It’s not often you’ll hear Eminem namechecked in a hit country song. But there he is, in the first verse of “My Girl,” the breakthrough hit by Louisiana-born Dylan Scott: “She looks so pretty with her makeup on, and I love it when she raps to an Eminem song.”
Like most of Scott’s songs, it came out of real life.
“I married my high school sweetheart. We’ve been together since I was 15. She can be a little wild and crazy, but she’s got a great ear, too. I run all my songs by her. It just happened one day that an Eminem song came on the radio and she started rapping to it. I thought that was hot, and the whole song got based around that one idea.”
The song likely struck a chord as his self-titled album went platinum, and “My Girl” was one of the most played country songs in 2017. Scott plays a sold-out show at the Paradise tonight.
If you’re an old-school country purist, Scott probably isn’t your guy: His brand of country is heavily spiked with rock; there are touches of hip-hop in the production and he even raps a couple of times.
“If it feels good to me, I say let’s do it. The man who was my hero, the guy I grew up listening to the most, was Keith Whitley. But at the same time, I was listening to Tim McGraw and George Strait — plus Li’l Wayne and T-Pain, and these days I listen to a lot of Post Malone. You never know where the spark of creativity is going to come from.”
Scott grew up in the northeast Louisiana town of Bastrop, where his dad was a touring guitarist who played for Tex-Mex legend Freddy Fender, among others.
“I grew up hearing a lot of my dad’s stories, but I didn’t wind up meeting many of those artists. I was in the middle of nowhere and the music atmosphere that I knew was literally me and a couple of buddies playing in their houses. I joined a little gospel trio when I was 14, otherwise, I did a lot of watching music awards shows and thinking, ‘Man, I’ve got to get out of here.’”
It took a move to Nashville to get his music underway, and he felt at home there musically.
“Nashville is way less traditional than it used to be. That’s what’s cool about country music right now. You’ve got some guys going mainstream, some going rock or pop. You get to find your niche and what works for your fans.”
Along with a hit album, 2017 brought the birth of his son, Beckett. In a new song he’s posted online, “3AM,” he sings about rocking his kid to sleep during the wee hours that he used to spend carousing.
“That’s the first of my daddy songs. It’s going to be a big part of my life from now on. But we’ll always keep the rowdy songs too, and I can’t imagine doing any fewer of those.”
