So just how does a songwriter come up with a song?
We posed this question to Old Dominion’s Matthew Ramsey during a phone call from Nashville last week to talk about the band's show at Country Thunder on Thursday, April 7. He walked us through the process for two of his band’s singles — “Break Up With Him” and “Snapback” — which he cowrote.
A little background on the songwriting bonafides for Ramsey and his bandmates: The Virginia natives, who take their name from their beloved home state, came to Nashville a decade ago to write songs.
“We just wanted to come here and learn to write the best songs that we can and that’s what we focused on for a really long time,” he said.
Ramsey has songwriting credits on hit songs by Kenny Chesney (“Save It For A Rainy Day”), Sam Hunt (“Ex To See,” “Make You Miss Me”), Pat Green (“Day One”), Craig Morgan (“Wake Up Lovin’ You”), Luke Bryan (“Goodbye Girl”) and The Band Perry (“Chainsaw”).
“It is a great feeling to have another artist record your song and see it go up the charts,” he said. “But when you are the one that’s on that stage night after night, seeing those crowds show up and you can hear them singing your songs and feel their energy, you kind of cut out the middle man. You are the one that’s connecting and you feel that direct connection and you are no longer behind the curtains any more. It’s amazing to feel that.”
Here’s how he and his bandmates came up with their first two singles:
• “Break Up With Her” — “That was us just trying to make each other laugh,” he said.
The band came up with the melody during a jam session at soundcheck. Not long afterward, as they were traveling by van to a gig in South Carolina, Ramsey toyed around with the idea of having a one-sided phone call to tell a love interest to ditch her boyfriend. “Trevor (Rosen) was awake in the back so I went of the back of the van and I said, ‘What about this?’ and he started playing it. I was whispering in my phone, quiet so I wouldn’t wake the guys up. I was like, ‘Hey girl, what’s up? I know it’s late but I knew you’d pick it up.’ Just because I was whispering it set this tone to the song. We have a recording of it and you can hear the seatbelts rattling in the van.”
• “Snapback” — “I just kept hearing that word, people talking about snapbacks. It was a new word for an old thing. … I kept hearing it and I wrote it down. We kept seeing people showing up at like Country Thunder, especially girls, with these snapbacks. In the back of the bus one day, I threw out the title and Brad (Tursi, who penned Tyler Farr’s hit ‘A Guy Walks Into A Bar’) jumped in and we were off to the races.”
