Your Country's Right Here: David Nail Keeps Heartache Flowing
posted in: Country • Music News
Would Taylor Swift write Taylor Swift songs if she didn’t tap into personal heartbreak over her failed romances? She doesn’t have to face that challenge right now” for good or for bad”but David Nail does.
The GRAMMY Award nominee for Best Male Vocal Performance for the song “Turning Home” has plenty of hits”such as the beloved “Red Light””but many of those songs were inspired by his own failed romances and resultant broken heart. So what’s a now happily married man to do if he still wants to pen the tearjerker songs”such as those on his debut album I’m About to Come Alive”without the inspiration despair breeds?
“I have been just such a miserable person all my life ,” says Nail, noting the sour ending to past romances until the stars
aligned and he found his very own fairy tale ending that culminated with his 2009 wedding to Catherine Werne. “I think, at least for me, the majority of my songs come from life experiences. It’s always been really hard for me to try to look at a lyric as fiction or try to put myself into what would I would do in a scenario.”
Yet that’s just what Nail is teaching himself to do now that he’s run out of recent grist from his mill of personal experience, at least on the heartache side.
Take the song “Let It Rain,” the February 8 release that Nail co-wrote with Jonathan Singleton. It was when talking about the Zach Braff movie The Last Kiss”you know, the one where the man cheats on his pregnant fiancee and she kicks him out of the house and viewers are left with a cliffhanger ending”that Nail started to think of what he’d do in such a situation. Call the last scene of the movie”which is literally and figuratively stormy”the eureka moment that brought Nail and Singleton the inspiration to complete the song.
Yet there are only so many movies to be watched and Nail does have his own archive of stories, so he’s tapped into them for musical inspiration. The result are songs for his new album, one of the most eagerly anticipated releases of this year.
“I have managed to do it,” says David of tapping that fictional and historic emotional wells. “I told my wife ‘Now, you can’t get mad and ask me who these songs are about. I’m thinking of old mistakes’…At the end of the day, I’m a story teller and I just took a while to use my past as a reference point. It’s easier to write when it’s true.”