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- This is gonna be the hard part-- - [Man] Quiet in the room

Can you sneak a little bit this way?

That's cool, thank you, that's better.

- That was the demo.

Yeah, this is a Fazioli.

The only one in the south, actually.

Isn't that pretty?

- I did the spray tan this morning.

- I look so white.

Do I look too white?

- Uh, let's see what I got here.

Grab a guitar?

You write most of your stuff in this bunker?

- Well, when I'm, when I'm, yes.

Take a position you feel super comfortable in,

maybe, you know, to play music.

That was back at home.

- Called me at like noon, on Tuesday, it was a Tuesday.

- Okay, wrong song.

- I'm good, how are you? - [Man] I'm good, good to see you!

- That's what I do.

I've been fortunate.

I've had about 500 of my songs recorded.

I've had 42 Top 20 singles.

And 25 of those songs ended up being Number Ones.

Which means nobody knows who the [beep] I am.

- I'm the guy that wrote Try for P!nk.

- You Give Love a Bad Name, Livin' on a Prayer,

Livin' La Vida Loca.

- Pontoon. - Faithfully.

- Like I'm Gonna Lose You.

- Grenade, Party in the USA.

- Nobody Wants to Be Lonely.

- Stay. - Mama's Broken Heart.

- The Climb.

- A Little Less Conversation. - Live Like You Were Dyin'.

- Have a Little Faith in Me.

- Change the World.

- Thousand Years, Because of You.

- The River. - Whiskey Lullaby.

- What Hurts the Most.

- I'm the guy that wrote Jesus Take the Wheel.

Well, I should say it this way.

I'm one of the three people that wrote Jesus Take the Wheel.

- We gonna talk first, you want me to play first,

what would you like to do? - [Director] Let's talk first.

- Sure, good.

- Why is Nashville this like

bastion of creativity?

And when it comes to songs, right, this is it.

Why Nashville?

- I've often thought a lot about why Nashville,

why is this place, this place.

You know, most of the real reasons are mysterious

as to why this place.

But I'm not usually one for these,

for the more,

new age-y explanations of there's just a vibe

or there's just an energy.

But there's a vibe, there's an energy.

I don't know what that is.

But I guess one of the biggest reasons is

that the antenna

that sent out the Grand Ol' Opry

to far-flung areas all over this country

at a time when everybody listened to radio.

It was almost like the Bat Light into the night saying,

you know, come here, this is where this happens.

- Johnny Cash.

- Patsy Cline with another one of her--

- Dolly Parton.

- Artists came to Nashville who,

once they made it on the Grand Ol' Opry,

they were in their cars driving from Birmingham

to Minneapolis to play a show.

So they came back on Friday and Saturday night to perform

on the Grand Ol' Opry.

And when they came back in,

those artists who stayed at home in Nashville

would greet them at the backstage door and say,

"Hey, I wrote a song, I got a song for you."

So an industry was born out of entertainers

being out on the road and not having enough time

to write songs.

And that's how Nashville became

this epicenter of songwriting in the world.

I just sort of fell in love with this,

the idea that the entire country music industry

took place on about four square blocks

of this quiet little town.

And most, except for the record companies,

everything took place in a house

that was converted into an office.

- There's so much, there's so much brilliance,

so much brilliance in this town.

That's why people come from all over the world

to write here.

I've written with and seen some of the best on the planet

come to Nashville and say, "Well, this is where

"great songwriters come to write songs."

- I'm moving to Nashville in two months.

I've been in LA for the last 15 years.

I've been coming to Nashville

for probably five or six years.

There's 10 people that I work with all the time in LA.

And here, I feel like it's a pretty unlimited amount

of folks that I can kind of be writing with.

- Oh, Nashville is ridiculous.

It's like a fruitcake.

It's densely packed with talent.

You can go to any one of these buildings.

There's probably somebody in there that's a badass.

- I can promise you there's 100 songs being written

right now in this town, this very second.

And it makes Nashville a very unique place.

- You go get a pizza,

they're gonna have a songwriters' night at the pizza place.

This is the only town I've ever known where banks

have a stage in the bank.

They literally have stages in some of the banks around here.

Songwriters will get up.

Every waiter that waits on you,

every person that valet parks your car

is a world-class gifted musician or songwriter.

- Kind of what I always tell people is for six months,

don't worry about the business.

Just worry about becoming a member of the music community.

Go see how competitive it is here.

Go to every writers' night you can go to.

Shake the hands of every songwriter

you would ever wanna meet,

because they're gonna be available to you.

They're gonna be nice to you,

because they were in your shoes.

- Move here.

Start livin' here, start being a citizen here.

They take you in, man.

- I used to friend people on Facebook

that I knew were in the music industry.

And I would post demos or videos of me

at Writers' Nights or whatever.

And I would just hope that someone

would stumble across it, and someone did.

And I went in wanting to learn,

but never asking for a record deal

or never asking for a publishing deal.

I was like, "Hey, my name's Kelsea.

"I'm from Knoxville.

"I'm 15, and I really want you to listen to what I do

"and tell me how I could be better.

"Or tell me who I should be with to make me better."

And people took the meetings because they didn't think

that I was trying to get anything, except for advice.

- Songwriting may be the only profession I've ever seen

where every songwriter genuinely is trying to teach

the person that's gonna be their competition.

- That's something Nashville has

that so few industries still have that,

where you can learn from the masters,

where you can sit in a room and the gods of this field

will tell you their stories and let you in.

- I went to my first Writers in the Round

at the Bluebird Cafe.

