Makin’ Tracks: Hannah Ellis Finds an Anthem in ‘Country Can’
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Historically, country songwriting has modeled itself after Tin Pan Alley, the New York district where composers would knock out Broadway songs daily and land them with artists by performing them in person around an upright piano. Nashville has had a similar, factory-like approach to the vocation, with staff writers clustered in converted two-story houses up and down Music Row, looking for magic in their guitars.
Of course, a lot has changed — Music Row is overrun with apartment buildings, the town’s writers increasingly create with laptops at home studios, and music companies have turned more often to out-of-town retreats that encourage concentrated effort. One of those retreats a year ago yielded Hannah Ellis’ “Country Can,” a Curb single built from a quartet of composers on Oct. 11, 2021, the first day in a short getaway to 30A in the Florida Panhandle.
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“It was honestly such a perfect grouping of people to write this song,” Ellis recalls. “Everyone brought something different and unique to the song that helps make it what it is.”
The lineup was a little different than originally intended. A couple of invitees had to cancel at the last minute, so they put out a call to Parker Welling (“What’s Your Country Song,” “Blue Tacoma”), who had been on a retreat with Thomas Rhett. Booking flights to Panama City was an issue at the time, but Rhett and his wife, Lauren Akins, were heading there, so Welling rode down with them to meet Ellis; her husband, singer-songwriter Nick Wayne; Matt Alderman (“Truth About You,” “Nothing To Do Town”); and songwriter/producer Jason Massey (Kelsea Ballerini, Ryan Griffin).
While the other three started in on a 9 a.m. writing session, Welling and Wayne borrowed Alderman’s truck to run errands. Wayne remembers taking sand flea spray to the Akins’ house, and Welling recalls picking up a portable cornhole set at her place. During the ride, they went over a one-sheet the Curb A&R team had put together that summarized some of Ellis’ favorite songs and artists, her attitudes and a reminder that they could use something “anthemic.”
Wayne and Welling brainstormed potential titles and got locked into an exercise where they looked for words and phrases that use the word “country.” When they began chasing alliterations, Wayne spitballed “Country Can.”
“While Hannah was finishing up her other write, we got back to the house and sat on the back porch with a guitar and just started to really dive into what ‘Country Can’ could be,” recalls Wayne. “Parker is just such a brilliant writer and such a fast, simple writer, it really didn’t take long at all to get the framework put together.”
One way they accomplished that was by asking questions. “We referenced that song ‘Nothing But the Blood of Jesus,’ and the device that the writers used, like, ‘What can do this? Nothing but the blood of Jesus,’” Welling notes. “That feels like a good way to get into that idea.”
Ellis was on board with “Country Can” when the previous session was done, and they invited Massey to sit in as well, over glasses of rosé.
“We kept going back and forth with all of the different things that we felt like country music was capable of,” Ellis says. “I came up with the line of ‘red dirt to West Coast sand’ because I wanted to represent that this is a song for everyone, no matter where you’re from.”
Once they got to the chorus, they sewed up that anthemic feel, repeating the title twice at the beginning of the stanza and returning to it at the end while connecting the genre to its classic means of exposure: “Nothing turns my radio to gold like country can.”
Welling was challenged during the session by a text conversation with a good friend whose father was hospitalized with COVID-19. He died while they were working on “Country Can,” creating an odd contrast between musical celebration and mortal tragedy.
“It was a really safe place for me,” says Welling. “In the middle of this song, which is not an emotional song, I’m crying on the couch. But also, in a weird way, I think it kind of added a little bit of heart to this song that could have been just super light. I think it gave it this intangible thing. I feel like sometimes the energy of the room makes its way into the song even if it’s not something that happens lyrically or musically.”
The two verses prior to the first chorus addressed how country can liven up a barroom, then how it can enhance community. Verse three explored its role in relationships, and the bridge visited how it helps to put down roots, rolling back into the next section by using the words “country can” as both the last lyrics of the bridge and the first words of the final chorus.
Before they finished, they rejiggered the chorus melody, which was originally in the same general frequency as the verses. “It was a little low, but when [Hannah] started pushing it up, it was like a country standard, like [Maren Morris’] ‘My Church,’ where you do the cowboy chords, you know. It’s just the one, four and five,” Wayne says. “I don’t even think there’s a minor chord in that song.”
Massey laid down a spare musical track and captured a vocal from Ellis to work with, then built a more elaborate demo back in Nashville. Curb executives were uniformly enthusiastic, and Ellis cut the master at Blackbird Studios with acoustic guitarist Ilya Toshinskiy, electric guitarist Derek Wells, drummer Evan Hutchings, bassist Jimmie Lee Sloas, keyboardist Alex Wright and steel guitarist Justin Schipper.
Massey kept some of the programmed percussion from the demo, allowing the performance to build when Hutchings enters with a more powerful sound. The drums in the first verse, though, weren’t drawn from any percussion sample — they’re actually a group of horses walking. He chopped up the clippity-clop of their hooves to fit the sonic profile of a drum beat.
“Probably no one can tell what it is but me,” allows Massey, “but it makes me happy.” He also chopped key notes in Schipper’s performance to create a stuttered steel effect, repeated just often enough to become a secondary hook.
Ellis delivered a clear, forceful final vocal, and they endeavored to add gang vocal harmonies to the last chorus late in the process. Ellis was touring heavily and couldn’t get back to Nashville, so Massey asked her and her touring guitarist, Kevin Monahan, to cut a series of harmony vocals on the road. They captured the parts on March 17 in Rutland, Vermont, where she was opening for Carly Pearce, on an iPhone. The recording had a lower sonic quality than they could have gotten in the studio, but it worked as a background-party effect.
“If it was a more prominent gang vocal thing, it might have been an issue,” Massey says. “I think it served its purpose on the phone.”
Curb released “Country Can” to radio via PlayMPE on Aug. 12. It succeeds in its anthemic ambitions, the hook is memorable, and few titles can be repurposed in a sentence quite as well as “Country Can.”
“It’s such a fun little pun to use all the time,” Ellis says. “Everyone does it.”
