, where he started getting cuts on songs by Lee Ann Womack (Last Call), Kenny Chesney (Somewhere With You), Jake Owen (Alone with You) and Luke Bryan (Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye).
McAnally has worked on songs cut by pretty much every major country artist of the last decade, most recently Carly Pearce and Kelsea Ballerini. Midland, a trio containing a model and a music video director, were the vehicle for songs like Drinkin’ Problem which brought back the traditional country sound at a time when Sam Hunt was, with McAnally’s assistance, bringing hiphop cadences into the genre.
Kacey Musgraves also brought in McAnally for her debut album Same Trailer Different Park, where he is credited on nine of its 12 songs. He also added his trademark sophistication to her modern standards The Architect, Space Cowboy and Rainbow. Old Dominion use McAnally as a sort of auxiliary member after the band’s songwriters had worked with him on Better Dig Two and Chainsaw, both cut by The Band Perry.
Brandy Clark, who was in the room for the former, worked with McAnally on Shucked, a musical that took inspiration from the show Hee Haw and which ran on Broadway in 2023. As well as SMACKsongs, McAnally is head of Monument Records, which had enormous success with Fancy Like by Walker Hayes, which followed Body Like a Back Road by Sam Hunt into the upper reaches of the Billboard Hot 100.
Player: Derek Wells
Humans are slowly being phased out of music-making in the commercial country sphere, but even in a world where you can press a button and hear a computerised plug-in that simulates a guitar, session players are still called upon to add character and style to recordings and make them pop on radio and streaming services.
Derek Wells dropped out of college to become Josh Turner’s live guitar player. He forsook life on the road to become a studio cat; quite incredibly, his playing can be heard on 100 number one songs. They include My Church by Maren Morris, whose album Hero is a personal highlight for Wells, and Girl in a Country Song by Maddie & Tae, whose Through the Madness project Wells produced.
In 2023 alone, he contributed to projects by Chris Young, Dan + Shay, Jordan Davis, Darius Rucker, Nate Smith, Justin Moore, Carrie Underwood and Jelly Roll. Wells also plays the solo on Everything I Love, the Allman Brothers homage by Morgan Wallen, and has contributed to albums by Dolly Parton, Niall Horan, Shakira and Kid Rock.
Like Shane McAnally, Wells has moved into the boardroom, in his case in a role in A&R and Production at Spirit Music. This marks quite a conversion from someone whose parents worked as session musicians too, a job which Wells has said he did not find ‘exciting or glamorous’.
Songwriter: Jim Collins
Kenny Chesney cut both She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy and The Good Stuff, two compositions by Jim Collins. The latter, which was written after a conversation with someone who had lost their wife to cancer, forms the name of Collins’ Instagram handle.
Born in Texas, he had been a singer/songwriter in the 1980s, with several songs sent to radio without denting the top 40. After releasing his own album on Arista in the late 1990s, Collins moved to the writer’s room, often collaborating with David Lee Murphy. The pair wrote the smashes Are You Gonna Kiss Me or Not and Big Green Tractor, respectively for Thompson Square and Jason Aldean.
Damn Strait, a hit for Scotty McCreery, is also a Collins copyright, as are I Don’t Feel Like Loving You Today by Gretchen Wilson and It Just Comes Natural for George Strait.
All Episodes can be found here
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