It was an epiphany, it was religion.

It was, I'd never seen anything like it.

- To be so close to somebody that you can feel

their foot in the carpet while they start to sing a song,

not only that they wrote maybe 15 years ago,

but you've heard on your radio 10,000 times,

and has become a part of your life.

It made me want to be so much better.

It made me feel horrible.

It made me feel like every song I'd written before

was gone, and I'm not using that.

It's about, it's what happens from here on out.

- I remember trying out for the open mic,

and like 90 people tried out, and 30 people made it.

And I made it.

- It's in a little bitty strip mall.

It seats 99 people.

And it launched just about every songwriter career

in this town.

Artists from Keith Urban to Taylor Swift to Garth Brooks

were discovered at The Bluebird.

- This is a place where dreams come true.

- Changed your life.

- Sure changed mine, yeah.

Sure changed mine, changed my children's lives.

Changed my children's lives I didn't have yet.

- The Bluebird Cafe, we help songwriters.

I always wanted to get it printed as a bumper sticker.

We help songwriters.

- And it's all about the song.

Even more about the song than it was the songwriter

think it'd be possible.

- On my own tombstone, it's just gonna say, Shh,

because that's just the shortest way to say,

there's something important going on here.

Shut up and listen to it.

- Four writers just playing their incredible songs.

Some were hits, some were new.

It changed my life,

because that night I thought, you know what,

that's what I'm going to do.

I'm going to buckle down and be the best songwriter

I know how to be.

So I went up and down these streets of Nashville

trying to get a publishing deal, a record deal, anything.

And I couldn't get arrested.

- Songwriters spend years,

years waiting for that one break.

They live on credit cards.

They wait to have babies, because they have to write songs.

- It took about five years of just nonstop grinding.

I would record anywhere, in the closet or in the bathroom.

- One of my funnier,

I love this.

So my mom, this is back in the velour days, right.

So I had this, she gave me this robe for Christmas.

So I had this black velour robe that I'd wear.

And I had a little hook on the back of my bathroom door

I hung my robe upon.

And I'm in my bathroom one day, sitting on the commode,

and I started lookin', and I can see the door

through parts of the robe.

And I realized, I've worn the ass out of this robe

from sitting down there working in my studio.

I'd literally just worn the ass out.

And all I could think of was like,

the pizza dude must think I'm totally hittin' on him,

'cause when I get the door and I turn, you know,

to walk back inside, and he's just lookin' at my ass,

just my thinly veiled,

literally my thinly veiled ass.

I was like .

- And then somebody says, "Okay, you're ready.

"I'm gonna sign you to a publishing deal,"

and pays him $20,000 a year,

which is not enough to live on.

- Oh gosh, I mean, I've been a bartender,

cater waiter, valet.

I used to sell pagers.

- When I first started out, you know, this guy told me,

wrote with Bob Dylan, he said,

"You know, you ain't got any mud on you."

I said, "What do you mean by that?"

He said, "Well, you ain't got any mud.

"You've been loved and coddled.

"You've got no mud.

"You've got no rejection.

"Your mommy and dad love you, buh buh buh."

And he goes, "You're gonna need to get some mud."

- They call Nashville a 10-year town,

but I dropped out of ninth grade

and started touring when I was 14,

and had 10 years before I came to Nashville,

of like losing record deals,

promoters stealing your money on tour.

- It's a beautiful town.

It can make all your dreams come true.

But it can also be such a bitch of a town.

It can be so hard.

You're putting your heart out on the line daily

and getting it smashed because it doesn't sound

like the radio or no one will ever record that song

'cause it's too sad, or something.

So this is This Town Is Killing Me.

- It's a no business.

You're gonna hear no.

No is usual.

You're gonna write a lot of songs,

and they're gonna pass on most of them.

So you're gonna have to want it bad enough

to deal with failure.

Because when they finally say yes, it's amazing.

- There was a turning point where I thought,

I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna have to do something else.

I'm not going to be able to support a family like this.

And I went to be the assistant

to this big real estate agent.

I put a suit on, borrowed a suit.

And I was sitting in this big glass lobby of this building

and all these guys kept walking through in their suits

with their briefcases.

And I just had a panic attack.

I just started breathing really hard.

I was sweating.

And I just realized, I was gonna have to do music,

no matter what.

And if I never made money,

then I would just continue doing those odd jobs

that I'd been doing all those years.

And that was

two months before I got my first cut.

- I mean, it knocks you down 50 times,

hoping you won't get back up.

And if you do, that's the time it works.

- It was a title my father had given me.

I was calling him about money, again.

He said, "No, you're not coming home, John.

"Lose that idea, don't stop believing.

"I mean it, don't stop believing."

And I scribble in this thing, and there it is.

- I remember I hadn't released any music yet,

and finally got to release my first record.

And I was at the grocery store, just came out,

and was standing on the corner with my bags.

And this car came and pulled up at the stoplight

and the windows were rolled down,

and she was listening to my song on the radio,

and singing.

And it was the coolest feeling.

So I had a friend with me and he was like,

"That's you!"

I'm like, "That's me!"

And he's like, "That's her,' tellin' the girl, "That's her!"

And she's driving, she's like.

- I'm sitting right there

when a guy named Tony Arata's onstage one night.

He sings these songs.

Tony's a great writer.

- Garth was sitting right back over there.

He was doing construction and selling boots.

And I was loading trucks at UPS.

It was me, Garth, Liz Hengber, who was a waitress here,

and Mark Irwin, who was the bartender.

