Ben Johnson is one third of the sibling trio, Track45, but is also a seminal songwriter in his own right – gaining his first number one hit recently with Lee Brice’s ‘One Of Them Girls.’ Here, we interview Ben about the track, writing with Ashley Gorley, moving to Nashville with his siblings, Track45 and his journey so far.
Hello!
Hey, how’s it going?
Good. Thank you! Congratulations on a first number one – that must feel amazing!
Yeah, it’s amazing. It’s something you kind of dream about when you’re a kid and when it happens, it feels pretty surreal. I feel like I’m gonna look back in like a year and probably it’ll sink in more.
Did you have a feeling with that song in the room that day? Did you think ‘you know what, this could be something special’?
Yes, but it was also pretty crazy. I mean we didn’t finish writing it until about two in the morning and then I made the demo until about four in the morning. So I was working on it from about 10 or 11 at night until four in the morning. So, I was mostly just really tired. That was a crazy one, though, because I did have a good feeling about it. I got a text from all the guys – we were in a group text – at about 8am the next morning, with Lee saying ‘Hey, I’m in the studio, we’re cutting it right now – that was pretty rare to turn around that quickly, crazy – it was just a few hours. I’ve never experienced anything like that before and I don’t know if I’ll ever see that again, it was a really, really fast turnaround.
I mean usually I hear about songs sitting on the shelf for ages and you’re not totally sure what’s happening to them, so it’s crazy to see that journey be so short.
It was definitely unusual! I thought, ‘How are you even awake right now?’ I’m so tired…
I know that track was one you wrote with Ashley Gorley, who’s obviously had a huge amount of success. So when did you meet Ashley and how did that come about? I can imagine he’s one of those people you want to get him in a room with.
Yeah so when I moved here, about seven years ago, maybe eight years ago now, I had actually never co-written any songs before. I realised quickly that Nashville is a song town and it’s all about the songs here. It’s so important that you have great songs and there’s so many other talented people that you would just be an idiot not to collaborate with, you know, other really talented people. So I very quickly started looking for opportunities to find great co writers. He hadn’t had 52 number ones then, but I think he had had about 30 number ones at that time. I thought if I can just talk to him, even just have a conversation with him, I’ll feel like I made it. I got a meeting with him through a mutual friend and was actually with my band, Track45, and he met with us and dropped some knowledge, but I thought ‘okay, maybe one day I’ll see you again,’ but I said ‘Hey can I get your email and I promise I won’t hit you up too much, but if I could just send you songs once a month, would you let me do that?’ He said that was fine, so I sent him songs once a month for about a year and he would hit me back and be like, ‘this is pretty good’ or ‘you could do this differently here.’ He would give me great feedback and we developed a friendship over that. Eventually, I sent him a song that he thought was good enough that he sent to Charlie Puth and Charlie Puth ended up recording it. So, that’s how I got my publishing deal, it was just through that kind of persistence.
That is amazing. It just shows that persistence works. It’s amazing also that someone of that calibre was ok to act as a mentor. Going back to the Charlie Puth cut, I can imagine when you write a song, sometimes you have an idea of how it could sound when it goes out and when it gets recorded, but have you had many tracks that have completely taken you off guard in production? That you wouldn’t have imagined that person recording the track?
That track was definitely one of those. When I had originally written it, I was imagining someone like Sam Smith would sing it, but also that was one that was a really, really personal song. I had just gotten married, and I had a fight with my wife. I was at the Kroger parking lot and I was sitting in the parking lot, just thinking, ‘Man, I really screwed this up’. I wrote that song. It was literally just like from God, I guess, it just came straight down. I just sang it into my phone, I still have it which is cool – I can go back and listen to it, I still have the original memo, where I sang it in the car. It was just like, ‘Hey, be patient with me, because I know not what you need’. When you write something that personal, sometimes you’re not really thinking of anyone, you’re just thinking of yourself, but then when I demo’ed it, I was like, ‘oh, maybe Sam Smith would sing this’, but at this point, I’d note, I was hardly writing with anyone. I had no connections, really – so I just thought that’d be cool. Literally, I think, two weeks later, I got a recording of Charlie – he had produced it out and sung it. It was so surreal.
It must have been a huge turning point where you think ‘oh I can actually do this.’
100%. Yeah, it was a big boost to my confidence and belief in myself, which is really important. I mean, it’s an industry where you fail 99% of time, even if you’re the best. I mean, even Ashley doesn’t get cuts all the time, most of them don’t get cut. So, it was definitely a big boost – I remember I had I just sent it in my monthly songs to Ashley, so I didn’t think anything about it. Then I got a call from him at about 2.30 in the morning. I just remember, he said, ‘Hey, what are you doing right now?’ I was like, ‘I’m sleeping… what do you think?’ HE said, ‘oh remember that song ‘Patient?’ I said ‘Yeah. Do you like it?’ He said, ‘Oh, well, I sent it to Charlie puth. A few hours ago.’ I thought ‘Oh that’s cool’ This is right after ‘Attention’ came out, so he’s the biggest pop star. He said ‘oh Charlie loves it, he just recorded it tonight.’ That was a big life-changing moment.
I can only imagine… I know you grew up in Mississippi, so did you just grow up with country music always around you? Did you always know that that was the end goal?
