Ashley Gorley, Variety’s Songwriter of the Year, on Being Part of Country’s Big Crossover Moment: ‘There’s a Lot More Freedom in This Genre Now’
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
Who should be counted as country music’s currently most successful songwriter? You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who could come up with a metric where the end result is not clearly Ashley Gorley, who’s being honored as Songwriter of the Year at Variety‘s annual Hitmakers event.
He has been a co-writer on five of the last six Morgan Wallen singles, all of which inevitably topped the country chart — with “Last Night” also going top 5 at pop radio, no small factor in the song spending a near-record 16 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. He just got named songwriter of the year at the ASCAP Country Music Awards for a record 10th time, on the basis of having 10 songs among the org’s 50 most-played hits of the past year. If that already sounds dominant, consider this: On the Billboard country airplay chart as of early November, Gorley had credits on six of the top 14 songs. Who, in any genre, comes close to that kind of dominance?
More from Variety
Variety sat down with Gorley in a writers’ room at Sony Music Publishing during CMA Awards week, picking his brain about why and how he thrives in these spaces, as well as his role as head of his own highly successful publishing company, Tape Room Music. An edited version of that conversation follows.
You just won ASCAP’s Country Songwriter of the Year for the 10th time, and you had 10 songs that were among the 50 most played.
Yeah, it was a fun math thing — the 10 and 10 — and we had one that went No. 1 that day. When all that stuff kind of lines up… I’m not expecting that to ever happen again.
There was a good mixture in those 10 songs that were among the most-played — five were with Morgan Wallen but the other five were with an assortment of other artists.
Yeah, all over the place. Sometimes, like with Morgan now, or with Thomas Rhett, Luke Bryan and Carrie Underwood, there’ve been times throughout my career where I just feel like I’m just in it with that artist or speaking their same language there for a hopefully not-too-short period of time. The Morgan stuff right now is really special because going to those shows, 70,000 people there, it’s crazy.
Just counting things, on this particular Morgan album, you were a co-writer on 12 out of 36 tracks — a third.
Yeah, 12 would usually be the majority, but not with that album!
Going back to “Dangerous,” you were on four out of 32, so you upped significantly the quotient between those two albums. On some you co-write with his stable of writers, and some have Wallen himself in on the co-write…
Yeah, what’s awesome about him is, he won Songwriter of the Year last night (at the BMI Country Awards), so he can obviously write for other people and himself. He could write everything on there by himself if he wanted to, probably, or with whoever he wanted. But he has just that Nashville vision to say like, “Hey, there’s so many talented people here. I don’t want to skip out on anything impactful.” So he will definitely choose an outside song that hits him more — he’s not afraid to do that. That’s a mark of a really, really smart artist. Kenny Chesney, Tim McGraw and so many of those people throughout history that have been the best touring acts are not afraid to take outside songs and kind of lean on those, even though they’re great writers themselves. It’s cool for the town too, because there’s a lot of guys that got their first cuts ever on the album before, or on this one, which is really rare. He definitely reaches out and will take a chance on a new writer, and that’s really fun for the whole town. It gives people something to reach for.
Does your higher quotient of co-writes on the latest Wallen album means he’s coming to increasingly rely on you, because of what worked before?
That would be cool if it worked that way. It doesn’t! I think it’s just a song-by-song basis. I might have three songs do really well for an artist right there in a row, and that next album, they don’t say, “Oh, say, I should pick another one of his.” You’ve still got to bring it every single time. I think at the end of the day, it’s so about the music for him that I don’t even know if he knows who wrote some of them; he just picks songs he loves. So no, I don’t think he’s trying to quotient me up. We were just happening to be on the same wavelength, song-wise, for this one.
How do you get a dozen credits on a single album, then?
I mean, I’m definitely kind of welcomed in that crew. There’s a lot of great new Big Loud writers that are doing so much fresh stuff, and I’m really good friends and work really well with Charlie Handsome, who’s had I don’t even know how many… he had more songs than I did on this one. He has a very unique process and sound, and it sets the songs apart, so he and I are really doing cool stuff together. That group goes hard, like I like to do, and tries all kinds of crazy stuff and isn’t afraid to get outside the box. It m really exciting sessions, and everybody’s yelling out stuff. It’s really active, and I like that kind of process. Thankfully, those happen to be the singles, but he could have put out five different songs and they would have done great. He’s got so many to pick from that I’ve been a little bit lucky on getting those singles so far.