And that was not only who was performing,

it was pretty much the crowd.

But we each took turns playing songs.

- And then here comes this song called The Dance.

And it was the last song he played. I went up to him.

I said, "Dude, surely that's gotta be on hold

"or somebody's cut that."

He goes, "No, it's been here a while."

Took it to Allen Reynolds.

And Allen Reynolds told me, he said,

"If you don't cut The Dance,

"it'll be the biggest hit you never had."

- I wrote Stay with a guy named Justin Parker,

and he and I were both super broke at the time,

met at a coffee shop.

I was almost too hungover to go.

I was nearly gonna cancel.

And showed up anyway, laid on the couch

with like an orange juice and a sandwich.

And he started playing these chords.

And I said to him like,

- Songwriting is, uh, is like what?

- Mark Huhta described it perfectly to me.

He said it's like hopping in a little spaceship

and taking a trip, you know.

That's what songwriting feels like to me,

because it's almost like, you know,

I'm just kinda steering, but not really.

- Writing a song is, uh, it's like a drug.

- [Director] Writing a song is like?

- Writing song is like flying.

- Writing a song is like?

- Writing a song is like getting beat up.

- Writing a song is like?

- Writing a song is like having your heart broken

over and over and over.

- Writing a song is like?

- Writing a song is like your first memory

of a birthday party.

- Songwriting is like therapy.

It's like you're writing this great movie

that's going on in your mind.

And if you get it right,

the rest of the world gets to see the movie in Technicolor.

- Songwriting is prayer.

You know, you open yourself up to receive.

And however you do that,

whether you do that with a couple of joints

and a shot of whiskey,

or if you do that by literally getting on your knees

and praying for inspiration,

that's what prayer is.

It's opening yourself up to the possibility

of something that doesn't exist.

As a songwriter, it's like clairvoyance.

- You have your good days, and you have your bad days,

and you have your days that it's almost like

you don't even remember feeling it come through your body

and down on paper.

So pretty amazing thing that we get to do.

You like that?

I like it.

- A little instrumental session and then

You know like?

- My favorite song is possibly my most successful to date,

which would be Try for P!nk.

People talk about

you kinda hear tapping into something

and there's something bigger than you

kind of vibe, you know.

That song was literally,

I woke up with that chorus on my head.

Like I've never had that.

95% of what you can hear on the radio

was literally like, oh,

What is this?

This is interesting.

And I grabbed my phone, recorded it,

worked on it for a second.

And then I called my buddy Ben later on and said,

"Hey, why don't you come on the Friday

"and we'll work on that Try song."

Should the second verse be more about her and them?

And then that last verse is our current second verse?

- Um, yeah, yeah. - This is sick.

So it was pretty,

it was pretty amazing when you could see that story

of how a song comes to be.

It's almost like an act of God, man.

- Stranger you met on a plane.

Wrong number.

A ring of keys and none of them work.

Yesterday's beer.

Oh man.

So I'm supposed to make a song out of this?

- Yeah.

Yeah, I don't know where this is goin', you know.

It would take me a, take me a minute.

It just seems like trying to paint a picture

of a missed connection, basically.

Not in the Craigslist way, but,

or maybe in the Craigslist way.

Yeah, that could be good.

Then it becomes a story song.

- That's very interesting. Is that the way it is?

Like there's all these scraps lying around in your brain

or in the universe and you're like?

- Yeah, I've gotten to the point where my writing

has become more,

I guess abstract, for lack of a better word.

I don't know, it's like approaching it

like an abstract painting,

instead of like with a title or, you know,

a hook, or something like-- - Really?

- Yeah.

So I just kinda float around, you know,

with my daughter, watching over her with the guitar,

or take her on a walk and recite the lyrics

and see what kinda edits itself.

So this is very similar.

- How is it that you put together a song?

What's your deal?

- I wish I knew how to write a song.

I mean, no, I'm serious.

I know there's craftsmen in town who can write on a dime.

And I'm not one of those.

I have a habit of playing the guitar every day.

And within that habit, I hope that something comes up.

But it doesn't always.

A lot of younger writers have come up to me over the years.

And the only advice I can give is to write songs.

You just have to do it.

- Professional songwriting in Nashville

is not what people think it is.

Most people think songwriters smoke weed

and walk around the streets and hope that inspiration hits.

That's sort of a good way to be a poor songwriter.

You know, you have to treat it like a job, you really do.

You know, Nashville has bit of a tradition of that

that started in the '70s.

Before then, it was more like that.

It was just, let's wait on inspiration.

And then a few guys kinda said,

"You know what, I'm gonna keep office hours."

- In the 1950s and '60s and into the '70s

and through the '70s, really,

I wrote virtually everything I wrote by myself.

I thought you had to go lock yourself

in a dark room somewhere, pull down the shades at midnight,

and sit there until three or four in the morning

and see how miserable you could get

and write a sad country song.

Then I discovered a thing called cowriting.

- You go in.

You write either with a friend that you know well

or someone you've never met.

And your job is to let your guard down

and just be honest with them.

- I think it's interesting that songwriting

is one of the only mediums where you shape things together.

Like nobody starts a painting

and hands it to someone else to finish.

But I love that about songwriting

because some of my favorite ideas

would never have come along if I didn't have his brain

or someone else's brain in the room.

- The most amazing thing about what I do is,

you know, Monday through Friday is I go

and I sit in little rooms on Music Row

with other songwriters, and I have for 20 years.

And we all do life together.

