Chris Young: The Day After Tomorrow

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“That song was fun to me because we were trying to use a whole lot of imagery,” Young says. “Even with the ‘Georgia hat’ line. I played that for a songwriter buddy of mine whose girlfriend was in the car and she was like, ‘I love Georgia!’ So it’s little things like that and the Flora-Bama deck. Imagery-wise, that’s one song that does that the most on this record.”

Of course, a writer can overdo the imagery – or not use it enough.

“Ninety percent of the time if I write something that I love, we write it really fast,” Young says. “So I have to be careful when I get on a song, if we love the idea and the melody and where we’re taking it. I have to say, ‘Okay, did we put enough color in there? Did we put in enough imagery in that song?’ You don’t want it to be flat when somebody listens to it. Like, ‘It’s really good … but I’ve heard that before.’ You want to at least try to find a different way to say it.”

And you don’t want to repeat yourself either.

“That’s the worst thing you can do,” he adds. “That happened to me on this record. There are two songs where I wrote with different guys, and I wrote a line and a verse that was similar and I had to change one of them. I thought, ‘This is going to be weird …’ It was a line about tipping a DJ and it was in two different songs, so I was like, ‘I have to write that again.’”

In mid-February, Young tells American Songwriter that the project is wrapping up. The recording sessions are done and the tracks are getting mixed, then mastered. Young still needs to sequence the songs before turning it into RCA.

“There are so many little things you have to do at the end,” he says. “It’s like, ‘Okay, I’ve sung everything and we’ve played everything,’ but now we have to go back and nitpick everything to death before we’re finally finished with it.”

There weren’t any last-minute additions to the track listing either.

“I don’t really overcut much. I don’t cut a bunch of songs then knock stuff off. I find what I love, go in there and cut it,” he says. “An album is a snapshot in time of who you are and where you are as an artist. So, as much as I will overthink it, you try not to overthink it.”

As for “Lighters In The Air,” Young says he’s very satisfied with the results.

“What’s cool about that song is that I haven’t had a go-to encore song,” he says, “but thematically I think that one would work perfectly.”

 

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