Let’s talk about two of the big ones: “You Proof,” which was ASCAP’s song of the year, and then “Last Night,” which obviously has been ubiquitous in culture, not just on country radio, but, but everywhere. You probably don’t maintain every detail of what happened in the writer’s room on each song, but do you remember the spark of those two?
Charlie Handsome did both of those — we did both of those together. They’re kind of driven by the lick and the vibes that Charlie creates. On “You Proof,” he and I and Ernest, which is a super fun combo, had done a little two or three-day kind of brainstorming retreat down at a place I’ve got in Florida. We f took it down there to just get away and and write a lot for two or three days, not aiming at Morgan or even Ernest or anybody, just yelling stuff out, just seeing what happens. I love binge-writing in a two- or three-day thing where you go for it and then come back and do family stuff. Charlie has so many tracks and ideas going, but one thing people don’t know about him is that he also has great country concepts, titles, melodies. He’s not just making a beat and leaving, you know?
So, in the case of “You Proof,” he had that title and then kind of started playing this little vibe, and it sounded super different, but it also still sounded country. Even though it’s like a half-time trap, more hip-hop kind of beat, the lick sounded really country and fun, and then what he was doing over top of it was great. So me and Ernest jumped in, started messing with it a little bit, and we didn’t finish it or even get too far down the road, but we had a good chunk of a cool start there. It just so happened that we got back in town and Morgan was around to write that day and Charlie and Ernest called and said, “Hey, let’s all get in here…” I was like, “We should bring up that thing we started at the beach, that vibe, and see if he likes that at all.” We got all over it, and rewrote stuff, finished it. He’s a great writer, you know — I love his whole cadence flow, the whole thing he does that kind of sets him apart.
Morgan was in-between albums, actually, but he ended up posting just a little demo. Of course he sang it in one pass. He’s an amazing singer; the demo sounded awesome. And I was like, man, this sounds really… I love this. You know, I love that, that song. He ended up posting it on Instagram and got a lot of response out of that, and then it just ended up being that single kind of between albums. Especially now with streaming and stuff, people drop songs out of nowhere. They ended up saying that was going to be that next single; while he’s working on the new album, they’re going to send it to radio. You never know how country radio is going to react to something different, but man, they played that one a lot. That song, musically, really kind of hit all the buttons, and I was really proud and glad that that ended up getting Song of the Year at the ASCAPs and BMIs.
You’ve done interviews where you talk about growing up as an MTV kid, saying that you weren’t necessarily devoted to country by any means. But you were living the country lifestyle, so it wasn’t hard for you to sort of come back around to it as a genre, even though you grew up very multi-genre.
You know what happened? I almost moved to L.A. about 10 or 12 years ago, just because I really liked all the kind of outside-the-box freedoms that came with that pop writing, where you can put any kind of sound you want on it. But I kind of prayed through that with my family and just decided that wasn’t what I was supposed to do. I always did some trips out there every now and then, but I just started loving country more and more as time went on. The pop stuff’s really cool, but at some point I was just like, “Hey, I’m just going to go all in on this community. I love the people here. I like the stuff that’s coming out.” And then once that happened, from 10 or 12 years ago till now, it turned out there’s a lot more freedom in the melodies and the cadences and sounds and stuff like that. So it almost kind of satisfied all the little weird musical things I like to do, within this genre, while I still was able to keep that really American lifestyle lyric that country does.
So it’s just like the perfect mesh of all that. We started being able to write songs like (Thomas Rhett’s) “T-Shirt” or (Luke Bryan’s) “That’s My Kind of Night” or some really weird, wild flows and sounds, so I was satisfied by that, within this genre. It’s been fun for the last several years, because I feel like we can try whatever and see what sticks. Once that happened, I didn’t feel led to go out there (to L.A.) as much; I haven’t been there in three or four years. But it is wild that once I kind of took having a big pop hit off my bucket list, we end up having one on a country song, you know? So that was a wild kind of turn of events. I know that “Last Night” is not bone-country to the core, but it definitely is a country song. And they didn’t change it at all for pop radio, so that’s fun, too, that they just kind of played it as-is. That’s how it is now: All the genres kind of blend together. People’s playlists aren’t necessarily one thing. So, that kind of came out of that, the freedom to write that way (on “Last Night”), and that was a good day.