- I'm like in a bit of a weird mood. I'm like super pumped

to be here.

I had a big fight with Raleigh, of course.

I feel like I've been - Oh no. in this cycle before.

So I'm like juggling that in my brain.

- Pain and beauty.

- And all of it is like I was just an asshole this morning

is basically what it comes down to.

That's the truth.

And so like, trying to deal with that.

- That's what we do all morning.

You know, we're drinking coffee.

We're talking about what happened last weekend

or last night.

And then you start talking about song ideas.

- I love this line. I don't remember where I heard it,

but like a building's rooms I've never explored.

- Ooh.

- I think it's beautiful.

- I got this kinda dumb idea.

- [ I like dumb ideas.

- It's called It Ain't a Lie If It's the Truth.

- [Woman] If It Ain't a Lie?

- It Ain't a Lie - It Ain't a Lie.

If It's the Truth.

♪ If ain't a lie

- It's just this ping-pong process

of song idea, song idea, song idea.

And then all of the sudden, someone says something

that rings a bell.

- Did you say, "Baby, you're my lighthouse?"

- I don't know what it is.

- At the end of the day, we're all making it up.

It's just, it is truly a mess.

And it isn't as scientific as you think.

And it's like no, it's not right, no it's not right.

I don't know, more of a milkshake sound.

And then suddenly you've got something that's great.

- Oh, I like that, when I'm lost on a world and sea.

- I'd love to like,

so that's kinda like a bit more like abstract.

I'd like to bring it into - Real world?

like some real like.

- I love that.

- I don't know.

I like that. - I love that.

- Now, we need a hit chorus,

and we need two verses.

It needs to be simple,

but it needs to be profound, you know.

We need to be brief.

But when you start getting into those things,

this is a different part of your brain

from the part of the heart that made you think of the idea

in the first place.

- Oh. - Because we've only been

singing the back half. - Yes.

- And I think that - Right.

makes it enough.

And it's like any trouble rolls away.

- Yes, yes.

- Do I know if you're gonna like the song?

I have no idea.

You may not even understand what we're talking about.

And I've completely miss the point altogether.

But if I can get done and I can look at it and say

I believe this is a hit idea

and I think we wrote it as well as we possibly could've,

then I think the song is finished.

- Okay, I'm gonna play it from the top.

Yeah.

- Anybody who's made a career as a writer will tell you,

really in some ways, it's not even the end product.

It's the process that's most important.

- The best writing rooms, to me,

are when there's three people in the room.

Then those three people form pretty specific functions.

- Nowadays you might have a track guy.

And then you got another lyric guy, you got an idea guy.

I need a melody guy.

I'm decent at it,

but I'd rather have somebody that's great at it.

If it's one of the best idea's I've had all year,

one thing I do not want to do is write about myself,

'cause it's not gonna be a hit.

Most everybody in Nashville does not know how

to do the whole thing.

The track guy's amazing, the track girl,

whoever it is, it's amazing.

What they do, I can't do that.

But it sounds badass when you walk in that room

and they've got something going,

it's something going.

- Oh, I love acoustics, you know.

Most of the time I hear the phrasing first

before a actual lyric.

I don't know.

I mean, shit, you know, I mean.

Just kind of make it up, you know.

I don't know, it's not bad.

You know, and some of them make sense, some of it doesn't.

But you just kinda blindly go in a direction

that just feels right.

- [ Is there a recipe to writing a great song?

- You know, sometimes, in anything we do in life,

somewhere there's this mentor that you went to

and you go back to and you really look up to.

And mine was a Hall of Fame songwriter named Tom Shapiro.

He used to say, "There's 5,000 ways to write a song.

"Pick one."

I think that's magic.

- When I first started coming to town, I was like,

I wanna write songs.

I think I met with 30 publishers in town.

And so I went around to literally every publishing house

with my guitar, played a song.

And I remember like how I would write songs at home

is I would just pick up my guitar and like,

whenever I'd kind of feel inspiration.

But it was the first time that I saw

like a staff songwriter.

These writers would come in with books

and they would have titles and titles

and like ideas and ideas.

And I was like what is this way of writing?

- There's one on here called Camp Out Country Titles.

She's been living in all of her junk,

goin' for the kill, makin' thrills, crying diamonds.

I don't know what those mean, yet,

but I'm sure they'll turn into something.

- Yeah, come on, come on, come on, sing it.

Give me some of it.

Crying about an.

- Oh, I don't know.

Now we're like the TV show Nashville.

Like that doesn't actually happen.

- That doesn't happen, okay.

- I've got a notebook full of ideas.

And it's, I mean, it's just pages and pages

and pages of titles.

That's the way I do it is I brainstorm titles

as frequently as I can.

I don't think about them when I write them down

and then I go back to them.

- Is there any way we could photograph that

one day, or?

- I would give anything for you to be able to do that,

because it got stolen.

- Oh shit.

- It got stolen about four months ago out of my Jeep

with my computer.

It was in my backpack.

And I couldn't have given a shit about that computer.

But that notebook had 17 years' worth of ideas in it.

This is a smaller notebook that I used to use.

But I'll fill them up.

I'll have explanations sometimes out in the margin.

And it's not necessarily that there's going to be

a great title in there.

It's just thoughts, and it's phrases

that can make me think of other things.

- It's fodder, your writing fodder.

- Exactly.

- It always starts with words for me.

And I suppose that's because I'm a singer,

so I'll overhear something,

somebody having a conversation at a table

or something in a movie will,

I'll love a line.

I'll think it's so well-written,

and something about it will get in my head.

