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10 Questions with ... Ryan Hurd
June 30, 2019
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BRIEF CAREER SYNOPSIS:
As a songwriter, Ryan Hurd's hits have included Blake Shelton's "Lonely Tonight," Lady Antebellum's "You Look Good," and Luke Bryan's "Sunrise, Sunburn, Sunset," and he also co-wrote Lady A's current single, "What If I Never Get Over You." He's had other cuts by Rascal Flatts, Dierks Bentley, Tim McGraw, Jake Owen and Maren Morris (Hurd's wife), but the focus right now is on his own current release, "To A T," which is climbing the charts and already hit No. 1 on SiriusXM The Highway's "Hot 30 Countdown." Hurd co-wrote the sexy single with Laura Veltz and Nathan Spicer, and it includes background vocals from Morris, who he describes as his creative muse. Hurd's career streams to date have exceeded 100 million worldwide. He is headlining his own "To A Tour" through the summer, and this fall will be joining the Old Dominion "Make It Sweet Tour."
1. We don't see a lot of Country artists from Michigan. How did you get enamored of country music? I understand hearing it on the radio was formative for you.
Yeah, we had one of the largest Country music radio stations in the entire country in West Michigan, B93 [WBCT/Grand Rapids]. Kalamazoo is very much rust belt meets rural, so there's a lot of industry and there's also a lot of people who live out in the country. I feel like there are so many Country music fans in the Midwest just because a lot of the Midwest is super rural or super rust belt. So, I grew up listening to Alan Jackson and Brad Paisley. Those were the first guys that I really loved. I also love Willie Nelson, and was really influenced by rock 'n' roll too. My dad had a bunch of Beatles records, and I love like Wilco and Jimmy Eat World. That's the stuff that I was into. I think you can hear a lot of those influences in what I do now.
2. As a songwriter, how much do you think about radio when you're creating music and to what extent do you just kind of write what you write and let the radio part of it shake out how it's supposed to?
I think there are some people who are really good at writing for the radio. I've always written more as an artist, like somebody who's got something to get off their chest. So I think I've just had luck because I've written really honestly for the last six years, and a lot of those songs ... other artists have heard their voice, or heard themselves in my voice. I think about "Lonely Tonight." That's a really emotional song ... I think I get a lot of that from listening to like Willie Nelson records. The way that dude sings you can hear his voice straining with emotion, even though he sings really quietly. So that's the way that I've always approached it.
I think when you start aiming for stuff, I've never had any luck with that. It's just really hard to guess what somebody is going to want to do next, just because everybody wants to do something that they haven't done before. And so, if you try to do a song that sounds like Kenny Chesney, Kenny Chesney probably doesn't want to sound like he did five years ago. So I've never had much luck with that part. I've been really lucky though, because I have just really poured my heart into these songs and other people have kind of seen themselves in it, and taken those songs and made them their own.
3. Did having big hits with your songs cut by other artists give you the confidence to know that you could pursue your own career as an artist, or were you always planning to be an artist and those other hits were just happy accidents along the way?
Happy accidents. I might use that. That's my whole life right there.
I never imagined being this guy. I've always thought I would just be the writer, the guy behind the guy. Some days I think I'm really stupid and crazy for trying to do this, because I do still have a lot of success as a writer, and being an artist takes up, like, 90 percent of my time. So I don't know.
To be honest ... sometimes stuff gets pretty tempting to just park the bus and go home and write. But I think that I'm really lucky because I'm young, and still new at this artist part, and I've gotten to do so much stuff, whether it's have hits with other artists, or be on major tours and play arenas and big amphitheaters, or go to awards shows with Maren. I've sat in the front row of every major awards show because of her, so I've gotten to experience everything already.
I mean, some days, you wake up and you just feel like you have nothing going on, and then a month later, it feels like you're on top of the world. I think that's just the Nashville story right there.
4. How do you choose which of your songs you want to keep for yourself and which ones you want to pitch elsewhere?
I don't know. I just turn them in and if [manager] Janet [Weir] and Maren like it, I usually keep it for myself. That's kind of the way that it goes. The truth is, I have a really good A&R team and that is much more than just [the staff] at Sony. It's other writers that I write with, and it's my wife and it's my manager. I feel like they have such a good sense for what I do, maybe more so than I do sometimes.
But also, if somebody wants to record your song, it's really hard to get cuts in this town, so it's hard to turn that down. It's such an honor any time someone wants to record your song because they could potentially sing it for the rest of their career. So, I just feel like I haven't had any gigantic personal battles with songs, and usually, if I love it, I hang on to it pretty quickly so that it doesn't get pitched around too much. But I've definitely had to call record companies and be like, "Hey, I'm sorry. I'm actually going to record that myself." But it's not something that I spend a whole of time dwelling on.
5. Can you talk about the process of writing "What If I Never Get Over You," and how it got to Lady Antebellum?
I love writing with Laura Veltz, and we've written a ton of songs together. She's one of our really close friends and one of my first ever songwriter friends in this town. I actually introduced her to Maren, and they've had so much success together. So it was just another day, really, sitting down, writing with her. And then Sam Ellis, who I've written a bunch of tunes with at Universal Music, and my friend Jon Green. I'd never written with Jon before, but he just is so inspiring and his melodies are so inspiring.
