Ed Hill Interview

Doug Burke:

Ed Hill grew up on a cotton farm in the San Joaquin Valley of California, between Bakersfield and Fresno. He became the house piano player in the backing band at both the legendary Blackboard Cafe in Bakersfield and the Palomino Club in North Hollywood. In those clubs, he backed legendary artists like Merle Haggard, Kris Kristofferson, Marty Robbins, and Willie Nelson, before becoming part of the Grammy-nominated Mickey Gilley's Urban Cowboy Band. He moved to Nashville and made the career switch to full-time songwriting and never looked back. He was BMI Songwriter of the Year in 2006 and has had 13 top 10 Billboard songs and four number ones. Probably for Ed, the most meaningful recognition has come from his peers where the Nashville Songwriters Association has awarded him four times the Song I Wish I Had Written Award for It Matters To Me, Georgia Rain, Find Out Who Your Friends Are, and Just Fishin.

Welcome to Backstory Song. I'm your host, Doug Burke, and today I am thrilled to have Ed Hill from Nashville. Welcome, Ed to our show.

Ed Hill:

Well, thank you so much there, Doug. I'm just really glad to be here.

Doug Burke:

Ed, I am blown away by your body of work. I've really enjoyed creating your Spotify songbook, which is out there for all of our listeners to listen to. But in listening to this and reviewing all your number ones and top 40 charting songs, you don't have to answer this question, but I am blown away why you are not in the national Songwriters Hall of Fame. You belong in the Hall as far as I'm concerned. And it is just a matter of time before you are inducted. So I feel honored that we get to you before that happens, and I can't wait to come to the induction ceremony if, and when it happens.

Ed Hill:

Well, Doug, I've been nominated twice for that. Once in 2018 and once in 2019, last year. Yeah, I would love that. And I have a body of work that definitely qualifies. But the flip side of that coin is there's a lot of songwriters out here that belong in the Songwriters Hall of Fame. And a lot of them are friends of mine. And when they have happened every year, there's say, I don't know how many are nominated, it may be seven or eight or nine. I don't even know who nominates them. And then they have the nominations for the songwriters that are actually artists. They get in. And you look that you're up against a lot of people who belong in there. And there are people in there that don't have as many singles or cuts that I have, but they have very important songs or they'll have a big song. So I can't knock any of it. And I don't even know who votes. I get the vote.

Doug Burke:

Well, here it is Ed. I'm here on Backstory Song to tell our listeners to start the campaign to get you in. We want to get the votes for Ed Hill to get in the Hall of Fame because he belongs there. Now, Ed, you've written a book, a memoir of sorts, but it really... I've read a lot of these memoirs from songwriters on my show. I found it to be a real instructional manual for songwriters in so many ways. There're so many incredible insights, it's called It Matters to Me, and you'll be able to find it on our site, Backstory Song, for purchase, but it is also on Amazon. But tell me about the book.

Ed Hill:

Over the years, as a songwriter, every once in a while, because I used to play in Bakersfield and I used to play in the house band at the Palomino in LA and I used to be in the Urban Cowboy Band and Mickey Gilley's band during the Urban Cowboy. And then I came to Nashville in the '80s and started getting songs cut. People have said, man, you need to write a book. And I had friends who said, man, you need to write a book, you really had an interesting life. As time went on and I had kids, I thought, there're things that they'll never know about me or my parents or my life if I don't write it down, and they might not read it for 20 years. But if I can just put it in a book, maybe people would be interested in. So there came a time when I just came across some people that had... Peanutt Montgomery, who is in the George Jones book. Peanutt Montgomery is a friend of mine in Muscle Shoals. And Peanutt wrote, I think it's 74 George Jones songs. And now there's a book, George Jones book. And then there's a book about Rick Hall. Even Stevens has a book, who wrote all the Eddie Rabbitt hits. And they're all of the same publisher. And they said, man, you can get your book published, and so I just started going, well, I'm just going to write something honest. Just something honest from me, and I'm not going to try to be a smart guy, and later on, I'll just put it kind of in order of when it happened. So I would just one day sit down on my laptop, and I wrote for about an hour, and I wrote about a song, like this is how this song happened. And then maybe the next day or two I had an hour and I wrote about my mother. And so I wrote about different things in my life and then after about two years, I just kind of just put them in order. And then I had to edit it all. And then I had to get interviews or people critiquing it or whatever. Anyway, when I got it all done and all the nuts and bolts put in it in most of the comments and the paragraphs, right? I mean, there are still grammar mistakes, but the crux of it is pretty much there. And there's a lot of stories I left out and then I had to edit certain things so I wouldn't get sued, because some stories you kind of got to be careful because if the person you're talking about they're even dead and their family goes and reads it and goes, well, I don't like that, what you said about my dad, they can sue you. But I said that in the book. I said, I'm not going to tell you who this person is, but here's what happened or I'm going to change the name because you can get sued. I mean, it's just that simple. Now if it's one-on-one like if something happened and it was just me and the other person, I can just tell the story because it's my word against their word. So I had to kind of figure out that a little bit just to make it happen. So anyway, here I am. And there's a lot of stories. I had great parents.

Doug Burke:

Yeah, you did. I noticed that from the book. You grew up in Hanford, California in the San Joaquin Valley of Central California on a cotton farm, and you really seem to have had a uniquely special relationship with both your dad and your mom.

