Caylee Hammack is one of the brightest new talents to come out of Nashville in recent years. Her debut album ‘If It Wasn’t For You’ will be out next month, but before the release, we spoke to Caylee about the creative process, her new release with Alan Jackson, Small Town Hypocrite and more. The interview will be available in full on the podcast.
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Hi Caylee, it’s so good to speak to you. This is a pretty huge day with the release of your track with Alan Jackson. Are you able to wrap your head around that?
No! I’ll be honest, people have asked me how I feel about it and I’m still a little blown away that he was able to do this and that I was able to cover a song that meant so much to me, I’m such a Don Williams fan.
It’s such a special track. You have such a traditional element in your music with a modern twist and so it was nice to see the combination come together.
Thank you so much Imogen.
Though we didn’t manage to get to see you at C2C, I had the opportunity to see you at CMT Next Women of Country in November and I remember you played ‘Small Town Hypocrite’ and it hadn’t been released yet but it was one of those special moments. You had a standing ovation and everyone got chills. Can you talk a bit about that track, because obviously it’s such a personal and autobiographical track?
Oh yeah, it’s a funny story just because some people joke at me for saying so many curse words in it, but actually it’s funny because this is the song they sent to Alan Jackson to see if he’d be willing to sing with me and introduce him to me. His response was ‘I love her voice but man she says s**t a lot,’ which I thought was so funny.
Anyways, the reason that it’s as candid as it is, it was about the first heartache of my life, it is the heartbreak that kept me in my hometown for an extra year after high school that made me turn around a really great scholarship to the school of my dreams here in Nashville. It really set the beginning of my life. It was the first love of my life, when I told him I was leaving because I had this scholarship to move to Nashville, he told me he couldn’t go on without me so I stayed. I chose love instead of my dreams. Anyways, when all of that happened, a few months after the scholarship was out of reach, I found out he was running around on me. I was like ‘screw you,’ and I wandered around my hometown for about a year, trying to figure it out. If I’d already given up dreams and now love has given up on me, what the hell do I have? I tried to find a new guy thinking that would make me happy and then I got into this other relationship but realised that that didn’t make me happy either, it was just a placeholder of some sort. Finally, I was like ‘dreams have never let me down, I’ve let them down.’ I was done betting on the wrong horse, I put all of my clothes in trash bags and I drove to Nashville. I stayed in a Target parking lot, I stayed there for a few weeks, I snuck into a honky tonk.
I started my life over, but a few years later, I was a staff writer at Universal. One day I was just talking to a friend about the love of his life – the first one – and I talked about my first love and how I got a phone call from a friend about how he had moved in with a woman. I asked her where she lived and she said in a little trailer on the side of town with a couple of kids. I just thought ‘you said the reason we didn’t work was we were just so close, we were almost living together at the time, we just were moving too fast.’
The thing I also love about that track particularly is the level of detail that you go into, but the way that you are able to still make it a universal track. One of my favourite lines is still ‘phantom pains for the wings I lost’  – that lyric can relate to anyone, but then you have more specific details, do you lead with those specifics or the concepts?
Literally, I started a song yesterday, I sat down on my couch and I started the song with two writers as ‘one of the dogs is sitting…’ I love starting off with things that are happening in my life, if it’s significant to me and it meant something to me and I can express it to someone else and they connect then that’s what I love, when I can take intimate parts of my life and share them in an open way. It’s really funny that you say that line, because that seems to be the line that most women especially have connected to and written about.Â
One little thing I want to tell you about that song, because I don’t get to say it too much. Seven years, that’s the only part of the song that is not true, I added the ‘years’ because there’s a saying that every seven years your body has regenerated every single cell in your body. My thought was, we were only together for about a year and a half and it just wrecked me – it’s so funny how fast I can fall in love – but the thing is, I sat there and I thought ‘in seven years, there will not be one part of me that you have touched or shaped or made, in seven years I will be a completely new person and you’ll have nothing on me.’ That’s why I put that in. So many women have messaged me about these seven year relationships that have fallen through, I always thought that was so weird that that was the part I added, seven because seven is also the number of completion, it’s a holy number and it has really stood out in my life, that’s why I put that in. It’s crazy that that’s the verse that people seem to connect to the most and I love that that was the hardest part to write of the song. It makes me happy when people connect with the thing that was most hard to put down on paper.Â
I think that’s the magic, when people connect so much to something like that. Obviously the follow-up to that track was the one you collaborated on with Reba – ‘Redhead.’ What did it mean to you to record that track with her?
It was wild! It is so wild to me, even thinking back to it now that Reba McEntire and Alan Jackson have been willing to sing with me. These are two people who are so iconic in my childhood and my entire life, when I was starting to grow this love and passion for country music, so to have her on this song… It was a fluke of a situation and a manifestation that I threw out in the air one time with my manager. She was like ‘I know that you’re going to have your friends on this album like Ashley and Tenille and that’s great, but are there any big names that you haven’t met yet.’ I said I wanted Reba on ‘Redhead,’ how cool would that be to have the redhead on the song that I wrote that was inspired by my fiery red-headed cousin and I wanted to write for the fiery red-headed women in my life. Anyway, it was so cool, our managers talked one day and said ‘yeah Reba really likes her’ and my manager said ‘well, why don’t you listen to this song…’ She played ‘Redhead’ for him and he wanted to play it for Reba, they played her the song and asked if she wanted to sing on it. It is just crazy how if you put something out in the universe, even if it’s a crazy dream sometimes it can happen. That was my crazy dream on this album.Â
I think there’s also something to be said for the fact that – everyone talks about women in country music and how difficult is to get on radio – women in country music are really supporting each other at the moment. We need to talk more about how the women in community are so amazing to other women.
