Country careers are built, as The Oak Ridge Boys like to say, on “three minutes of magic.” And the next most important ingredient for career longevity, as The Oaks also like to say, is “three more minutes of magic.”
George Birge found his first three-minute life-changer with “Mind on You,” a mysterious-sounding 2022 release about romantic obsession that peaked at No. 2 on Country Airplay on Jan. 6, 2024.
Of course, the three-minute creations don’t usually appear through magic. Songwriters typically spend hours – months sometimes – working on songs that never get heard outside the publisher’s office. And even when they do get into public circulation, a song that feels seamless may not reflect the amount of time that went into its creation.
“As songwriters, we go into the deepest, darkest corners of these things, trying to create magic and trying to create stuff that people feel,” Birge says. “You never know if that extra two hours or three hours you spend on a 10-second part of the song, or direction, is even going to resonate, or if people are ever gonna catch it.”
That provides a solid framework for what’s likely to become Birge’s second “thee minutes of magic.” “Cowboy Songs,” released by RECORDS Nashville to country radio via PlayMPE on Feb. 22, is – like “Mind On You” – a mysterious-sounding song about romantic obsession, but its 187-second script required perhaps 17 hours to write on its date of creation, and then another six months or so to fully develop its final sonic persona.
Birge leaned into it with three fellow writers on Feb. 3, 2023, in a retreat at a Tims Ford lake house, between Lynchburg and Winchester, south of Nashville. By leaving town, Birge says, “I can turn the real world off for a second [and] have a lot more fruitful songwriting.”
The time of year helped that effort.
“It was dead of the winter, and I think that was the best thing for us,” says co-writer Michael Tyler (“Somewhere On A Beach,” “Girl Like You”). “All we did the whole time was write. I think we wrote three or four songs in two days. And we knew instantly that this was the one. If it was during the summertime, I don’t think we would have wrote any of those. We would just be out on a boat.”
“Cowboy Songs” originated with songwriter/producer Matt McGinn (“Bury Me In Georgia,” “7500 OBO”), who had the hook – “she only dances to cowboy songs” – but thought it would work best if the music was somewhat antithetical to the lyrical theme.
“We wanted it to be something you wouldn’t expect,” Tyler says.
Songwriter/producer Lalo Guzman (Sammy Arriaga, Dylan Schneider) whipped out a track he’d created that he believed would be too far afield, but he liked it and figured it would at least give them a starting place to explore the sound’s direction. His co-writers all jumped in on that very track.
“I was like, ‘For real?’” Guzman recalls. “It was just wild.”
Tyler sang what became the hook at the start of the chorus, and they knocked out a good part of that stanza before jumping to the opening verse, where they set up the scenario. The protagonist had staked out a place in a bar, where he’d ordered a mystery woman’s favorite drink and brought a lighter to attend to her smoking needs. The guy didn’t know her name or if she’d even show up, but he was prepared if she did.
“As a younger kid, when I first started going out to bars and stuff with a fake ID, you would see this girl that’s just like magic,” Birge remembers. “She’s captivating a room. Everybody’s looking at her – and this is back when Austin had these cash-only bars and it was smoking, and edgy, and jukebox. I was immediately transported back to that scene, and I was like, ‘Okay, how do I capture that in a song?’ and like, ‘Who is she? And who’s watching her?’”
When they got back to the chorus, they revised the foundation a bit to change things up. “We were singing the chorus over the same verse chords for a second,” Tyler says. “I can’t remember who it was – maybe it was Lalo, the producer – that was like, ‘What if we went somewhere completely different for the chorus chords?’ It really lifted and took that chorus into a different space, and made it made it a lot more hooky.”
Birge dropped in a Waylon Jennings reference – “I definitely was very heavily influenced by Waylon, so it’s probably not an accident,” Birge says – and they kept a Texas-based narrative in verse two, with a note that “She makes love like an Amarillo rain.”
“In Texas, rain is very hard to come by, and you’re always praying for it,” Birge explains. “You’re begging for it to come, and then when it does rain, it’s long and steady, and it lasts forever. That was the vision I had.”
Much of the 17 hours on the retreat was devoted to the demo, which included enough steel guitar and Dobro to insert a little Western flare into the mysterious sound. They worked on the master multiple times, with Andy Ellison providing steel at the beginning and Birge spending three hours on the vocal track, drinking tequila to set the barroom mood and focusing on specific inflections. They blended three different basses to get the low end sound, but they kept going back to the studio in an attempt to get the drums right. Originally, it had no live drums, then Guzman oversaw a session that took the percussion too far afield. Finally, McGinn worked with drummer Phil Lawson, who held back during much of the three minutes, but pounded the snares when it fit.
“Matt took it to where it needed to go to,” Guzman says. “I was almost envisioning it a little too pop – like The Weeknd kind of drums. For some reason, the groove wasn’t clicking. Matt brought in that space that I wasn’t hearing.”
Sometime after the song’s completion, McGinn was arrested Oct. 31 on a domestic violence charge. He has, Birge says, dedicated himself to recovery.
Meanwhile, Birge began playing “Cowboy Songs” live during the fall, planning it as his next single. It debuted at No. 55 on the Country Airplay chart dated March 9, two weeks ahead of the label’s impact date. “I’ve never had a song that we play live react like this,” he says. “I go to the meet and greet line, and every single person in line would be like, ‘This song, “She only dances to cowboy songs,” when does that come out?’”
Thus, early indications suggest that the 17-hour writing session and the months of agonizing over drums sounds may have given Birge what he most needed from “Cowboy Songs”: three more minutes of magic.