Irony may not be the right word, but it’s almost ironic that, once upon a time, if you were going to predict pop crossover for somebody, it’d be somebody who was not so country as a personality as Wallen is.
Yeah, exactly. I love country boys and girls being on that pop chart, and when people love it, they love it. That’s kind of the new bar: is this great or not? I love where everything is now, and just the fact that we could have “Last Night,” which is maybe two instruments and then a more hip-hop, R&B-flavored drum thing and cadence…. and the next song he puts out is “Everything I Love,” which sounds pretty old-school country. The freedom to be able to do those kinds of songs back-to-back just helps the whole writing process and fires all of us up so we can kind of come up with whatever we’re feeling that day. He loves it. Morgan’s instincts are so good and he knows that whole team is great about picking singles. This last year or two has been probably the most fun
You mentioned you like binge-writing, and you like situations where people are shouting out in the room.
Yeah, I can’t be quiet. I’m not a notepad guy… I like to say stuff out loud, say whatever I’m thinking. It may freak people out, but the people that I do really well with, there’s that freedom in the room to be like, “OK, what if you did this, and y’all had something crazy, and then we can reel it in if we need to a little bit.” I just like a little more of the freestyle. And when you’re in a safe space in a writing room, you can say all that terrible stuff or miss all the notes, and there’s just no worry about anything. Everybody knows we’re aiming for the same thing, and whoever has the best melody, the best line, we’re on it, and then we’re on to the next part of the song. It’s really just a little bit of the fidgety in me that I just like action and variety. Just in general, in life: I love traveling, love seeing places I’ve never seen before. So I always try to want to do something different whenever possible in that room. And I’ve found a lot of great even new guys with that same mindset.
Do you have an idea of what your ratio is, of things written to things that get cut by somebody?
Oh my gosh, terrible ratio. I would definitely get cut from any MLB team — any of us would— with the batting averages we take. Even when I get a pretty high percentage of stuff recorded, it’s still down at, I don’t know, 5 or 10 percent, maybe? That would be a great year. But I usually write every day. And then if we’re doing a camp, it wouldn’t be weird to write four or five songs in a two- or three-day span.
Any idea how many songs you write in a year on average?
No. I know it’s been 200, sometimes. I write a few less now. You know, I take a lot of time off in the winter, and then in the summer, I kind of go out on tour with some people. I don’t have a session every single day, anymore. But I used to. I used to write every day, and then at the end of every month, I would get a band and do a demo session. I’d either cut five or 10 songs depending on what I thought was great, and it was kind of set that way. But now that a lot of times we make the demos in the room, the song production even goes up sometimes, because it kind of moves it along quicker. There’s days I don’t get anything and strike out.
There’s a lot of times where what’s happened is, we spend maybe seven hours of the day on a song, listen back, and it’s good, maybe, or it works, but then I love to spend the last 20 minutes or so not thinking and just say, “All right, let’s try something else here at the very end, now that we’re all comfortable and we’re warmed up.” Then we’ll kind of get to the great thing after we do the good thing sometimes. And it’s fun because there’s a freedom of, “Hey, we already got one. So this is a bonus. Let’s see what happens.” And there’s something about then when you kind of take the reins off and just go for it for a minute, you’re kind of just not thinking too much, that some great stuff has happened.
But there are days you might seven hours perfecting a song in the room, communally?
Oh yeah, for sure. Or we come back to it. Some songs take 30 minutes and some take five different sessions to mess around with. But you know, people that go to shows and listen to the radio, they don’t care how long it took to write the song. Even songs like “Body Like a Back Road” — I didn’t write that, but I publish it; Zach Crowell wrote that. I remember he said they spent 15 or 20 sessions on that song, just trying to get it. It’s almost like the simpler it sounds, the longer it takes, sometimes, to make it sound that simple.
It’s interesting, that idea of having that moment at the end of the session, where you’re in the zone and think, let’s just try to have a spark for a different idea, after you’ve been working all day on something else.
