Tag: Nicolle Galyon

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31 Days of Women: Nicolle Galyon

Credit: Julia Cox

Editor’s Note: In celebration of Women’s History Month, You Sing I Write is highlighting female country artists and songwriters throughout March.

Nicolle Galyon is an in-demand songwriter who has penned countless radio hits and garnered two ACM Song of the Year wins with Miranda Lambert’s “Automatic” and Dan + Shay’s “Tequila.” But long before she was a mainstay on country radio, Galyon moved to Nashville with the dream of either being an artist manager or working at a record label. This dream came to fruition last July when Galyon launched Songs & Daughters, a female-focused imprint of independent record label Big Loud Records, which represents Madison Kozak and Hailey Whitters.

“My desire to be behind-the-scenes in the business is what got me here,” Galyon tell me over the phone. “But I never fully understood how that was all going to come into play until Songs & Daughters. This last year has been a lot of reminding myself what it was that made me want to move to Nashville in the first place.”

Galyon celebrated the one-year anniversary of Songs & Daughters on July 22 and says she feels like she’s just getting started. “Creating the company was a full-circle moment, but then it started a new race for me to run,” she says of Songs & Daughters, which recently added a publishing arm in partnership with Big Loud Publishing and Warner Chappell Music with the signing of songwriter Tiera.

“Writers need artists and artists need writers. My vision for Songs & Daughters is for it to be more of a music house. It’s not just a record label or a publishing company: it feels more like a home for female creatives,” she says. “It completely makes sense that the next evolution of Songs & Daughters would be a publishing company. That’s how I came to be in the business — through the publishing and the songwriting world — and so that feels very natural for everyone.”

While Kozak is the label’s flagship artist, Whitters was signed to Songs & Daughters in June. Previously collaborators in the writing room, Galyon says the signing of Whitters happened organically. “We’ve been writing for a few years now and we built trust and a mutual respect and comradery as creatives with each other,” she says of her relationship with Whitters. “It felt like we had a beautiful foundation to build upon on the label front too.”

Galyon says serving as the label head of Songs & Daughters has made her a student again. She’s been learning from the young artists and writers she signs, and in return, she hopes she is teaching each artist to trust herself.

“To me, it’s important not only for them to feel like they have someone giving them permission to be the artist and writer that they want to be, but it’s also important that I feed myself in that way. That’s the beauty of our business: it’s not just a one way street. You have to keep reinventing yourself and have to keep learning from everyone,” she says. “I never want to keep having success and keep rising to a point to where I am not feeding off of the young, new energy in Nashville.”

For more of my interview with Nicolle Galyon last year, visit Sounds Like Nashville.

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Articles

31 Days of Women: Hailey Whitters

Credit: Harper Smith

Editor’s Note: In celebration of Women’s History Month, You Sing I Write is highlighting female country artists and songwriters throughout March.

Hailey Whitters moved to Nashville 13 years ago to follow her dream of becoming a country singer. Her latest album, Living The Dream Deluxe, was released in February and follows the singer’s long journey of navigating Music City, while also sharing elements of her small-town Iowa roots.

“My mom brought me to Nashville when I was 15-years-old and we went to the Grand Ole Opry,” Whitters tells me over coffee at Nashville’s Falcon Coffee Bar weeks after making her Opry debut in 2019. “That curtain went up and I saw those lights and that was the moment I was like, ‘This is what I want to do for the rest of my life.’”

Whitters has had several country artists record her songs including Little Big Town (“Happy People”), Alan Jackson (“The Older I Get”) and Martina McBride (“Low All Afternoon,” “The Real Thing”), and now the singer-songwriter is sharing her talent with the world. In 2020, she signed a record deal in partnership with her own label, Pigasus Records, and Big Loud Records/Songs & Daughters.

Below is an excerpt of my interview with Whitters from 2019 shortly after she released her EP, The Days, which she self-funded.

When was the moment you knew you wanted to be an artist?

I come from a non-musical family. I always had this draw to country music, and I have a memory of sitting on the back of my dad’s lawnmower while he mowed the lawn, singing to myself. I think I always had a really strong pull to writing. I remember being in elementary school, and I had a guidance counselor who knew that I had this passion for it, and he asked who I like. I liked the Dixie Chicks and the Spice Girls. He was like, “Well, you know the Dixie Chicks write their own music.” So then I got a guitar and I started dabbling with that.

What was the first song you ever wrote? 

My friends and I, we would try to start a chick band on the playground in elementary school and Spiceworld  had just come out. So we were making up dances and pretending we are the Spice Girls. We wrote this one song. I’m trying to remember how it went … I remember the feeling of writing a song back then. It felt like you could do anything and that’s still a feeling I get today when I write a song that I just love. You walk out and you feel like you’re on top of the world.

What’s the most autobiographical song on your EP?