A lot of times, I think I write most of my songs in the car,

just driving.

And there's something about the speed of that

and everything just flying past so much,

which is the exact speed of my brain.

It's like I don't feel like I'm tripping over myself

and everything's coming out smooth.

- I think songwriters think a little differently.

You see the world a little differently.

You're always going, that's a song, that's a song.

That dude and that girl over there, that's a song.

- I might be in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner,

hear a word, I gotta document it.

- I'll be in the middle of an argument with someone

and think, ooh, they just said a really good line.

I'll put it down and go, okay,

gotta get back to the actual situation.

- That's the thing is that it really is a blessing, man.

An idea's a blessing, and that's the thing.

You never, you don't know where they come from.

You don't know why something moves you in a moment.

Your job is not to question it.

Your job is to document.

- Songwriting happens all year-round.

And it happens everywhere.

And I just try to be open enough to receive it.

- All right. - Okay.

- Why don't you tell me the story--

- Oh, the story, okay, the story of the song.

It's just, it's a, it is a country song in itself.

So, you know, it's just classic.

In like three weeks' time, or in a week, really,

my marriage went south, I lost my record deal,

and I lost my publishing deal.

And as most country singers, I just, you know,

figured I could work it out in a bottle of Jack Daniels

at some point.

I was hanging out at my manager's house,

and we were sitting up way too late, had way too many,

and he commented that I'd put a bottle to my head

and pulled the trigger.

And I said, I said, yeah, that, man,

wow, that's pretty.

I scribbled that down and I lived with that idea for awhile.

And then that's when I brought it to Bill Anderson.

I hear a--

- Anybody that could come up with a line of

he put the bottle to his head and pulled the trigger

is a pretty special human being.

I think that's the song that most people will say to me,

"Gosh, I didn't realize you wrote that."

- Your first instinct when you hear something

like Whiskey Lullaby is not what a commercial masterpiece.

It's more like, what an artistic masterpiece.

- It was told in a way that, uh,

was a unique take and captured everybody's attention.

I mean, it won every award.

And it wasn't a new story.

You need to tell somebody something they already know

or something they've already lived through.

But the secret is in telling it in a way

that they haven't heard.

- When things started to happen for me,

when my artistry started to take off,

was when I started trying to write songs for,

I always say for the woman who worked at the bank.

Because when I would go in to write songs every morning,

a lot of days I would stop by the bank.

And I would think about that woman who was the teller.

And I would think, what's going on in her life?

You know, what's her story and how do I tell that?

- Write it to somebody.

Don't just write a song like espousing something.

To someone.

You're writing, you're always singing to somebody.

When I moved to Nashville,

I was dating a girl back in West Virginia,

had been dating her for a couple of years,

actually, through college.

And two weeks after transferring here found out

that she had sort of gone to my best friend

at home for consolation.

And it was devastating.

I mean it was, in some ways, the greatest thing

she could've ever done for me.

And so I would sit and I would put her photograph

on the desk and I would write to her.

And I wrote the song Another You to her

and got it cut and went to number two on the chart.

- You're trying to almost sell a house.

Your song's like an open house.

You bring a listener into the foyer

and if he doesn't like what he sees in the foyer,

he's gonna walk out.

So give them a nugget of some truth, of something,

so they'll continue to listen.

And that's what's so good in Nashville.

A lot of the writers here have done the work,

you know, in putting the right furniture in their songs.

Interesting furniture, interesting decoration.

- At the end of the day, everybody wants a great lyric,

a real lyric, a raw lyric.

And that's what Nashville brings, I think, to LA

and to New York is we learned from these guys

that are twisting hooks, they're painting pictures, they're,

I mean, the Nashville songwriting poets,

like Kris Kristofferson taught us how to write.

- Kris had made such an impact.

He was the first writer to really introduce the bedroom

to country music.

Take the ribbon from your hair, shake it loose,

let it fall.

Lay it soft against my skin like the shadows on the wall.

Very poetic stuff, but it was very seductive

and it was smart.

The great artists like Kris Kristofferson or Guy Clark

or Townes Van Zandt or John Prine,

those are the teachers.

- Guy Clark and I would be writing these songs.

And it was kind of like being able to hang out and paint

with Picasso, you know, for 20-some years.

- Where melody and poetry meet

is where I wanna be.

That's what I learned from a great artist like Guy Clark.

And I'd go over to his house and he'd say,

"Hey man, if you write a good song,

"a really good song, people are gonna hear it.

"End of story."

- I was obsessed with Patsy Cline.

And one of my first memories of songwriting

was when it would say written by Harlan Howard,

I was like, well, who is Harlan Howard?

- A lot of people thought that Harlan Howard,

and there's a great argument to be made,

was the greatest songwriter that ever,

you know, put a pencil to a piece of paper in Nashville.

- I think if you're not in some way influenced by him,

you're missing the boat big time.

And you need to go back and listen.

Because I just think he did so much with so little.

The Three Chords and the Truth,

I think that can be overlooked sometimes,

but simple is the hardest thing to be.

- I admire the kind of songwriter that can,

that's what, you know, John Lennon was going for I think,

more and more was the simplicity,

the elegant simplicity of just two or three words,

two or three chords.

I think that's amazing.

- It's economy.

That's what I try to do every day is boil down a topic.

What's the essence of what we're trying to say?

He stopped loving her today.

You know, so simple, but it says so much.

And the feeling is not simple.

It's complex and it's timeless.

- The song may not be your cup of tea,

but you will walk out of there going, that was the truth.

