Songwriters Circle: Tracy Lawrence

12 years ago Liv Carter 2

Having focused mainly on independent or upcoming songwriters in this series so far, it was time to include a big name; someone who has been there, done that, and wrote a song about it. Tracy Lawrence celebrated his 20th year in the music industry last summer and has seen every possible side of Music Row. Now, in charge of his own record label, Lawrence Music Group, he has found the artistic freedom which alluded him for many years.

The pleasant label offices were the perfect setting for a relaxed conversation about learning how to write hits, creative challenges, and the self-inflicted emotional pain the creative mind thrives on.

UCN: You recently had the one year anniversary of your company. A comment you made on the night was that you wanted everyone here to be free to be creative. How has that reflected in your own writing?
Tracy Lawrence: I’ve never been a really well-structured writer. From early on, I’ve always been actively involved in the business side of things and I found that, for me, when those things start to consume me it really affects my songwriting. I guess they’re two completely different parts of the brain. I’ll go for a period of time where I’m writing all the time and I feel like I’m neglecting all this other stuff, and then when I have a lot of business stuff going on, I don’t find myself waking up in the middle of the night with an idea or some epiphany about life that I want to write about. I found that what works best for me is to have a notepad around and if I see or hear something that makes me think ‘hey, that would be pretty cool to write about,’ I will take notes. Then when I start the writing process I can binge really hard for a month or so where I’m writing a lot. I might not write for two or three months and then in a two-week period write a whole bunch of stuff. Having that freedom, that’s just the best way for me to deal with it. I understand the quirkiness of artistic people; we all have our own method. A lot of guys here in town write for a living and it’s very structured. They come to their office and they do their thing. I’m not that guy, and I never have been.

UCN: I remember you once saying during a songwriters round that you came to town to be a songwriter, so when you first got here, did you get into that world of scheduled writing appointments?
TL: I did several of them. When I first came to town, I didn’t know anybody. I got here in September 1990, didn’t know anyone and found out where the songwriters hung out; places off the beaten path away from the touristy stuff. I made friends with a lot of people and started writing and getting on stage anywhere I could. But, really, I got discovered as a singer very quickly. From the time I got to town to when I signed my record deal, it was about seven months. That’s absolutely unheard of; it was a very quick time frame. So, I never really got to get into the whole writing side as much as I wish I would have. Then I had success on the first album and all of a sudden I’m being placed with A-list writers like Paul Nelson and Larry Boone. It became really apparent really quick how unprepared I was as a songwriter to even compete on that level. It was really overwhelming!

UCN: But a good school, I’m sure, to be paired with someone like Paul Nelson.
TL: Absolutely! But it also affected my self-confidence about my writing. I didn’t feel like I was good enough. I mean, I could write with those guys but as far as having the confidence to step up and write something by myself and feel like ‘yes, I did it, I took it from beginning to end and I’m proud of it,’ it took me a long time to get to that place.

UCN: Do I remember it correctly that on your debut album, Sticks and Stones, there’s only one cut that’s yours and you did indeed write that one by yourself?
TL: Yes, it’s one I wrote by myself, but that’s a song I came to town with. I had written that right out of High School so I had that one for several years. I tweaked it and messed around with it but it had been around a long time.

UCN: So there was some self-confidence then.
TL: There was, yes, at the time. But that was before I realized how inadequate I was! *laughs* I do think there’s positive aspects to that kind of naivety of blind self-confidence of really feeling that you’re great at something without knowing if you are or not. That’s part of the innocence of it and it’s what you have to go through when you come here. But in 20 years in this business, I’ve grown a lot and the great thing is that I will always have all those experiences to draw from as a songwriter. I feel like I understand the mechanics of songwriting, of being able to make it special and not just full of fluff or too many words, but being able to get as much out of a sentence as you can get. For example, yesterday, Flip [Anderson] and I wrote with a lady from New York who is working on a play. We’re getting an opportunity to write some songs for the play. It’s based on the West Virginia coal mines back in the 50s and 60s. We were working on a song and when we got to the second verse, one of the things we discussed was ‘OK, here’s what it naturally takes me to at this point, I would go away from the conflict and instead make the correlation to the relationship he has with his family.’ But we were talking about it and I asked ‘If this is not a commercial song, is that relevant?’ The audience will be able to see what’s on stage, and writing a commercial song doesn’t really work as well for that because they want the song to stay framed up in that moment. If you’re writing for commercial radio, you want to go away from that one thought and go to another thought in the second verse. Does that make sense?