Well, it depends on how far back you go. You know, I thought I was gonna be a professional baseball player for most of my life, and then I had a moment when I was about 17, where I realised that I wasn’t good enough to play professional baseball. So my musical upbringing was pretty diverse, actually. Mississippi is kind of the birthplace of American music – a lot of people don’t know that the blues originated in Mississippi and so many iconic artists, from Elvis Presley to Britney Spears, are all from Mississippi. If you look at it, it’ll blow your mind, it’s really insane. Every genre started with the blues – you know, Rolling Stones, Beatles, everything – so that was a big part of it. My granddad who lived right down the street from us, he was super into classical music. He really helped bring me up with a love for that and I played classical cello growing up, so he took me to the symphonies and to my cello lessons – my major was actually jazz piano, because I love piano, well it was for two months and then I realised I didn’t want to do that. I had a pretty diverse thing but it was always country music. So, the town I’m from is the birthplace of Jimmy Rogers, who’s the father of country music. That heritage just surrounded me growing up, and we’d listen to 97 O-K-K our country station nonstop, and so that was always there, but it is nuts. I mean, I really love the Beatles was, I was super into the Beatles and then I got super into bluegrass music.
I don’t know what it is about high school, but you just dive into things and think ‘this is the greatest thing ever. I’m gonna learn everything there is to know about this.’ When it was the Beatles, I read a 3000 page biography and I listened to all their songs. Then I also love gospel music and contemporary Christian stuff, too, I don’t know – it’s all over the place, but the two things that I always came back to were I love country music and I love pop music. I love everything Max Martin had something to do with and Ryan Tedder, I would study their songs and I would print their lyrics out.
I do think that leading with the song is the core of what country music is about today. You mentioned briefly your band Track45, did all you siblings move to Nashville together, or did one go first and then encourage the others to come with?
No, we actually all moved together, which, at the time felt so natural, but looking back now is so crazy because KK, my younger sister, was 15 at the time. We all just straight up, moved out one summer. We had a man named Marty Gamblin, who was Glen Campbell’s publisher and Alan Jackson’s. He had heard us play a gig in Meridian and he had said, ‘You know what, I think you all have what it takes, y’all should move to Nashville and really pursue this.’ I think we had thought about it before, but we were really honestly probably too scared to do it, but we felt he’s seen stuff, he knows what he’s talking about. So, we saved up our money for a year, worked a million different jobs and then we just the three of us moved up to a tiny, tiny apartment in Nashville, and we lived off spaghetti and Jiffy cornbread for about two years. Like I said, we had never co written and so we said, ‘we need to get better at songwriting.’ Nashville is the song town so you have got to have a great song, everything has to be a song, like you said. We wrote two songs a day, for two years – that was our goal – none of them were very good. They’re all really bad songs, but I think that exercise really helped, you know, the 10,000 hour rule, and so it really helped us put in the hours to get better and made a lot of connections that way.
Yeah, I can imagine. It must have also been a baptism of fire living with your siblings – if you survive that you can survive anything.
It’s funny. I don’t know if I could survive without them, honestly, because KK was cooking the meals and making our budget and doing all this stuff, and I was like, ‘yeah, I’m just gonna go practice my guitar for a couple hours – let me know how much money.’
When you went to release music as Track45, when did you know which songs to take? Obviously, you’re writing so many songs a day, but it must have been hard to know which songs to keep back for you guys and which to send out and find out what happens?
Yeah, that’s a great question, because like I said, we were writing a ton, by the time we were getting ready to release music, I was writing a ton for other projects as well. What makes it easy is for the band, our barometer is really ‘is this real for us’ – most everything that we release is true stories to us, it comes from a very real place. We like to say it’s autobiographical, but when I write for other people, it’s fiction most of the time – it’s like ‘What about this scenario?’ or ‘What is this person may be going through?’ I’m talking to the artist, trying to figure out what they want to say. So that’s the difference, I think.
Yeah, thinking through all the tracks on the latest EP that makes a lot of sense. Finally I just wanted to ask about ‘Give Heaven Some Hell’ – can you talk about the inspiration behind that one?
Yeah, absolutely that is a really, really special song. I will just say, I feel so privileged to have been a part of it. I mean, it was definitely just one of those things that it’s just hard to believe I was in the room that day. The origins of that song – the summer of 2019, Hardy, myself and our buddy Hunter Phelps, we’re in a room writing a song called ‘Truck’, which ended up coming out as well on his album. In the second verse, there was a line that says, ‘If there’s numbers on the back ’92 to 2012 / Bet there’s story’s about his best friend that he can barely tell
‘Cause he misses him like hell.’ That’s the lyrics right now, but originally, it was that ‘their stories about his best friend, he can barely tell, and he’s given heaven some hell’. As soon as we said that, it was like a scene out of a movie where we looked at each other and we said ‘Give Heaven Some Hell’ – that’s it. So, we said, ‘Alright, well, what would that song sound like?’ And we sketched out what the first and second verses would be, it was a really emotional kind of moment, thinking about it, but then we said, ‘Alright, we’ll finish ‘Truck’ and we’re writing again next week. When we come back next week, we will finish that song.’ We came back next week, and we were in with Ashley Gorley – because he’d know what to do, he’s the master. We said, we have this idea and that’s a great idea. I played these chords, and I remember thinking because I love Ryan Tedder and pop music so much, I thought the chords to ‘Halo’ by Beyonce would be really cool, because it’s afterlife vibes, and so I started playing those chords – literally in 30 minutes, the entire song was written. We were all just four emotional dudes.
Magic.
Oh, man, it really is. It’s just amazing to see how it’s connected with so many people and I got to be in the music video as well, which was just a ton of fun. That’s a special one for sure.
For sure – well thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me today!
Thanks so much.