Yeah, my thing is, I get asked all the time about how we think the industry will become better to women and I’m like ‘hire more women.’ Women are the ones, especially behind the scenes, that are making this happen for female artists and helping promote them. They are the people who hear that there is an absence of female voices. We’re like ‘where is the voice that is telling my story? Where is it?’ I’m just so grateful that you’re doing what you’re doing as well and taking an interest in female artists.Â
Tenille and Ashley are two of my closest friends and we have created this friendship over the past year or two. With the whole industry being the way it is, it kind of puts this idea in your head that there can only be one big woman at a time, which is just bulls**t. There are so many slots for so many types of music, you look at the world. We do this thing together every week, us three, we get drunk and sing covers together on my backporch. I have big old chairs from Goodwill. It has been such a soul reviving therapy session for me every week to be around these women, because any time something happens and I feel defeated, I call one of them and they say ‘yeah, been there, trust me it gets better.’ I think, until we rally around each other and introduce more women to the workplace in country music and the industry in general, until all women in the industry start to bind together and create really strong unions and we’re able to get enough women hired, I don’t think we can truly change anything. We’re the ones that have the ability to change it. I don’t get how you can hear these women and not promote them.
Well it’s hard to not talk about your debut record ‘If It Wasn’t For You.’ It’s hard to believe it’s only the debut because there’s so much depth in that record and there’s so much in there. ‘Looking For A Lighter’ is one of my favourite tracks at the moment, it’s so stunning. Can you again talk about that one, because again you wrote that one with some incredible songwriters?
That first verse, I wrote for myself, I wrote it in my house on my twenty-third birthday. On my birthday, I give myself a pass. I can drink a whole bottle of liquor, I can smoke a whole pack of cigarettes, I can roll a j, I can kill a person. It’s my day. It doesn’t matter, it’s my birthday (laughs). I woke up and had this idea that God was going to birthday gift me a song idea, that’s all I wanted for my birthday was a killer idea. I sat there playing, playing, playing for a couple of hours and nothing was coming up. Eleven o’clock and I was like ‘damn, I haven’t come up with anything worthwhile.’ I’m fed up and I go to my kitchen junk drawer to get a lighter, I’m going to light something, sit on my back porch and just hang out for a while. I go to my kitchen drawer and I pull it out. I have to yank it and when I do, all this stuff comes to the front and the first thing I see is a fake ID that I realised that day that I caught up with. Anyway, I realised ‘oh god, I’ve caught up to the age I’d always pretended to be’ and there was just this weird feeling, I keep looking through that junk drawer and I find letters from the boy that ‘Small Town Hypocrite’ is written about, the one that really broke me but for some reason, sentimental me, wanted to hold onto these letters and keep them in the kitchen drawer. I find them and I pick them up, I’m bawling my eyes out, every time I try to cut loose, even in my kitchen junk drawer, you sneak up on me. I was like ‘I’ve got to stop smoking, because the only time I run into you is when I want to cut loose this way.’ I wrote that first verse and it was really about what was happening that day. I brought it into Hillary Lindsey and Gordie Sampson and I played it to them at the end of the write and Hillary said ‘I never do this, because I don’t want to be a jerk but will you please save that idea for us, so we can get back together and write it because I want to write that for you.’ I thought ‘ok that’s fine.’ That’s not a name you pass on. It was so cool to write it with her. One producer thing I want to tell you about – in the back, that’s not a steel brush on a snare, that’s actually sandpaper. In the studio, I actually sent a runner out from the studio to get sandpaper and a piece of plywood and the drummer sat there. I love making weird sounds like that, even The Beach Boys did that to create new sounds. There’s something about that song and all my music, I want to put elements of my family and my life in it and when I think about ‘Looking For A Lighter’ it’s kind of this eventual grind of learning to not run into you, whatever it is.
Mikey Reaves was the producer on the record, how did that partnership happen?
It’s funny but I sat down with my publisher when it came time to write the record and she threw out all these names in Nashville, but every time I work with a big producer, I get lost somewhere in the process. So, what I wanted to do was be a co-producer – I’ve found in my life that when I take a chance on someone who’s young and hungry, like I was, I have ten times more success than ever working on a huge, established name. My thing is, none of us have infinite ideas, so when there’s a majority of five big producers in town, who are producing all the artists, how can you really be completely different. That’s why I wanted to work with someone who was young and eager, also I would love for my debut album to be someone else’s debut album. We’re putting out our first major label album together and that just spreads the excitement.
What do you hope people do take away from this album then as listeners?Â
There is an app called the ‘Pattern,’ so mine today was talking about ‘You have the ability to create a safe space for people to feel their emotions, you just have to remain true to yourself.’ I just sat there and thought, that is so weird. I’ve told people that my main goal was always to create a sonic safe space, where people can listen to the album in their kitchen. I just wanted people to be washing dishes and be looking out of the window, singing ‘Looking for a Lighter.’ It’s just been so much fun and getting to put out music that is a diary entry to myself. It’s such a beautiful gift because the songs that were hardest for me to write are the songs that people connect to the most, like ‘Forged In The Fire,’ and ‘Sister.’ Rupi Kaur has this quote ‘to be vulnerable is to be powerful.’ If I can be 100% vulnerable in my music and just put it out there, even if it’s not perfect it adds to the authenticity of it, if people feel like someone is doing that, people know you’re showing your true self. Even if I don’t meet anyone who listens to this record, I want it to feel like they are.