UCN: Very much, yes.
TL: Even ten years ago, I wouldn’t have even thought to have that conversation. I would have just done what I would do as a songwriter. But now, for that particular song I had to use a different mindset.

UCN: And understand that context matters.
TL: Yes, absolutely.

UCN: I’ve always felt with your material that, yes, it’s commercial, but it’s never felt ‘written for radio’. I guess it’s never felt like pandering to me. It’s always seemed like ‘this is the story I want to tell and I’ll write it in a commercial way’ rather than just writing whatever has the most chance of going #1.
TL: That’s the genius of Paul Nelson who mentored me and taught me how to approach that from an intellectual standpoint. There are songs, like ‘If the World Had a Front Porch,’ that I have a lot of lines in, but at the same time, not every one of them is a real life experience for me. We were trying to write the best song we could write and be personal, but you also have to detach yourself from the personal sometimes. What are you trying to get in there? You’re trying to get in the sights, the sounds, the textures and the flavors and all those things, so that when someone hears that song, they get the tapestry of what you’re trying to explain. Paul taught me that. He taught me how to approach a song from a more intellectual place.

UCN: When I look at all the people whose material I really like, what they all have in common is the sense-bound language. In one song, they’ll refer to taste, smell, touch, hearing, sight. I think it’s probably hard to teach somebody to do that, if they don’t have that kind of storytelling innately.
TL: Oh, it is! And I think while I had that, I just didn’t know how to frame it up. But like the song from yesterday, that was a song that didn’t require all the sights and smells because you’re going to have the theatrics and the dialogue in the scene that are going to frame the rest of it up. So with that one, we weren’t trying to put all of that in that moment. We wrote the song yesterday in less than two hours which is pretty good. If we were wrestling with it trying to make it a commercial piece that I was pitching to someone or cutting myself, we would have spent several more hours on it. It’s not a lower caliber of a song now, but just written for a specific context.

UCN: The most recent full project you released was The Singer. At the time, you said it was your most personal record. Was it easy to achieve a more intimate album, or did the songs come before that thought and inform how the record had to sound?
TL: The songs came long before that thought. A lot of them had been written a year or two in advance, and some had been lying around for a longer while. The concept for that record was to take things that fit the mentality of the album we decided to cut. Some of them are extremely commercial and they are going to bounce over to the full production record that’s next. And some found a home there because they fit that stripped-down production. One in particular, ‘Jealousy,’ which I wrote with Casey Beathard, was extremely personal for me. My mom and dad had been going through a lot of stuff and it was one of those emotional songs. I think I had most of it written when Casey and I sat down that day and he was kind of like ‘I don’t even know why I’m here, you pretty much have this one nailed down.’ It was because it was something I was living through at the time. Though, those songs don’t always translate into something that anybody else is going to get. When you write something that personal, it’s going to be hard for someone else to get 100% of what it’s about.

UCN: Well, it’s been a recurring point in my conversations with writers that the people who initially tried to write really universal got away from that and started writing specific. It doesn’t seem to matter to listeners if the details are different for them; it’s the emotion behind the lyrics they connect with.
TL: The great thing about the place that I am at in my career now is that I am able to do those kinds of songs that are more personal and not have to be concerned about the commercial aspect of them. That’s part of the 20-year journey that got me here. I don’t really give a shit anymore! *smiles* Obviously, I like to see a song be successful but that’s not the goal. The commercial songs are not the whole picture of me as an artist. There is so much more to me as an artist than just the stuff you’ve heard on the radio. There’s more depth, suffering, pain, happiness, achievements and all these other things that’s never got a chance to be expressed in my music just because of the box I fit into, or the place I fit into the format. I feel now I’m about to spread my wings. I’m sure you hear this from a lot of artists who get to this place. It feels like the chains have been broken loose. Down in my soul, I know that getting to this place means great things are going to happen. They’re not financially motivated. If success comes, that’s great. But the wonderful thing has been getting back to where I am enjoying the craft of writing songs again.

UCN: That wasn’t always the case?
TL: For several years, towards the end of the 1990s, there was a time in my life where I was done. Mentally burned out, personally burned out, frustrated with the industry, my personal life sucked. I didn’t know if I’d ever find that passion again. If you go back to the big comeback album I had on Dreamworks, the Strong album that had ‘Paint Me a Birmingham’ on it, I didn’t write one song on that one. I was coming out of a dark period in my life. Luckily, I had huge commercial success with it, so I was able to get a couple of my own things on the next record. And then I was able to come back with something like [The Singer] where I was involved with just about everything on it, produced it, and was extremely hands-on with it. I don’t think you’ll ever see me go back to the other way again.

