A country way of life, Episode 19 (Austin Nivarel, Ilya Toshinskiy, Jason Nix)
Author: Jonny Brick.
Producer: Austin Nivarel
Dann Huff, Dave Cobb, Zach Crowell and Joey Moi are among the top sonic architects of today’s country music. Austin Nivarel has joined them through his association with Jelly Roll, a boy from Tennessee who has moved from rap to country at just the right time. Jelly, says Nivarel, is ‘as real as they come’; he was in the room for Jelly’s chart-topper Need a Favor, which also made the Rock and Alternative charts, as well as for the love song She and the felon’s lament Behind Bars.
Nivarel, who is from Cincinnati, first put out his own music at the age of 20 but like so many other hopeful stars he soon moved into the backroom. With Jelly Roll playing enormous venues with his baptismal country, he and his producer might be cooking up some more anthemic genreless tunes as Jelly follows the enormous success of Whitsitt Chapel.
Player: Ilya Toshinskiy
Nashville beckons people from all over the world to its studios and writing rooms. Ilya Toshinskiy grew up in Obninsk, the so-called Science City 100 miles south of Moscow, and learned to play classical guitar before picking up a banjo.
After he continued his string studies at music college, he moved to Music City and became part of the band Bering Strait, whom you may remember were produced by Brent Maher. Toshinskiy went on to release a solo album whose title Redgrass was often the term given to his group, which disbanded in 2006.
He then began playing on sessions by A-List acts, and you can hear his work on songs by an eclectic mix of stars including Brooks & Dunn, Kane Brown, Tim McGraw, Keith Urban and Carrie Underwood. Toshinskiy has also, along with Austin Nivarel, helped to carve the sound of Jelly Roll’s music.
He plays all kinds of stringed instruments on The Band Perry’s self-titled album, Kacey Musgraves’s Same Trailer Different Park and Maddie & Tae’s debut album, which includes Girl in a Country Song. As a reliable musician for acts affiliated to the Big Machine label, Toshinskiy has played on recent albums by Thomas Rhett, Carly Pearce and Brian Kelley.
Toshinskiy’s name also appears in the credits to Taylor Swift’s country material: he plays banjo on Love Story and You Belong With Me, and mandolin on her album Red.
Songwriter: Jason Nix
When I bumped into Kenny Foster earlier this year, he was full of praise for his friend Jason Nix, whose Instagram bio is simply ‘gave up looking for a real job’. Kenny turned me on to Can’t Get to Heaven from Eastern Kentucky, a gut-punch of a song written by Nix that a country superstar should take the risk and record.
He grew up in Mississippi but returned to his birthplace of Nashville as a teenager, going out on the road with Canaan Smith and Chase Rice as their guitarist. In the writer’s room, he sat down with Lainey Wilson and wrote her breakthrough tune Things a Man Oughta Know. Nix told one interviewer that he had the title and wanted it to be about his grandpa, but he didn’t know ‘how to make the idea matter to anyone besides me’.
Nix was also in the room with The Shires when they wrote the enormously fun Guilty, and he has credits on a handful of songs by Eli Young Band. Despite these commercial hits, Nix says he walks the line between ‘what’s mainstream and Americana’.
All Episodes can be found here
For more country music evangelism, go to countrywol.com where you can read Monday essays, Friday reviews and Sunday Hymn Sheets. Follow Jonny’s Country Music Calendar at the Country Way of Life Facebook page (facebook.com/acountrywayoflife).