“Ten Year Town” is probably the most autobiographical song because it feels so up-close and personal. [It’s] very much like my broken heart ballad to Nashville. I wrote that song with Brandy [Clark] two years ago and I was only 10 years into [living in Nashville]. Jake [Gear] was like, “You should change it. You’re only here 10 years.” It’s been this weird universe thing that we’re finally releasing it and I am 12 years in. It was just a weird timing thing.

What’s the story behind “Heartland?”

I was feeling really homesick and just questioning like, “Well, what’s my place in Nashville?” I was writing with Nicolle [Galyon] and Forest [Glen Whitehead]. Nicolle is also from the Midwest, so we started talking about going home and Nashville. [Songwriter] Barry Dean told me once, “Nashville will try and change you and make you someone you’re not. It’ll make you forget who you are and it’s important to find that place or those people that you can go to that bring you back.” That’s always been the Midwest [for me]. The Heartland and everything it stands for: hard work and honesty and good people. That is what always draws me to the Midwest. I like to go back a lot. It keeps me grounded.

For more of my interview with Hailey Whitters, visit Billboard. Her latest project Living the Dream Deluxe, which includes “Fillin’ My Cup” featuring Little Big Town, is out now.

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Songwriting Session

Songwriting Session with Nicolle Galyon

Credit: Jessica Steddom

Songwriting Session is a column that goes behind-the-scenes with artists and songwriters. Each Sunday, a new songwriter will share their journey and provide lessons they’ve learned along the way. This week, Nicolle Galyon shares what she has learned as a songwriter.

There’s a very good chance when you turn on the radio one of Nicolle Galyon’s songs will be playing. Ten years since signing her first publishing deal, the songwriter currently has five singles at country radio including Kenny Chesney’s “All the Pretty Girls,” Lady Antebellum’s “Heart Break,” RaeLynn’s “Lonely Call,” Florida Georgia Line’s “Smooth” and Lee Brice’s “Boy.”

The Kansas native’s songwriting journey is more than a decade in the making as she moved to Nashville in 2002 with the plan to pursue a career in artist management. During her time as a student at Belmont she worked as a personal assistant for Greg Oswald at William Morris Endeavor Entertainment (WME) where she was frequently surrounded by music and industry professionals. She recalls being mesmerized while attending guitar pulls her first year in Music City and it’s there that she was first hit with the songwriting bug.

“I was like, ‘Wait, this is a job? You can do this? I think this is actually what I should be doing,’” Galyon says over the phone.

Galyon grew up around music and played classical piano. Her real passion was country music though and somewhere between classes and acting as a personal assistant, songwriting spread like wildfire in her heart and overtook all the things she previously thought she’d pursue. By the time she graduated from Belmont her dream of a career as an artist manager changed to becoming a songwriter. She took all the lessons from working for a booking agent with her and admits that one of the most important things she learned was to have thick skin.

“It really taught me to not take anything personally and to have a thick skin and to see behind the curtain of how deals get done and how business really goes down,” she explains of her time shadowing Oswald. “That perspective has really helped me, even as a songwriter, when something doesn’t go my way or my song isn’t a single or my song doesn’t make a record. That job gave me the 30,000-foot perspective to realize it’s not all about you and it’s not about the song. There’s a lot of moving parts here that has to go right in order for something to happen.”

Her time as Oswald’s assistant frequently had her in the presence of other songwriters, publishers and producers. Galyon vividly remembers parties where she’d be cleaning up and someone would ask her to play them a song she wrote. She says it was in these moments that she earned her stripes in bravery and thanks to Paul Worley, one of the people in the room that heard her songs, she was introduced to BJ Hill from Warner/Chappell Nashville where she signed in 2007.

“I met so many people through that job,” Galyon reflects. “I say I got my degree from Belmont, but my education from working for Greg Oswald.”

In 2013, Galyon saw her first taste of success when Keith Urban recorded “We Were Us,” a song she co-wrote with longtime collaborators Jimmy Robbins and Jon Nite. Galyon recalls writing the No. 1 song shortly after she came back from her 10-year high school reunion. Robbins and Nite had written with Thomas Rhett earlier that day and played her an idea that they didn’t wind up using. She says they had the beginning of the song’s chorus, “Back when that song was a song I could sing along.”

“They had the top of the chorus written, but they didn’t know what the title would be. There was really no idea yet. Because I had just come back from my hometown, this little rural farm town in Kansas, all of this small town imagery started coming out of my mouth. Then I started singing some of the verses,” she recalls. “I was really nostalgic thinking about my whole class because I had just seen all my classmates. We’re all married and some are pregnant and have kids and I’m just looking at us going, ‘Man, that’s when we were us. Now we’ll never be us again, me and my class. You can never go back to that time.’”

For more of my chat with Nicolle Galyon, visit Sounds Like Nashville.