UCN: Well, no, you shouldn’t be told what to do anymore.
TL: Yeah, why would I want to do that, I’ve already done that. I’d say “go find you some young kid that you can dictate what to do.” *smiles*

UCN: And there’s many here who just want to be a success, no matter what.
TL: I don’t think I ever went through a time where I consciously said I will do anything it takes. There was always a line for me that I knew that artistically I wouldn’t cross. I was always pretty adamant about the stuff I cut. I did undersell myself and my self-confidence about my ability as a songwriter.

UCN: Does that confidence come from the commercial success, or does it come from your peers; great co-writers liking what you bring to the table?
TL: *takes a long pause* I think it’s just… That’s a tough question… For me, I think a lot of it is just, as an artist who has done 90% of his own A&R work over the years, whether I was writing it or not and looking for outside songs, I was always critical of it. So for someone who has been that critical for so many years, who’s cut so many songs, I think the confidence comes from being able to look at my own material objectively and think ‘that’s good, I’ll put it up next to anybody else.’ I think I’m now confident enough so that I don’t need to be reinforced by someone else’s opinion. You might not like it but I know, from the craft of songwriting, if I’ve turned it in and I’ve demoed it, it means I feel good about it.

UCN: On The Singer, one of the stand-outs is ‘Heaven for a While.’ I remember you telling me once you had a rather dark thought that set it off.
TL: Yes, last year we did a writers’ retreat up in Gatlinburg. I took a bunch of writers up and the last morning, I woke up and had just had a dream. In my haze waking up, I remember thinking how awful it would be if something happened to one of my children. I was thinking that, as a parent, it’s probably one of the worst things I can imagine going through. So that song was written from that ‘what if’-approach, about how painful it would be and how hard it would be to overcome. I put it in the live show a few times last year and I can’t get the words out; it makes me cry. I literally choke up. It’s that hard on me, just the thought. I mean, I saw this guy on the news the other day that just blew him and his kids up, and something like that would just crush me. I’m sure you live, you go on, but you’d never get over the pain of it.

UCN: What’s extraordinary about that for me, is that songwriters almost do this to themselves. They put themselves in that heart-wrenching situation…
TL: We love to suffer. *laughs*

UCN: *laughs* Yes, apparently. The thing I’ve compared it to is Method Acting, where an actor immerses himself in the character and becomes that person for three months. How much of those emotions from a tough writing session do you take home with you?
TL: That song lingered for a couple of days and I don’t think I’ve ever gotten completely over it. I don’t think I could go on TV and perform that song. As we were preparing to select a second single, that was one I really thought would be it. It moves me so much, just the raw emotion of it. I really thought we should single it but I got talked off the ledge by the promotions team because it’s four-and-a-half minutes long, there’s a lot of ballads coming out this time of year, and it was probably the wisest decision to not release it. But I did think ‘this is going to rip some people’s hearts out; it’s going to be powerful!’

UCN: Oh, I can tell you it moves people. One of my friends lost someone last year and she loves that song.
TL: As a songwriter, you put yourself in that situation and you draw from that pain and emotion, and hope people connect. Even a song like that, something so painful, can still be inspiring and uplifting to people. It can give them hope and help them move on.

UCN: When you write something personal, something about real people in your life, do you ever think about the fact that you’re putting it out in the public domain, or you do just say what you have to say?
TL: I think I’m very unguarded when it comes to writing songs. I think you have to take the boundaries off to let the song be the best it can be. I never consider that when I am writing songs.

UCN: You’ve never gotten into trouble? *smiles*
TL: No, no yet! *laughs* I hope I have a lot of songs left in me, so it’s quite possible I might. *smiles*

UCN: When you started down this road, what inspired you?
TL: The stuff that I loved was a lot of the mid-tempo material. My objective when I was making records in the early part of my career was drawing just from what I knew. As an early performer, the objective overall was to keep people on the dance floor. My objective was to cut dance music; two-step, three-step, waltzes, then throw a slow song in every now and then. I felt like if I was able to make those kinds of records, I’d be able to work for a long time. And that’s what I did. If you look at Sticks and Stones, Alibis,…there was a bounce to the stuff. That influence came strongly from George Strait and the Texas sound. It was the backbone of most of it because that was the stuff I was playing in the clubs as I was learning to entertain. If I had a four-set night, I would start off with some basic two-step things and by the end I might add some Lynyrd Skynyrd to rock out the night, but the objective was to keep people on the dance floor.

