Ashley Gorley is a songwriter like no other. Raised in rural Kentucky, he graduated from Nashville’s Belmont University in 1999 with a degree in music business, hoping to be a songwriter but intent on any career in the industry. Smash cut 24 years later and Gorley is one of, if not the, most successful writers in Country music history with 64 number ones and over 400 songs cut. He was recently announced as ‘Songwriter of the Decade’ at the Nashville Songwriter Awards.
It’s probably easier to list who hasn’t benefitted from his (humble) magical touch but the likes of Carrie Underwood, Brad Paisley, Jason Aldean, Thomas Rhett, Lee Brice and Morgan Wallen have all been co-writers and recipients of the Gorley magic. When we found it he was going to be playing the CMA songwriters night in London for the 2023 C2C festival we couldn’t wait to get a peak behind the curtain of his talent and were thrilled to grab 10 minutes with him before the show.
It’s such a privilege to talk to you today, Ashley, thank you for your time.
Of course, and thank you too.
I love these type of songwriter rounds that we are at here in London tonight. What thrill do you get out of playing them?
I’m actually a very nervous non-performer! I don’t do this very often. I was never an artist, I’ve never been in a band. So a night like this is quite uncomfortable to me but nights like this are great because you get to see people enjoying these songs that we just made up in a room somewhere in Nashville! Seeing the reactions to my songs is pretty cool, even if they are not sung as well as the original recordings are!
How do you decide, out of all your cuts and number one hits, which songs to play at evenings like this?
(laughing) I’ll ask my daughter, who is here in London with me on this trip, right before I go on! A lot of the times I play piano just to have a little different vibe up there on the stage and I’m more comfortable sitting behind that than I would be playing guitar. I tend to do songs that sound good on piano.
Sometimes I’ll do songs that were huge hits and other times I’ll do a song that no-one has ever heard of. Tonight I think I’m going to focus on songs that were released in the last year or two. (Editor’s note: Ashley played ‘One of Them Girls’ (Lee Brice) ‘You Should Probably Leave’ (Chris Stapleton) ‘She Had Me At Heads Carolina’ (Cole Swindell) and ‘Sand in My Boots’ (Morgan Wallen)
‘…Heads Carolina’ was a huge song for you last year. Did you feel like you had something special on your hands when you wrote it?
That one, I think I probably did, yes. You never know how big a song will be when you write it but once we had firmed up what that song was going to sound like, we tried it in a lot of different ways, I was fairly sure it would do well.
I was brought in to help tie it all up together and figure out a couple of angles and do all the weird stuff I do to help make something right. I was very proud of that song and would have bet a reasonable amount of money that it was going to be a hit. (laughing)
Is there a song you’ve written that has gone the other way and didn’t turn out to be as impactful as you thought it might be?
Hundreds of em! (laughing) Sometimes things happen. The promo department changes, the timing is off, the label aren’t as behind the song as you need them to be or even an artist quits, you know? I usually have a pretty good gauge on what is going to work. I wrote a song with HARDY called ‘Give Heaven Some Hell’ that I thought was going to be bigger than it was, I don’t know whether it was because we had the word ‘hell’ in the title and some stations were nervous about that or what but it was still a big song, just not as big as we’d imagined.
Is there a song that you credit with igniting your career?
The first hit I ever had was ‘Don’t Forget to Remember Me’ by Carrie Underwood. That was the first number one. The winner of ‘American Idol’ selling eight million copies, right, so I’d probably have to say that one. It made me begin to think that something interesting was going to happen in terms of writing.
‘T Shirt’ with Thomas Rhett was a big song for me. ‘That’s My Kinda Night’ with Luke Bryan. Those were pushing the boundaries of the genre a little which some people didn’t like but the fans really did. We had a little more freedom to run away melodically and try some crazier stuff and so I credit songs like those and even songs I didn’t write, like ‘Cruise’, with widening the boundaries of the genre a little and allowing us all to pay attention to the melodies a little more than had previously been possible in Country music.
When you get in a room with TR, Carrie, Jason Aldean or Brad Paisley, they all have their own different vibes and styles. Does that mean you have to be a chameleon and change all the time as a writer?
They are ALL different! (laughing) Yes, I do have to be something like a chameleon. I don’t know what the right word is, it’s more like I’m there to service them and be a part of their world. There’s a small window we have to create something lasting for them so I can’t think ‘what would I like to do today’ I have to think, ‘what do they need from me today’, right?
As a writer you have to get in the mind set of writing something for an artist that sounds like them stylistically but is something that they haven’t done before. Some of my sessions the artist isn’t even there, I and the other writers with me are aiming something at them that they might like. I’m not an artist, I just use what I’m good at to craft something that they and their fans might like.
On the days where the juices aren’t flowing do you have any tips or strategies to kick start the creativity off?
I just refuse to let writer’s block happen! (laughing) I refuse to strike out even if I have to sit there for five hours. You can take a break, go outside, grab a drink but my Tape Room music team that work for me are amazing and they keep things so fresh and mixed up that the ideas are always there or thereabouts. We get very hell bent on getting something great and refuse to be defeated by anything like writers block, which is illegal in our team!
You can always start another song if the one you are working on isn’t happening, we do that lots of times. I’ll often throw away a song three quarters of the way through and delete the whole thing, I do that a lot which drives people crazy!
ERNEST recently told me he used a Chatbot to generate some Country music titles and then wrote ‘This Fire’ from it, which is the best song on his new album. How do you feel about the development of A.I. and creativity in that way?
(laughing) ‘This Fire’ is a great song but the title is nothing special, you know what I mean? I have no social media and I keep things simple when I write but I guess that anything that helps or helps to generate ideas is absolutely fine by me. If there was a sentence generator I might even use something like that but it has to be a human that puts it all together and puts the heart into it. It’s more helpful when writing term papers at college, I guess, than it is in the music industry right now.
Anything that gets the ball rolling is fine by me but I would never let a Chatbot finish, you know what I mean?
Are there any up and coming artists in Nashville that are on your radar as the next big thing?
Nate Smith and Lainey, who are both up on the stage with me tonight are great artists. I got to do a few songs with Nate recently which was fun. He’s a great singer. Bailey Zimmerman is doing really well right now. My writer Ben Johnson and his band Track45 should have some good songs coming out soon too. ERNEST, HARDY and Morgan Wallen, that whole crew, are good dudes who are making good music. I like Parker McCollum, Jordan Davis – there’s so many talented people around right now.
Do you see yourself very much like a mentor in the industry now.
Absolutely. That’s probably my favourite thing to do. I wanted to be a publisher and a songwriter for the longest time, it was always my true passion so my goal is to get our writers at Tape Room to beat me to writer of the year, I would love for that to happen. I want to get to a point where my team don’t need me! (laughing)
I would like to get to a point where they have figured it out and I’d like to think I had a hand in helping them get to that point, it’s something I take very seriously. We have a great family and mentoring is a part of my everyday process that I value so much.
NASA are sending three of your songs into space as examples of Country music for alien civilisations. Which three do you choose?
(laughing) Oh my gosh. I’d try to pick three different sounding songs. I might send ‘You Should Probably Leave’ by Chris Stapleton, maybe ‘You Proof’ by Morgan Wallen too. They are both totally different. I might send an old George Strait song up there or an old Randy Travis instead of one of mine, that would give a nice breadth and difference to the songs on offer! Sounds like a good idea though!
