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Interview: Hit songwriter ERNEST reflects on chart success, the Nashville mafia & new album ‘Two Dozen Roses’

2022 was a terrific year for Nashville-based songwriter ERNEST. His own song, ‘Flower Shops’, featuring Morgan Wallen, brought him to the wider attention of the radio crowd and the album of the same name was in many publications’ top 10’s of the year. On top of that number one singles with Wallen, Jelly Roll and Kane Brown hit the top of the charts too.

ERNEST is aiming to eclipse the success of 2022 this year and the first step towards achieving that is the release of an extension to the ‘Flower Shops’ album entitled ‘Two Dozen Roses’, out on February 10th. We talked to ERNEST all about it.

Thank you for your time today, ERNEST, we do appreciate it.

No problem, thanks for having me.

Let’s start with a congratulations on the success of ‘Flower Shops’ last year. That song burned and burned for you all year. Did you know you had something special on your hands when you wrote it?

Definitely! It felt different to most of the other songs I’ve written. We had so much fun writing it and it didn’t take a lot of time either. You can never predict or guess the trajectory of a song but that one did feel very special. 

I look forward to the day, though, when it doesn’t necessarily have to be the ‘grand finale’ song because that will mean I’ve written some even better ones by then! (laughing)

Morgan Wallen and Ernest
Credit: Big Loud Records

You had an amazing 2022 as both a writer and as an artist. Did you have any real stand-out moments or events that really resonated with you and made lasting memories?

If I had to narrow down to just a few I’d say getting to sing ‘Flower Shops’ at Madison Square Gardens with Morgan (Wallen) – that was awesome.

Debuting at the The Grand Ole Opry was a childhood dream of mine which we achieved last year.

As a writer? This most recent number one with Jelly Roll – ‘Son of a Sinner’ – was very special. That’s three unassuming Nashville guys on that track, right there! Two of us were rappers at one point too. It’s the weirdest, coolest fairytale story you could imagine! (laughing) If you had told me when I was hanging out with Jelly Roll in high school that we would have a number one song at Country radio I just would not have taken that seriously!

I love the guy. He sings about real people going through real shit, and that there is Country music, right?

There seems to be a real developing Nashvillian mafia around town right now. Yourself, Jelly Roll, Mitchell Tenpenny are all having great success. Who else should be included in your Nashville mafia?

Oh man. Conner Smith is another one of us. On the writers side? Our guy John Byron is cool. Grady and Rocky Block, the brothers. Reece Rutherford is another cat on the scene that people need to take notice of – his dad Rivers Rutherford was a huge writer in the industry in the early 2000’s. There’s a lot of good Nashvillians bubbling and boiling right now. We’re aiming to take the town back from those Georgia boys! (laughing)

Speaking of Georgia boys, then. We’ve had Kane Brown over in the UK recently. He played both your ‘One Mississippi’ and ‘Memory’ co-writes at the shows. What was it like working with him?

Kane’s great. I love him. He’s always willing to go in whatever direction the song needs. From super-Honky Tonk to straight Rap, Pop and R&B. From a creative standpoint, that is so awesome. We wrote a few songs together down in the Florida Keys at a beautiful house on the water – that doesn’t suck either! (laughing)

Kane knows what he wants to say and he doesn’t lock himself in a corner.

Let’s talk about your forthcoming ‘Two Dozen Roses’ album release. What was your thinking behind extending the original album with another batch of songs rather than releasing a brand new product?

The brass tacks answer there is that there are more reasons beyond just me to put out a deluxe album. It’s beneficial for streaming, for consumption, whatever. I handed in an album’s worth of songs so I wouldn’t call this a deluxe album at all – it’s more of a part two.

It would make more sense if it was seen as a part two rather than just a deluxe album. 

I saw you say on Twitter that every song on the album had been a true story at some point over the past year. Is there one song on there that is the most deeply personal to you?

I think ‘The Hill’ might be. Brett Tyler brought most of that idea in and I immediately gravitated towards it and wanted to finish it. When that song was written we were living in a ranch style house that was built in the 60’s and we were thinking about turning it inside out and making it our forever home. 

Now, when the album comes out, we will be in a new house that we bought that has a little more acreage on it so that my boy has more space to ride. That song means so much more and in a slightly different way than it did to begin with. 

At the same time ‘This Fire’ also means a lot to me. I don’t know a guy in this industry who can’t relate to that song. Not even in the music industry, there isn’t a guy in the whole world who won’t relate to ‘This Fire’. We all got fire out there and the fight in life is to try and repel it as much as possible.

Funny story the day we wrote ‘This Fire’. Myself and the other writers were in the room at Julian Bunetta’s house. Me, John Ryan and Rocky Block. We didn’t have a title and Julian was like, I’m going to go online into this A.I. thing and generate a Country music title! By the way, Chatbot GPT just beat the bar exam so this thing is advanced, right?