And that can't be denied.

- Songwriting for me has to be truth.

It has to be true.

It has to have some kind of,

something that rings true for me.

If it doesn't have that, you know it,

especially when you get in front of an audience

and attempt to sing that song,

because the audience can tell when you're lying.

- Harlan's on to something.

You don't really need anything more

than three chords and the truth,

truth being underlined.

I tend to stay more in the five or six chord range myself.

- For me, it's more like seven chords

and the perceived truth [laughs].

- Well, I don't know about any three chords.

I may know four or five,

and I know where to buy one of these.

- Now it's more like four chords and a pickup.

- Now it's two chords and a loop [laughs].

- But I think if your truth is your truth,

the important thing is that you're wearing it on your sleeve

and really willing to put it out there for people to hear

and disagree with or agree with.

So much of songwriting just comes

from a point of inspiration,

and then you just run as fast as you can

into the middle of nowhere

and try to describe what it is you're seeing or feeling.

- I had an experience writing a song

with one of my favorite cowriters.

I opened up an idea.

It was painful, the process of it,

'cause I was really,

it was like confessing things

that I didn't even wanna know about myself.

And I came home to Chuck,

and I played it for him and he said,

"That's the best song you've ever written."

And I just cried and I said,

"Well, if that's what it takes, then I quit."

I said, "It's too hard."

- Yeah, I think it's the one thing we're obligated to do

is tell it true.

You know, pretty much everything

people go through is universal.

And if you tell it true, it's gonna resonate.

- And truth doesn't always have to be like

rock you to your core truth,

like, oh man, that's some deep stuff right there.

That really hits me where I live.

Sometimes the funniest things are true.

- I got a call from a legendary A&R guy, John Kalodner.

John Kalodner put me into the room with Joe Perry

and Steven Tyler to write a song.

The day I got there, they had gone to a bar.

And it was kind of this kind of very swanky bar.

And at the very end was this gorgeous blonde

and from behind, just curvy, and teased up hair.

And so they were all drawing straws,

trying to figure out who was gonna go up to her.

And so suddenly, the blonde turns around

and it's Vince Neil of Motley Crue.

And so that's when they all went oh my God, oh my God, that.

- Life has a funny way of like giving you signs

before they happen.

I was in a studio in New York late at night.

I snuck into the studio.

My friend was the engineer.

So I was going in there late at night to get my demos out.

I was in the hallway just kinda hanging out

and I looked up and these two bodyguards came in

with Britney Spears.

And she walked by and I said to myself,

I'm gonna work with her one day.

I don't know how, but I'm gonna work with her one day.

I have a few more,

we kind of like to leave the biggies for the last.

We got Britney up here, Celine up here,

Bruno, Ne-Yo,

Cher and Christina Aguilera, Whitney Houston,

and Michael Jackson.

- What?

- Yeah. - What?

- Yeah, so this is like royalty lane right here,

whatever you wanna call it.

So I think I had to convince myself

I was a songwriter before anyone else said,

"You're a songwriter."

- When did you go wow, I've arrived?

- When Elvis cuts one of your songs.

I mean, in my instance, that was it.

I mean, that was no getting around it.

I mean, he was the man.

And I had some of the first songs I wrote,

I wrote with him in mind.

I saw him on the back of a flatbed truck

at the Hub Motor Company parking lot.

And all the girls went crazy.

And I thought to myself, boy,

if I can't do that, I'm gonna get a song to him

if nothing else.

- For me, I like to have an artist in mind

when I write a song,

'cause I try to kinda put my voice into that artist's voice.

And that artist could be a male or female.

- P!nk, she's a massive artist.

Her recording your song is this,

you know, it affected us greatly.

And she said something, she said,

"LA Reed always told me,

"'Smart artists will cut a song,

"'even if they didn't write it."

And it was like, wow.

- And we get these pitch sheets,

the publishing companies get these sheets--

- No kidding, explain this. - From the record company.

And it'll give everybody on their label

that's looking for songs to record.

So you go down and you kinda see.

And that helps you go, hey man,

I've got a song that I just wrote last week

that's perfect for what they're looking for.

And then you send it over and see if they hear it

and it ends up on the record.

And interestingly enough, sometimes you write a song

that you were writing for that.

It didn't work for them, but a year later,

it ends up on someone else's record.

- Our biggest song that we had together

was Change the World.

- It got pitched out of PolyGram Music Publishing Company

and Don Potter took it

from there for Wynonna Judd's next project.

We were told that it was gonna be a single for her

and all this stuff.

And then we watched them put out one, then two,

then three singles from that record,

and none of them were this song.

So we were just sort of like wow.

About the time that we were digesting the fact

that we were not gonna have a song

out as a single with her,

Clapton puts it out on the soundtrack

to Summer of '96 and the movie Phenomenon.

- There's a vast majority of songs

that have come professional songwriters

that they said, "I don't know where this came from,"

or "I was driving down the road one day,

"and I saw this thing, and I had to write about this."

"I had to walk into this room and tell you this story

"and write about it."

And then there's that whole other side where, you know,

you get a list of things that a certain artist

is looking for and you need to write

about these specific things.

But I've been in many rooms

where you may have that list of directives,

but the room and the energy in the room

takes you somewhere else.

And that ends up being the thing that gets cut.

- Wow, really? - Yeah.

- Can you give me like an example of that,

like in your own, where that happened to you?

- Um, yeah, well, yes.

It was summer day, 16th Avenue,

and it was in a house on the row.