Yeah, it’s still really fun. I love those sessions that make me feel like I’m just hanging out in college with buddies, writing. Once you kind of get in that headspace and it’s just fun and everybody’s digging and trying to get the best thing we can, that’s kind of the sweet spot we’re all going for, you know. Yes, there are certain moments in a session where it does feel like you’re writing an essay paper, and you’ve really gotta put in the work to tweak the syllables and make it singable and say something a little fresher and this and that. But, yeah, definitely sometimes it’s after a full day or it’s at 10 at night, after everybody stops getting their phone blown up and having to do their obligations. We’ve done really well at some of those camps that start at night. Especially the ones I write with Hardy, Hunter and Ben, like “Truck Bed” or even “New Truck” for Dylan Scott or “Give Heaven Some Hell” for Hardy, those are all kind of 10 p.m. starts. There’s something free when you’re at those camps and some of the daily chores and the to-do lists go away and you just get to be in that pure place, just creating.
And trusting your co-writers is key. You know, I don’t write very much by myself, unless it’s idea-generating and stuff like that, just because it’s more fun to be on the team.
You mentioned that “Body Like a Back Road” came from your stable of writers at Tape Room Music. Can you talk about that?
We just celebrated 40-something No. 1s — not that I wrote, but that our writers we’ve signed have written in the last 10, 12 years. For the strange way my mind works, I love mentoring and encouraging, and I like doing two or three things at once. So for me to be able to also influence writers and hear these amazing songs that come in that are beating mine a lot of times, or artists are asking for them instead of me… it’s definitely gotten to that point. I mean, my goal is for my writers to beat me out for writer of the year. Hunter Phelps almost did last year; he’s really close. So I’m not precious about that at all. I want those guys to learn everything they can from me, and get them in situations where they can succeed. It’s probably a better feeling watching somebody like Zach Crowell, Hunter Phelps, Ben Johnson, Taylor Phillips and those guys go on a run or just kind of harness their creativity and confidence and get in a spot where they’re having an amazing year. At Tape Room, everybody’s rooting for each other. Everybody knows each other’s songs.
You relish being a song publisher.
I always wanted to be a publisher even before I thought about being a songwriter. I felt like my main skill was knowing what songs would connect, and which ones were great instead of good, and little things like what song will match up with what artists. I thought I might be an A&R guy at a label. When I moved here, I didn’t know how the whole industry worked, but I always loved A&R and publishing. And getting to do both of those a little bit right now, along with the writing, helps me to kind of have those different little boxes I can operate in my brain. I love writing and having a hit — obviously, I’ll take all those that I can get — but it is special that Hunter’s up with “Wait in the Truck” for CMA song of the year. I had nothing to do with that song. But after watching him get better and better and better for his first five, six years of the publishing deal… Just trying to work with these guys who are so nice, so coachable, so they’re just ready to get after it is really, really satisfying — I would say more than when I’ve got something on the radio. I love hearing those people that are getting their first hits.
It’s fascinating that when you came to town you thought you were gonna do A&R and publishing and studio work, and “writer” was not something on the docket.
Yeah, I mean, somebody like me that can’t read music … I’m not in a band, I’m not proficiently great at anything, whether it’s singing, piano, guitar. I’m not going to play on the master most of the time. They’re more gifted musicians than me. When you get to town is, everybody wants to do everything; they just want a gig. Then you kind of filter that down to, OK, what am I best at? You know, I remember putting my drum machines and production stuff in the closet. I used to DJ and make beats, and I was more was like a track writer, coming out of the gates and coming out of college. And then I remember I felt like I was starting to get better at melody and lyric toplining, as they call it. And I just stopped working production stuff, because I was like, “Gosh, there’s so many people that can make stuff sound better than I inherently can.” It’s a lot of button-pushing and scientific stuff that doesn’t compute with me when it comes to computers and things like that. So I’m very glad I kind of landed in that space of knowing what I can bring to the table and concentrating on that, not trying to do studio production necessarily. I mean, I’ve co-produced some stuff, but as far as being an engineer or anything like that, I thought that might be in the cards until I took those classes at Belmont and quickly learned that was not my thing. But the melody and lyrics … there’s limitless possibilities when that’s what you do.