A list of 20 songs was spit out and the second one was ‘This Fire’ and I was, like, ‘OK then boys, we’re writing that one!’ (laughing) We sat around and talked about ‘what’ the fire should be and got there pretty damn quickly to be honest. 

What was it like writing with Charles Kelly on ‘Songs We Used to Sing’?

It was awesome. Charles is great. I could listen to him sing the phone book and not get bored. We wrote two songs that day. The first one was a song called ‘Bad For Me’ that I think is a ‘Charles song’ and then I was messing around and playing a progression and we wrote ‘Songs We Used to Sing’ second, pretty quickly, and he was, like, ‘Man, this song is for you, you gotta song this.’

We each got a song that day so there was no tug of war! (laughing) I think Charles is going to come out and sing that song with me when I’m there at The Opry next.

I really like ‘Wild, Wild West’ on the new batch of songs.

I wrote that one with my best friend, Rafe Tenpenny, who I just signed to Cadillac Music. Mitchell’s brother, right? Rafe and I made some of my first music together back in 5th and 6th grade so when the opportunity came up to start my own publishing Rafe said he was ready to start writing for real and so we did it! 

What were your template of influences for ‘Wild, Wild West’?

If you had to guess what the template and the influences were what would you say?

Of the modern bands I can hear a lot of Midland and that West coast style on there.

You’re right about that West Coast Country! The Eagles were a huge influence to me on that song. The Band, as well, were another unspoken influence on both ‘Wild, Wild West’ and ‘This Fire’. 

When you write a song do you consider yourself stronger on lyrics or melodies or does it chop and change according to the song and the day of the week? I love the fact that ‘Miss That Girl’ sounds like the cadence of a child’s nursery rhyme. It’s so melodic.

That was very intentional on that song, for sure. The melody I was playing on the guitar that day automatically just generated the ‘red dirt, red dirt’ cadence. Needless to say it is one of my son’s favourite songs on the album! (laughing) He loves that one and ‘Unhang the Moon’. When he hears the intro to that song he says, ‘……Moon?’ He knows that one.

To answer your question about lyrics or melodies, it totally depends on the day. Somedays I got nothing to bring to the table in terms of lyrics, or it might well be somebody else’s day, right? You know, when Ashley Gorley shows up with an idea you are duty bound to let him run with it! (laughing) It depends on who you are writing with and what their ideas and strengths are. No two back-to-back days are ever the same in this town.

Is there anyone you haven’t managed to get into a room with in Nashville who you’d like to write a song with

Yeah! I wanna write with Shane McAnally. To grab a day with him and Josh Osborne would be so cool. I’ve written with Josh before and Shane and I have talked ideas back and forth a little. He stopped by when I was writing with Ashley Gorley one time and we sort of halfway wrote a song but I’d love to sit down with him fully and get one done.

You’ve already mentioned your new publishing company. What’s the motivation for you stepping into the business side of the industry? Why now?

I have the resources to be writing a lot more on the road now. Even my drummer, Grady, is a writer with Big Loud now. It was happening organically and having Chandler Walters out on the road with us is great. He’s writing a lot with Bailey Zimmerman right now. I found a guy called Cody Lohden on Instagram and I was like, we need to write with this guy, he’s good.

The time is now and I’m blessed to be able to use Big Loud’s resources on all of the stuff I am not good at behind the scenes, right? I’m good at the creative side of things.

Yourself, Morgan Wallen, HARDY and writers like Ben Burgess are sort of responsible for pulling Country music back into something a little more traditional right now. Do you guys talk about that and was it always an intention you had?

It would be true to say that it is not just us. Culture, as a whole, has shifted into a sort of cowboy world. Yellowstone is the new hottest playlist for any artist to get on. Alongside that you have artists like Charles Wesley Godwin and Zach Bryan doing their thing too. What you might have called Americana five years ago is now considered Country music. 

Me and Morgan, when we see ‘You Proof’ doing 10 weeks at number one? We can’t believe what we’ve managed to achieve but we never sat around a round table plotting all this out, right? We just write songs and have so much fun doing it. Listen to the HARDY album. That dude is doing exactly what he wants to do. I’m doing exactly what I want to do. We’re not trying to be anyone else and if people like that, hell yeah! 

What are the chances of us seeing you over in the UK this year? I know you’re heading out to Australia and New Zealand soon.

I think about this a lot and it could be on the plans for this year but there’s nothing confirmed right now. I’d love to come spend a couple of weeks over with you guys, even taking music out of the equation, just to see the country and have a drink with y’all.

ERNEST’s new album, ‘Flower Shops: Two Dozen Roses’ is out Friday 10th February. Pre-order or buy it right here.

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