I went up to the attic to write with Katie Herzig.

And we'd been given a set of directives,

you know, different artists who were looking for things

in a specific lane to write in.

I didn't want to write anything.

And I'm sitting there with my head back on the couch,

and Katie starts playing these really open chords,

and she's only hitting two strings every time,

sliding up and down.

And I just pictured in my head this image of a man

on the street who was also having a really bad day,

but worse than I was having.

Didn't have a home to go to,

didn't have a car to get in after all was said and done.

And the lyrics flowed really quickly.

And 20 minutes in, we had this song

that was nothing like the directives.

But that was the only song of mine

that has ever gotten Grammy recognition.

- Any time I do a song and it feels magical,

it may not always get to the place

that I think it should get to.

But those ones always find a home.

- One of my good friends was Bob Beckham,

and he ran Combine Music.

And Bob called me, he said,

"I got this new writer kid in town named Kris Kristofferson

"and he's written three songs.

"You come listen.

"I want you to record.

"Pick any one you want."

So I said, okay. So I went over and he played

Help Me Make It Through the Night,

Sunday Morning Coming Down,

and I think For the Good Times.

And I said,

"Well, I sure love that Sunday Morning Coming Down.

"I'll cut that."

I put out Sunday Morning Come Down.

Sold 12.

Johnny Cash cut it a couple years later,

and it was a big hit for Johnny Cash.

And I finally figured out,

I didn't have the image to sell a song

about being stoned on Sunday morning.

My image is just too clean.

If a song is a hit, it's a hit.

I just wasn't the right one to sell it.

- You know, when a song is Song of the Year,

or just a massive hit, impacting hit,

there's a reason for that.

Something speaks to people.

Like what hurts the most, you know.

A real song, again, that was about my father

and the time that he had left in his life,

when he had sent me out to go,

"Go do your music, man,"

and I didn't get to see him for a bit near the end,

till the very end.

And you know, all that time, I was like,

man, I could've been here.

I could've been here.

And he wanted me out there.

He knew, you know, I didn't know, but he knew.

And so that's what that song was about.

And then it ends up being this massive love song

that strikes a chord throughout the world.

And then you know, and then I lost my son 10 years ago,

and that song became a whole new song for me.

- You just never know

when you sit down and put some words on paper

and give it a melody,

you don't know where the thing is gonna fly off to

and who it's gonna touch.

- I had a man tell me he was in his car driving out

in the swamps of Louisiana listening to the radio.

He said, "I was gonna commit suicide."

And he said, "Your song came on the air

"about five little fingers, about your daughter."

And he said, "I realized that I really had more

"to live for than I thought I did.

"I pulled over to the side of the road.

"I listened to your song.

"I turned the car around, I went home."

That's when being a songwriter is special.

- I mean, it's just one of those weird things

where you never know in my world

what day is gonna be a day that's gonna change your life

or change other people's lives, you know.

I show up at this building pretty much every day,

and I sit in a room this big.

And that particular day,

I remember not even really want to go to work,

which is unlike me.

But I thought, you know, Connie Harrington,

I saw her on my calendar.

And I thought, you know, worst case scenario,

we'll go out to lunch, she'll be fine.

So Connie had just pieces of paper and Post-It notes,

and she's always shuffling through all these ideas.

She came to this one and she started to cry.

And I was like, what's that?

- I was

driving home, and I listen to talk radio,

NPR radio, regularly.

And then this man comes on.

He was trying to petition to get the right

to put flags on the graves

of not just his son's grave,

whom he lost in Afghanistan,

but all the soldiers in that particular cemetery.

And they asked him how did he cope with losing his son.

And he said, "I drive his truck."

And he said, "It burns gas like crazy,

"but we drive it anyway."

Because he felt closest to him.

- She literally was crying so hard

that she could not even tell me the title.

She would get the story started and then break down.

- And I'm driving, you know,

and I keep little yellow Post-It notes.

And I'm writing down the details of the truck

and sticking them on my dash, trying not to wreck.

And I thought that deserves to be written about.

- I mean, we just literally cried our way

through about four hours of just imagery,

writing words on a page.

I felt so strong that I had to treat this idea

with kid gloves, because I knew that there hadn't been

a lot of songs written about grief.

- But we both agreed at the end of the day

it would be good to get a guy's perspective on it.

So we debated who that should be,

and arrived at Jimmy Yeary.

- There's, you know, eight male songwriters

just in this building we could've called.

And if we had called any of the other ones,

it would be I Drive Your Truck that we have today.

And so we booked another writing appointment

and he came in, and me and him got the guitars out.

He had kind of a melody going.

It was perfect.

- When I write, when I get so far

and I realize today's going well enough,

this is gonna be a real song,

I will type in the date and I will type in the title.

And when I did that,

I just stopped, burst into tears,

and they're like, "What's wrong?"

I'm like.

We're wrote that song on June 21.

When I zoomed in on the picture

of Jared C. Monti's grave,

he was killed June 21.

- The second she said it, I got a chill up my body,

because I knew this is important.

We have got to get this in the right hands

and the right artist.

And Lee Brice took it all the way to number one,

which was unbelievable.

But all along, though, we're fantasizing, thinking,

has that dad heard it?

This guy that said it on the interview,

is it possible that he's a country music fan,

that he would hear this song?

- The last time I talked to my son,

the phone rang.

"Hi Pop, how you doing, happy Father's Day."

And he was on a satellite phone in Afghanistan

talking to me.

And we talked for a while, and then he said,

"Pop, I gotta go, we're going on a mission."