There’s a handful of like really emotional songs that people gravitate toward that you’re proud of, I know, but you make it clear that you’re also very proud of something like a Luke Bryan cut that’s more of a party songThat means as much to you as something that is more of a heart song.
Yeah, yeah. I feel like those get overlooked sometimes when somebody’s thinking about songs for, like, Song of the Year or for something that they herald as a great piece of work. Man, I love old R& B. I love pop. I always gravitated toward songs that were big hits. I wasn’t too proud and trying to find underground bands nobody had heard of; I was like, I love this Katy Perry song, this Kesha song, those songs that just make you feel something and sound magical. I’ve always thought that if a lot of those songs aren’t sad, or they’re not slow, or they’re not serious, it doesn’t mean that they’re not great pieces of art.
So I always kind of had the dual thing going on. I love writing a song like (Wallen’s) “Sand In My Boots,” or (Thomas Rhett’s) “Marry Me,” or anything kind of piano-driven and a story thing. But it’s also really fun and really tough to do songs like “Last Night,” or “That’s My Kind of Night.” And watching people have a great time, and to see people having fun with that being a soundtrack for a fun Friday night, it’s awesome. But also, having a song like “Give Heaven Some Hell” or “You Should Be Here” that I’ve heard at funerals… I really thrive on that variety. But I’ll always stand by a great up-tempo, something that you can sing along to immediately by the time you get to the chorus or the second chorus. That’s a big challenge, to get something that memorable and get those songs that people will play forever in their set. So there is a place for all of it. Thankfully I’ve been able to do all different types of songs. And when I write today, who knows if we’re going to write the slowest, saddest, darkest song ever, or the most fun, uptempo thing ever.
There is a lot of mood-shifting on country radio at the moment. And it’s even some different types of songs that are crossing over to pop.
I think that’s just what’s happened here lately, with Luke Combs and Morgan and all the stuff that’s kind of coming out and just how well it’s doing, the fact that it’s crossing over… and Jelly Roll having a top 20 pop hit right now with a song saying he only talks to God when he needs a favor is pretty wild, you know? That lyric, that artist, with a country song on pop radio… I feel like the box has gotten huge if there even is one now. And on country radio, I love hearing a Jelly Roll song followed by a (Chris) Stapleton song, an old-school country one, and then one that’s got a little more hip-hop flavor. But again, that lyric… the storytelling in country music I feel like is always gonna be there in the end.
Once upon a time people thought of songwriters as a guy with a pen and a guitar sitting alone at home or whatever. And now it seems to favor a really social personality. And you obviously thrive on the social interaction and the interplay. And that favors a, a certain type of personality who can do that, because there must be people who just get nervous in a room and never get over that.
Yeah, for my personality, it’s perfect. Because I’m going to be uncomfortable in a huge crowd, probably, and I’m also going to be uncomfortable by myself. And so I can get these three or four buddies, or it’s just me and one other person, just two way, which is fine. … I’m just not that person for sitting down, renting a cabin for three days and trying to get everything out of your brain and really taking time to do that. I just thrive more being around people. I like hanging out with the whole family; I’m not trying to go watch TV by myself. It’s just life and it kind of carries over. I love having a group of people that I love and trust and doing stuff with them. So that’s kind of what the sessions are. I love seeing somebody I hadn’t seen for a month, checking to see how everything is going. You know, the writing is kind of a bonus at that point.
I love the small group. It’s a safe space. There was an after-party last night (after the BMI Awards) that I ended up skipping. It freaks me out a little bit. You know, we’re all kind of weirdos if we’re creatives, and so I definitely can hit a bar there where it makes me nervous. But the one place I’m not nervous is hanging out with my family: I love to do take trips with them and hang out at the house — we played pickleball yesterday as a as a family before the show. And it’s just when you’re in that safe space of a writer’s room where nobody’s gonna look at you weird if you do something dumb… you’re just gonna do the next thing. So you get to spill all that stuff out of your brain, and you feel like we’re all after the same thing and nobody cares who says the right thing. We’re just hoping somebody says it.
I think that’s a great kind of microcosm for how I like to do life, where you find those people that you feel safe to say whatever you want to say to, and they’ll help you get to where you need to go.
Best of Variety
Sign up for Variety’s Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