I had the title, and I thought we would write it a little bit different. I wanted to write it like, "If I never get over you, this is what I'll do." Instead, Jon and Laura and Sam kind of molded it back into the terrifying question, like, "What if this is it? What if I never get over you?" We all kind of thought about that, because Laura and I are with partners that we are in great relationships with, but the idea of losing that is scary. That's kind of the emotional place that we wrote the song from.
We were just really lucky that day to write something that we felt was really honest, and then to have somebody like [Lady A's] Charles Kelley hear it, really believe in it, and say that he loved it, and then actually follow through. They made the most beautiful recording. It's different from the demo in the best way, and I'm really proud of just to have a small part of it.
6. You mentioned being in a great relationship, but I've often heard songwriters say that their best songs from the angsty parts of their lives and that they actually worry about being too happy. Do you ever think about that, and how has being happily coupled up affected your work?
I think songwriting is two things: It's perspective and it's craft. If you have to be inspired every day to write a song, then you're going to run out of that really quickly, whether you're happy or sad. Most of us who have been doing this a while have learned how to write songs from the storytelling aspect, and not necessarily from the emotional well.
Just becoming a better songwriter, if you work at it and work at it, you're going to have a lot more success if you focus on that as opposed to focusing on actually writing down whatever you're inspired or not inspired by that day. Because if you're dependent on that, then you're really dependent on something that you have no control over. A lot of people learn to treat it like a job, so whether you're in a great headspace or in an angsty headspace, you can still show up and take an idea and turn it into something really special. That's something that I've learned how to do over the last few years, and it is really fun.
Maren, obviously, is my muse. There's this joke in Nashville saying that if you're writing a song with Ryan, you're writing a song about Maren, and that was true for a long time before we were even together. She's always been this place that I've drawn from. But aside from just being inspired, and writing down my story, and writing really autobiographical songs -- which I've done -- I think I've also gotten better over the last few years, and gotten to a place where I can take an idea and know what to do with it and not necessarily be so dependent on the status of my romantic life.
7. I like your notion of songwriting being a combination of perspective and craft ...
It's true. Perspective is something that you have and that you develop through your world view, but craft is something that you can work on and hone ... I feel like all the great writers understand that, and they do really work at their craft and understand when it's not quite good enough or it's not exactly what it could be. That's what makes great songs happen.
8. "To a T" just cracked the top 40 on the Mediabase chart and it's rising. Does it feel like you're almost competing against yourself now with the Lady A song and your own song both on the chart simultaneously?
No I don't, honestly. The Lady Antebellum song feels like its own steamroller at the moment, and I'm really happy to have that song. But all my energy goes to "To A T" just because it's my name and it's my voice, and I have to be the one who goes out there and promotes it. I'm obviously pulling for the Lady Antebellum song to be a massive hit, but I'm also really focused on "To A T," more so than anything else. Stations are going to play them both, and it's going to be really special.
I'm really happy that I get to do both things. I think about like what I do as sort of like wearing a pair of shoes. You have a left foot and right foot, and I wouldn't really feel whole, as a creative person, if I didn't get to write for other people and then still have my own project.
9. Do you remember the first time you heard one of your own songs on the radio, both one you wrote for someone else and also one of your own songs as an artist?
Yeah, I had a Rascal Flatts single a couple years ago and I almost crashed my car into a telephone pole on Wedgewood [Avenue]. You hear the opening guitar lick and you're like, "Oh my god, this is incredible." Then I remember hearing [his own debut single] "Love In A Bar" a lot on radio stations.
But as far as "To A T" goes, I remember I was on the phone with Maren. I was driving in my car and I had Bobby Bones real low [on the radio,] and he played it the first day it came out. I put her on speakerphone and we listened to it together in my car. That just made me feel like, "OK, this is all going to work, one way or another. We've got people's attention, and the music is there and now we just need to promote it in a way that we hit that critical mass that [Sony Music Nashville Chairman/CEO] Randy Goodman is always talking about." So, we're just really excited about getting an opportunity to promote this song and to keep putting more songs out. I'm really excited about this one.
10. You and Maren both put a lot of your lives on social media, which your fans really love. What's your strategy with social media in terms of what and how much you wish to share?
I have no strategy. Maren is really great at it. She's just creative and visual. I just try to put stuff up that doesn't sound like it's somebody else, and I try to have fun with it, especially on Twitter. [I] just make everything a joke and try not to respond to people who are negative. I usually look and see how many followers they have because, most of the time, if somebody says something mean about you, it's like a tree falling in the forest and nobody can see it.
We try not to over share. Sometimes we just put our phones down when we're home. I've looked at Maren's stuff before on Instagram and been like, "I'm not in any of these photos," and [that's when] you kind of realize when we're together, we're not really focused on sharing. We like to have a little bit of a privacy barrier sometimes, and that's really important. But we do like people to know that we're actually married and that we do like each other.
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