David Nail on How a Chick Flick Inspired New Album
If someone had told David Nail last year that he’d be spending his time off the road in 2015 working on his fourth studio album, he wouldn’t have believed it.
“To be honest, I had no intentions of making a record at this point in the year,” the singer-songwriter tells Rolling Stone Country. “I took the first two-and-a-half, three months off for the first part of the year. I wanted to get away from playing music and traveling and all that. But at the same time, I miss the creative part of making music. I really dug in and started writing immediately in January and wrote two or three songs that I wanted to go in and record. . . but not really for the record, I just wanted to record demos of them to start the process.”
Executives at Nail’s record label, MCA Nashville, caught wind of his new work and after hearing the new tunes, persuaded him to start the album.
“Any time you get that vote of confidence, it motivates you and it shows they still believe in you as an artist,” Nail reasons.
That confidence boost resulted in more songs “appearing out of nowhere,” the singer humbly confesses. He is still riding that wave of creativity, writing more songs for the project that hit personal, emotional notes, and recording them during rare stretches of days at home in Nashville.
“It’s going to be good,” Nail says of the album, “but I feel weird saying that because every artist says, ‘This is the best album [I’ve] ever made.’ But since we were able to do it mostly all in one sitting, the theme of the record fits more front-to-back than any other record I’d made in the past.”
Much like his last LP, 2014’s I’m a Fire, the new set of tunes is reflective of Nail’s past and present. One that he notes strikes a particularly personal chord is “Home,” inspired by his hometown (and Sheryl Crow’s) of Kennett, Missouri. The 36-year-old singer was prepping to headline a concert back home and was admittedly anxious about it, with those nerves following him into a writing session with Lori McKenna and Barry Dean.
“I didn’t have the goal of writing a song about my hometown, about my life, but with the anxiousness of that show being a few days away, it was very much on my mind,” Nail recalls. “I told myself a long time ago that I wanted to limit the reflective songs and songs about my childhood and how I was raised. But I’ve always been a sucker for them and I feel like this was the first one that I had written that really captures the feelings that I feel when I go back and those early relationships that I had. It set the tone for it to be a personal record.”
David Nail on How a Chick Flick Inspired New Album, Page 1 of 2