Award-winning, Nashville-based singer, songwriter, guitar player, and producer who co-wrote Jason Aldean’s hit, “She’s Country,” which was the most played song on country radio across the U.S. in 2009 and held the number 1 position on the chart for two consecutive weeks and has had 181 million streams on Spotify alone. Her song “Loud” was selected as the official theme song for ACC football’s 2010 season. She has also had cuts with Randy Houser and George Clinton, among others, and, of course, as a recording artist, has released her own original music along the way as well. Meanwhile, she is vice president of SoNash Publishing and also serves on the board of The Charley Foundation, which she also talks about here.
“It always kinda takes you a minute to get there. Ya’ know, one song could be written in an hour and 15 minutes and your next thing could take eight hours to eight years of the rest of your life.”
“People that come over, I’m on a farm outside of Nashville, and when people come in, they call that the magic table. There’s a lot of songs that’s been written on that table and it’s this collection of wood that the table’s made out of and I think sometimes the wood helps us tell stories.”
“If you write a song the right way, not only does it affect you emotionally it affects us emotionally first, so I think emotions take us back to memories pretty quick.”
“I think the goal is always to connect and I think the goal is always to emotionally connect and give you guys an experience that you walk away from it going, ‘I need to tell five more of my friends about that experience. I want them to experience that too’.”
“I’ve got a spirit of justice that either gets me in trouble or keeps me out of trouble.”
“When I was about 13 I started writing songs and I was in a southern gospel group with my parents, started there at home, mission churches, tent revivals, where, man, when you go, it's more about how it feels than what it sounds like and I just remember (that) getting Jesus across is about the same as trying to get a song across to the general audience so that they’ll accept whatever that emotion is.”
“I just wrote with Trisha Yearwood, which was amazing, and got to tell her, ‘I don’t know how many times I’ve sung She’s in Love With the Boy’.”
“It all… obviously at the end of the day came together in Nashville for me and then it was I wanna get my education, I wanna know what this is, this is music, yes, but this is also a business and I wanted to make sure I understood what the business side of this world looked like.”
“I’m an organic person, I kinda need it to be organic, a believer, I kinda need to know that it comes from the source that I believe in to know what my next steps are, so everything has been pretty organic, not forced.”
“Nobody ever thinks that the things you see on TV or the things you hear on the radio are an actual possibility and I think something drives your entertainment people in general past that.”
“Sometimes I just think and feel through things more actually than I think through them. I need it to give me an emotion first so I can convey that to you.”
“I very much write like that, I have to feel the temperature, I have to see the colors, I have to know what it smells like, where we are, all of these things have to come together in my head for me when I’m writing.”
“I actually love producing and I did not know how much I was gonna love it. I discovered I like finding the artist in another artist.”
“I always say there’s a space between those speakers and the people and that’s our space, and there’s nothing like that exchange between myself as an artist and the people that are listening.”
“Jealous of the Sky” (Ashley Cooke)
“She’s Country (live)”