UCN: Do you remember the first songs you wrote?
TL: The very first song I ever wrote, I was four years old. Obviously I couldn’t write. I had a crush on a girl who was 17-years-old who lived close to the house. When I would disappear, Mom knew she could always find me at her house. *smiles* I came home one evening and I told my parents I wanted to write a song. So they sat down with me and I told them what to say, and they wrote a verse a piece. My Mom kept that lyric all these years; she’s got it packed away in a box. Obviously it was absolutely atrocious! *smiles* But I had the desire to write from a very young age. I also wrote poetry all throughout school when I started to understand how to craft a story. I had books full of poetry. After that, I know I wrote a lot of songs. I started playing the guitar a little more seriously when I was about 12 and started to sing Haggard songs and mimicking people. I know there were a lot of songs but I don’t remember those.

UCN: It might be cool to go back to that first lyric and see if you could use it in a song now.
TL: I have. It’s not going to work. *laughs* It’s always been a cool story because it’s very real and it shows how far back my passion for this goes. It’s always been a part of my life.

UCN: I think there really is something like ‘the creative brain,’ if you have it, it’s there right away. Do you see it in your kids?
TL: I do. My bus driver and I were talking about this riding back from Texas. We were having a conversation about right brain and left brain. He was telling me about his little boy, who is the same age as my daughter, and he takes guitar lessons from the same teacher who teaches my two girls, so, he does have a lot of creativity, but he is really strong with Math. There are kids who are just born with that. I don’t know how other writes see it, but days when I’m writing really well, if I’m writing a song and I can visually picture the scene I am writing about, I write better. I will never get in a corner if I can create a mental picture in my mind; I blast through it. Days when I’m sluggish and I’m not into it that day, if I’m just looking at words on a piece of paper, I might as well not be there. If I can see it, it just falls out of my mind; there’s no stopping it. If I need to change direction with a song, I can visually see the pictures in my mind. I don’t know how else to describe it. I don’t know if other writers do the same thing but, for me, if I can’t see the pictures, I can’t write it.

UCN: Like we said before, some writers see it as a job and can write on command about a certain topic, two hours later there’s a song, everything fits and it’s a massive radio hit. And others need to take time to write, or are the writers who have a song just pop into their heads. I think it’s such a personal, mysterious process.
TL: It is! You have to have a gift for it. If you don’t have a gift for it, and you don’t have passion for it, obviously, you’re wasting your time anyway. But I don’t think there’s a right or wrong way to do it, I think it’s all up to the individual.

UCN: I think it’s one of the reasons some writers get frustrated with some of the Music Row scheduled way of writing.
TL: But you have to admit some of the most prolific writers in the world live here.

UCN: Oh yeah, absolutely, I’m not saying it’s bad, it’s just not for everyone. I always come back to writers like Jeffrey Steele; it’s incredible what he’s done! He’ll have songs that are commercial radio songs and then the next day he’ll come out with something like ‘What Hurts the Most.’
TL: And the radio songs might have been days when he was just doing a songwriting exercise with someone because he had the scheduled appointment. Who knows?

UCN: Or on purpose. When you get to his level I’m sure you can say ‘let’s write for this artist and we want it to sound exactly like this.’
TL: Absolutely. And he’s a genius!

UCN: He is, and one hell of a performer himself. I told a friend to go see his live show and she at first resisted because she thought songwriters were writers because they couldn’t sing all that well themselves. Until Steele started singing!
TL: Well, it’s true for some. I made this comment to Jason Sellers the other day. I love Sellers, he’s a phenomenal demo singer and I told him “I have to be careful about your demos because you’ll sell me a bad song.” And he’s like “I don’t know how to take that,” so I said “I mean it with the utmost respect, you have a vocal delivery and a style that makes even a crappy song sound amazing. I have to be careful when I listen to demos because you will sell me a bad song!” *laughs*

UCN: Thank you so much for your time. It was really interesting talking to you.
TL: Well, thank you for asking me!

 

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Liv Carter

Liv Carter

Liv is a career coach for creatives, and the people who work with them.
She holds several certificates from Berklee College of Music, and a certificate in Positive Psychology from UC Berkeley.
Her main influences are coffee, cats, and Alexander Hamilton.
Liv Carter

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