That was on June 18, 2006.

And he left for the mission, and three days later,

I had men walking up my driveway

to tell me he had been killed.

That's the Medal of Honor.

- How did it make you feel

when you heard that song for the first time?

- Sad.

Tearful.

It was very difficult to listen to.

I mean, I only got,

I think I only got partway through the song,

I had to shut it off.

And it's still pretty much that way.

I still don't get to get all the way through.

- Have your other kids heard the song?

- Oh yeah.

Both my daughter and my son are so hurt

by their brother's death

that they've reacted in--

I'm sorry.

- Paul? - Yeah.

- Connie Harrington. - Oh my God in heaven.

- Merry Christmas.

- Is that Jessi? - Mm-hm.

- It's me and Jessi.

- Oh my God, I can't believe we're here.

Oh my God.

- They didn't tell me this was gonna happen.

- [Jessi] Well, we wanted to surprise you.

- Oh God.

- I'm sorry.

Oh my gosh, here we,

look at you, here we are.

- Those are the mud still in the bottom of the boots.

- Wow.

- That is unreal.

I know you miss him.

Jerry, sometimes.

- Thank you. - Thank you, God bless you.

- I miss him.

Everybody's creative in some way.

Some people cook.

Some people paint.

Some people dance.

That's the connecting piece.

We all have that.

We all have that.

We don't all acknowledge it, but we all have it.

And that's what songwriting is.

It's being able to see art in life,

but interpret that in words.

For some people, that'd be with brushes.

For us, it's words and music.

- At the end of the day, we're all the same guy.

We're staring at an empty page,

and we're sitting with a guitar,

and we're just trying to mean something.

If it means something to somebody else.

- We're more connected than we all think.

And in this world right now,

I think people are longing to feel like we're all connected.

So I mean, I think songwriting is more important

than it's ever been.

- You know, music's one of the only things

that I know of in the world that can turn bad into good.

Whatever's the worst thing that ever happened to you

can become a song that'll make your life better

and a song that'll improve the life

of anybody that hears it

who has a shared common experience.

Or even a sad song can be good for all kinds of people.

There's not many things that turn bad into good,

and I get to be connected to one of them.

- Classic songwriters, their songs will be around

a lot longer than you or I.

And it's because they're good.

You know, it's that simple.

- If you listen to Top 40 music today,

how many of those songs are gonna be around

in 50 years from now?

I think the answer's probably very few.

And I feel like I listen to the best songs

that come out of Nashville

are the songs that I think we'll be singing

100 years from now.

- This is a songwriting town, period.

Everything else is in the next paragraph.

- These people are geniuses.

And so I'm proud to be from Nashville,

because there are more kinds of music here,

more people doing it on a real high, professional level

than anywhere in the world.

- There are times when I could probably make

a little bit more money doing something else.

But, I just wouldn't be happy doing something else.

And I don't know how to do anything else.

- I don't think you write with this false hope

that you're gonna make it big, you're gonna make it rich.

I think you write because that's what you do,

that's what you are.

- This is better than a royalty check, right,

this moment right here.

It's bigger, better in the grand scheme of things.

This means more than that because it's a memory.

We've made a memory.

Instead of money, we made a memory.

- A song has the power to soothe your soul.

It has the power to speak the words

that you don't know how to speak.

It has the power to give you hope that you didn't have.

- And I'm ever amazed there's what, 12 notes, 26 letters,

and I'm ever amazed because it never fails

that I'll turn on the radio and go, dah.

I mean, it's like that idea is so good and so obvious

and done so well.

You would think we'd run out of things like that.

But not in this town.

- People say, "Well, is it any harder than it was

"20 years ago in Nashville?"

Yeah, I just tell, it's always been impossible.

It's always never gonna happen.

It's always nothing but Catch-22s.

It's always just screwed up and it's never gonna happen.

And every week, there are Number One parties for kids,

first Number One parties for kids.

- Go to a bar with your friends and drink a beer

with no music going.

You know, just think of all the things

that very rarely you do that you don't hear music.

And everybody forgets that it started with a songwriter.

It started with somebody that got up and went in a room

and had the nerve to put their journal to music.

- It's just crazy that it's an industry,

an industry where you go to work

having no idea what you're actually going to produce,

and you're gonna take an idea

that's floating around your head and put it on paper

and make it, you know, actually concrete,

which turns into, hopefully, a song,

which turns into a demo, which turns into maybe,

hopefully a record cut,

which then people over the world hear.

It's like what, how is that even a job?

- To go from there's a song I wrote

that my publisher walked into the room and said,

"That's a hit," then five months later

Rhianna wants to cut it,

then I think six months later, the first time

it's being performed is at the Grammy's,

and I'm onstage with her.

- There is a kind of a funny little story

that goes around amongst songwriters

that the greatest three songs ever written

in the history of songwriting are

Amazing Grace, Bridge Over Troubled Water,

and whatever I just finished writing.

- One of my favorite quotes is by Quincy Jones.

And he said, "You need three things to make a great record.

"Three things.

"The song, the song, and the song." [laughs]

- The reason I do this is that I'm chasing a feeling.

I'm chasing the chills.

- It's the best drug.

Besides love, it's the best drug I can think of.

- The beauty of my job is that I have no,

I've been doing it for 22 years.

I had 21 number one songs.

And I have no idea what makes a great song.

- They come from poets and balladiers,

age-old stories passed down through the years,

from a little baby's laughter, from lovers' tears,

and sometimes God just whispers in your ear.