The voices behind the track.
Every songwriter knows the feeling of a familiar routine, but sometimes the best songs come from breaking your own rules.
Here’s a look inside that unexpected journey for Alex and Marty.
Marty’s writing process
This song came together in a way that felt both pretty normal for me, and also quite different at the same time.
Sometimes when I write it all starts with just one element like a guitar hook or a vocal melody, but more often than not I’ve got a guitar in my hands and I’m kind of building everything at once, chords, melody, and sometimes even lyrics all happening together.
It’s pretty fluid, and each part sort of shapes the others as I go.
This time though, Alex came to me with a fully finished track with no vocals, but a rough idea for a hook.
That changed things straight away. I wasn’t building the song from scratch, I was stepping into something that already had its own structure and feel.
So instead of playing with harmony and arrangement, I was really just focused on melody and lyrics, but within some pretty clear boundaries. At first it felt a bit constraining.
The original hook idea leaned into this nostalgic kind of love song, comparing a person to that feeling of familiarity and comfort, like a drive through Tennessee or something that just feels like home.
We chased that for a while, but it never quite clicked. So I tried something I don’t normally do and decided to write a story that wasn’t personal to me. And weirdly, that shift is what opened things up.
What started off feeling limiting actually became pretty freeing. It’s probably close enough to someone’s real experience to feel relatable, but for me it was more just imagining a character and following that through.
What came out of that was the story of a guy whose life gets completely flipped by meeting the right girl. It starts with him just trying to pick her up in a Nashville bar, and ends with their wedding, something he never really saw coming, but now wouldn’t change for anything.
Once that idea landed, the verses actually came together pretty quickly. The arc from verse one to verse two felt natural, like the story was kind of writing itself, However as always, the final 10% took the longest.
I really labour over particular word choices and how they sound aesthetically and I can go back and forth over even a single word for weeks.
Lyrically I’ve always loved how country writers use really creative turns of phrase and imagery, and I think that’s something I tried to lean into here.
There’s a line in the chorus, “That night in Nashville Tennessee, you pulled the rug from under me and now you got me on one knee”, that’s probably my favourite.
It’s got that repetitive internal rhyme that I find myself coming back to a lot in my writing, almost like a kind of rhyming alliteration, and it just helps everything feel a bit more memorable while still carrying the story forward.
Alex’s producing process
I always start a song with my little Arturia Mini Lab 3, I aim to find the chords first before the melody, as the melody often comes from the singer, so I’ll work on the chords and BPM until I find something nice.
I use a fake guitar sound to find the chords and will always build the song from the chords first. Then I will add a fake bass, usually just the root note to keep it simple.
I will also use fake drums just to find the groove. I use particular sample websites to find an interesting fiddle part or harmonica, I build the song up from samples and midi instruments until I have enough information to really identify the ‘bed’ of the song.
At this stage I could send it to a singer to see their take on it but I usually send it to a guitarist first to over dub and record fresh acoustic, nylon or electric guitar. So I start building the song up again using live instruments from real session musicians.
All the fake instruments and midi is being copied and recorded again with human finesse to create an organic feel, and it just starts to feel real. It’s the most exciting part of the process for me, as the producer, pulling in all these great people and seeing them bring my demo alive.
Once I have live guitars, often acoustic, then I will send it to the singer. Sometimes I already have lyrics, sometimes I completely leave it up to the singer to have creative freedom.
And in some cases I will ask the singer to hum a melody over the top – writing a top line and then I will write lyrics to that melody.
In this case with Marty, I did have a particular melody and lyrics but Marty had something stronger so we ran with that. I like to give artists their creative freedom and it makes the collaboration a lot more cohesive.
Once the vocals are recorded I like to sit with the whole production and take out any instruments that may be in the way or not supporting the main melody.
After this I then send it to Swedish mix engineer Thomas Juth to mix and master the track, a process that I love and am very much involved in as well as Marty.
Special thanks to Peter Stevenson who has helped source musicians for my projects and was involved in the vocal recording and production.
Words by Alex & Marty.
