Ahead of the release of his new single ‘Trouble,’ out everywhere now, we chatted to Johnny Dailey about his journey so far and the release of his track ’24’ last year.
Hi, Johnny. Good morning, how are you?
I’m doing good. Good – different time zones, I’m drinking coffee, and you’re maybe about to get a cocktail!
True! The news of your publishing deal was an amazing start to the new year, how does it feel to have that support behind you now?
It feels really good, it feels like the start of a new chapter and year. It’s all great, just building the team and I really believe in these people. I think they believe me, they’re really good people and they focus on the song and the songwriter.
Particularly when you’re starting out, it’s so important to have that support network behind you as you’re building your career. Obviously, you released so many of your new songs during the pandemic. How did it feel then when everything got lifted and people suddenly know your music and respond to it? How has that experience been?
It’s been good. It was a shock, of course, I mean, we were just getting rolling and then the pandemic comes along. You just make the best of it and I think I think in a lot of ways it was really good because it allowed me to get on social media and promote the music. To be honest, I tell everybody, I don’t know the difference and what it would have been like otherwise. It’s been great for me, I mean, I’ve loved seeing everybody react well to the songs we’ve put out so far and they look forward to putting out more music.
Were there any opportunities and things that came about – with some songwriters becoming more available and people who might live further afield and not ordinarily have the time, stuff like that?
It definitely came up. I’m trying to think of one instance, but for sure, some guys that I wouldn’t usually write with because they might be on the road, they were around town. The Zoom thing was weird at first, but you get used to it. A lot of the songs that I’m about to release, we wrote over Zoom.
You ended last year with the release of ’24’, which was an incredible track. Can you talk a little bit about that song and the evolution of it?
Yeah, I think that’s my favourite song that we’ve put out. I wrote it with Daniel Ross and Benjy Davis – we went into the room and didn’t have an idea. Daniel had just had a kid, I had a kid, my dad passed away, like a year before we got together. I had this title that wasn’t 24 – I wish I knew what it wa – but we just started building off that and talking about ‘what if we could write this love song that has to do with giving somebody your last moments – if you were forced to do so?’ It turned out great, but it was great timing too, because it came right before the pandemic and just felt like the right time to put that song out. It was just one of those days that you leave, and you don’t know how you wrote another song, but you did.
How have you seen your music evolve since moving to Nashville? I know you started in Charleston and then ended up here, so how has the songwriting side developed?
It’s definitely made me a better writer, for sure, it’s something I had to get used to. Before I came up here, I wrote by myself and so I think, for me, it’s like having that balance, because if you only co write and never write alone, I find that I’m not a good co-writer.
I guess it’s a muscle you have to keep honing and refining.
Yeah, exactly. If I only write by myself, I don’t take advantage of the great writers in Nashville, so I try to do both. I feel like if I can find the line and do both of them, I’m at my best.
What’s been your journey so far, in terms of the evolution moving through Charleston and then to Nashville?
So, I think I found out that you could be a country music songwriter in my senior year of high school. I was too scared of it, I thought that there’s no way I could ever make that possible and I went to Charleston actually to a school there to study carpentry because that’s what I grew up doing. Then I met some guys out there that did video work and loved the same music and they asked to do videos of me singing the songs I’d written. Long story short, a guy in Nashville saw those and reached out to me and it’s always something I wanted to do. I was doing cover shows, but it just never seemed like reality. It seemed so far fetched, I think one thing led to another and my dreams lined up.
Sometimes, you need that one person to reach out and say, ‘you can do this’ to try to make that dream a reality.
Exactly, it’s really cool looking back to see the path to the point I’m at now.
Obviously now you’ve written with so many people and have built out that community, how did that happen?
I mean, my management was a huge part of connecting me with people when I got here. I wrote a song with Warner Chappell right when I got here, and they were a huge part in setting me up with with new writers. I knew all those writers before I got into town, so getting in the rooms with those guys, it was crazy.
You’ve got ‘Trouble’ coming out this month. Can you talk a bit about that track?
That song is more leaning towards ‘Burns like Whiskey,’ I actually recorded that song with the same producer Aaron Eshuis and it’s just a cool song that I wrote about growing up and being in love – or at least trying to grow up and things maybe not being the way that everybody thinks they should, but it’s what you need at the moment. It’s kind just your classic love story about two different people in Canada being what each other needs at the moment, you know. I’s really cool. It’s one of my favorites that that I’ve part of, and that we recorded. So I’m excited for everybody to hear it – it’s definitely different from 24.
Will that build into a larger project?
So we’ll have the three that we’ve already released and then three more. It’s going to be called ‘Dillashaw,’ which is a creek that ran through my home. and the land that I grew up on. All the songs kind of capture that small town.
We’ll hope that when things have really calmed down to get you over to the UK at some point. Thank you so much for your time today, it was really good to chat to you.
