Makin’ Tracks: C.J. Solar Finds an Addictive Southern Rock Edge in ‘All I Can Think About Lately’

Dictionary.com defines an earworm as “a tune or part of a song that repeats in one’s mind.”

Which makes C.J. Solar’s new single, “All I Can Think About Lately,” a sort of self-defining earworm. The chorus’ hook — which benefits specifically from the way the word “lately” sits within the line’s sonic tension and release — is so overwhelmingly sticky that it can indeed become all the listener can think about for hours on end, to the point that the earworm becomes a mild addiction.

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That’s a perfect result, given that “All I Can Think About Lately” adds to a long line of songs — from B.J. Thomas’ “Hooked On a Feeling” to Thomas Rhett and Maren Morris’ “Craving You” — that have used physical dependence as a metaphor for love or infatuation.

Despite its creative success, “All I Can Think About Lately” was mostly stashed away for the last seven years, in part because Solar expected just enough negative reaction from the most conservative of country’s gatekeepers to hamper his introduction. “I really wanted to do it [for] the first EP [in 2016],” he remembers. “I just thought, ‘Man, a hook with getting high, my stuff already rocks. I don’t know if people are ready for that.’ My second EP [in 2018], it was on hold.”

Thus, “All I Can Think About Lately” finally arrives in public after a slow-motion journey, seven years after its creation on March 4, 2015. Solar penned it with Joey Hyde (“Later On,” “Made for You”) and Aaron Eshuis (“You Time,” “This Is It”) at Sony/ATV, where Hyde was a staff writer. All three men’s memories on “All I Can Think About Lately” are sketchy, though that’s a product of fading time and not a sign that they were creating amid a smoky haze in their work environment.

“I don’t think Sony/ATV would have necessarily condoned that,” Solar says with a chuckle, “but I don’t think we were that day.”

“I probably average 120 songs a year,” adds Hyde. “If this was seven years ago, that’s 840-something songs ago. You know what I mean? I don’t remember what I wrote yesterday.”

While there’s no consensus, it appears Solar introduced the title into the room that day. They created a chorus that conveniently fit his voice, though as new songwriters, they were more focused on writing a hit for an established act — Jason Aldean, for example — than stockpiling material for a potential future Solar project.

“That melodic sensibility is pretty natural for C.J., and he was sort of leading the music that day,” Eshuis recalls. “I think Joey and I were kind of supporting his role, and I think he’s got that natural sort of Southern rock influence thing that Aldean does as well. So this really is C.J.’s song — that was what was coming out of his soul that day.”

Intentionally or not, that Solar-powered chorus played up its best musical attributes enough to create an addictive pattern. After affixing tension and release into the two-syllable “late-ly,” they repeated the effect each time they inserted a similarly structured word with a long-A vowel sound — “crazy,” “hazy,” “baby” — creating melodic chaos and offering sweet relief, priming the listener to receive even more aural hits.

Not that they could have explained what was happening; they were writing, says Hyde, out of “happy ignorance,” relying on their guts to know what was working. “Back then, we didn’t know what the rules were,” Hyde says. “And we didn’t particularly care to know what the rules were. So we just kind of did whatever felt right, and that felt right that day with the three of us. All three of us have some sort of a rock background. It just made sense.”

Heightening the narcotic allusions, they fashioned a first verse that finds the singer yearning for another head rush that resembles the one he experienced the night before. It’s not until the second line of the chorus that it’s clear he wants to repeat the high of a romantic session, not of a drug trip. Appropriately, the new information is revealed, not announced.

“You don’t want to wear out the shtick,” says Eshuis. “So that would’ve been very intentional. There’s always that fine line of you want it to be clever so that it’s interesting, but you don’t want it to have so much of a wink — like ‘See what I did there’ the whole time — because the listener catches that. You don’t want to be too cute.”

Once the real subject is revealed in the chorus, the second verse underscores how much the woman’s occupying the singer’s internal life, calling her “a habit not a choice.” They wrapped that stanza by giving him a common-man viewpoint while admitting his vulnerability: “You hang the moon for this ol’ boy.”

“This might be incredibly inappropriate, but I was jokingly [saying] ‘You light the spoon for this old boy,’ ” Solar says with a laugh. “I was kidding, but we did jokingly throw that one around. We were definitely not going to put that in a song.”

Solar periodically performed “All I Can Think About Lately” over the years in his live sets while he waited for it to make the rounds on Music Row, though it never quite caught on with another artist. (Solar has, however, landed hits by writing Morgan Wallen’s “Up Down” and Jameson Rodgers’ “Some Girls.”) Ultimately, as weed has been legally normalized in more states, Solar sees the song’s topic as less of an issue in 2022 than it was in 2015, and it essentially raised its hand when he began recording his next album, co-produced with his road drummer, Nick Gibbens, at the Soultrain Studios in Nashville’s Berry Hill neighborhood.

“He’s a big country music guy, but he is also a rock guy as far as the music he listens to — like he’s a Foo Fighters/Black Crowes kind of fan,” says Solar of Gibbens. “It’s drums and electric guitar — that’s kind of something that I feel like we lean into a little bit.”

Evan Hutchings’ heavy back beat, sprinkled with cymbals and tambourine, worked alongside Solar’s plugged-in guitar arpeggios and Sol Philcox-Littlefield’s burning slide guitar to capture a Lynyrd Skynyrd/Molly Hatchet vibe, while Philcox-Littlefield’s solo squeals a tad like Chris Leuzinger’s role in Garth Brooks’ “The Thunder Rolls.”

Solar played the crew the original demo, recorded in the key of G, and they bumped it up a step to A just to inject a little extra urgency. But the musicians needed very little direction to find their way through it.

“Those guys are just so freaking good,” Solar says. “They might just look at each other, you know, like do a little head nod and go, ‘Oh, we’re going to do something weird here,’ and then they just somehow know what they’re doing. I don’t know how it works.”

It just does. Thus, Solar self-released “All I Can Think About Lately” to country radio on his Raining Bacon label through PlayMPE on April 5, introducing himself to many listeners with a song that’s hard to get out of their heads once it has been heard.

“It sounds,” he says, “like the way I want songs to sound.”

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