Ed Hill:

Yeah. They're wonderful people. My mom is actually from Tennessee, a little town called Springville. Now there's Springfield, Tennessee, which is a bigger town. Springville is a little place kind of about, I don't know, maybe 50 miles from Paris, Tennessee. But my father was born and raised in Hanford, California, by a fourth-generation farmer. They were just great parents. I just can't say enough about them. And they had a lot to worry about because I was raised in California in the '60s. They had a lot to worry about.

Doug Burke:

My favorite story is the time you got arrested on top of the guy's Chinese restaurant building, just trying to look at the city, and your dad represented you in court.

Ed Hill:

Well, my dad, all the time when I was growing up, he either called me buckaroo or partner. And I have a Lee Ann Womack song I wrote with Mark Sanders, it was a single called Buckaroo, one of my favorite songs. And it was from my dad calling me that, but he also called me partner all the time. And I didn't know that this little piece of pasture he had put in my name and his name when I was just a little boy, he never told me about it. Because he just didn't want to die and have it hung up. He was just like it'll just go to me, you know what I mean? He was thinking way ahead. And that story of the Chinese man who pressed charges, when he went up there in the court, my dad eventually asked him, "Well, don't you have mushrooms in that restaurant?" And he goes, "Oh yeah, we have mushrooms." He goes, "Well, where do you get the mushrooms?" He goes, "So I go pick them out in the fields and stuff. They grow wild." "Well, haven't I seen you pick them out there somewhere around Ninth Avenue in Houston?" He goes, "Oh yeah, there's a cow pasture out there. I go out there and pick them because they grow on poop." He goes, "So you know, the one you're pressing charges against, he owns that property. And it says no trespassing on it, and you're charging him for trespassing on your property." And that was it.

Doug Burke:

End of the case, huh?

Ed Hill:

End of the case.

Doug Burke:

This case is dismissed. And the judge banged his gavel and it was over, huh?

Ed Hill:

It was over, man. My dad said, "Now I want you to thank the people." I mean, actually, my dad got a jury trial because he wanted people to hear it. So I thanked every one of those people as they walked out. I didn't have to, but he told me to. My dad was the lawyer. He was my lawyer. He just kept that all to himself, all those years and all that time, and that's probably why he went ahead and did it because he knew he had him. That's just a great story, and he was full of those. I mean, when I saw him one time take a wasp nest in the middle of the summer, I was working on some tearing down this old building or something, old shed, and I was doing it with another guy. My dad was sitting in his truck. He was reading the newspaper in the middle of the afternoon. It was probably in July. So it was hot. And we came across a wasp nest. And a wasp nest in July, it’s not any fun, you know what I mean? It's like they're buzzing around and we kind of jumped back and my dad just kind of put his paper down and he got out of his truck real slow and he walked over and he just unhooked it. Unhooked the wasp nest and it dropped to the ground. He went back and sat in his truck and opened up the paper. And he told me later, he said, "I didn't want to kill the wasp, but if I drop it to the ground, they'll go and make another nest." And when I look back on it over the years, my dad didn't have anything when he was a kid. I think when you look at kids that grew up in... He was born in 1912. So when he was growing up, that was part of his entertainment. I mean, he didn't have bicycles and toys and stuff. That's how country boys... I mean, that was fun and interesting. He didn't like to kill anything. He would pick up snakes, a lot of snakes. Gopher snakes, garter snakes. And my son does that, the same thing. The animals would come to him. That just reminded him of when he was a kid growing up on a farm.

Doug Burke:

So you make your way to Bakersfield, the kind of the height of the birth of the Bakersfield sound arguably, or maybe after it has been established, and you're playing in this legendary club called the Blackboard.

Ed Hill:

Yeah. Bakersfield was a circuit, a West Coast circuit for those country stars. I mean, they would play Bakersfield, they would play Long Beach, in a place called the Long Ranch or whatever. They opened down the coast. Those West Coast kind of players like that. And a lot of those people like Merle Haggard's family and Buck Owens, they came from the Midwest, from Oklahoma. Buck was actually born in Texas, but they migrated to California to be farmhands, to work the orange groves, seasonal workers. They lived above Bakersfield, in a town called Arvin and another town called Lamont. And they were just where these four people lived and they would just have little makeshift, little houses, and they would work seasonally, and they would go around and do that. So Haggard and Buck were the results of that. And playing music, it was a people thing, it wasn't like now. It was like, you go to those little bars and clubs, which most of them are gone now, and that's where these people got relief. That's where at the end of the week, they would go on a Friday, they sit down and have a beer. They talk to their neighbors. They go out on the dance floor, they'd have a dance floor. And they listened to music they could relate to. It was a way of getting rid of their stress because these people didn't have anything. And that music evolved from that. And they're real stories. Merle Haggard, he just told the truth. I mean, he talked about the streets of Bakersfield. He talked about the Kern River and the things in his life like that. These people didn't have anything and their music, they didn't want to conform to Nashville. Nashville turned at the time to have a bigger sound, the Nashville sound got to be where it was more orchestrated and more background vocal, some ladies, which was beautiful. Eddy Arnold and things like that. Make the World Go Away. And Bakersfield was going to be just Telecasters and honky-tonk music.

Doug Burke:

So you were the piano and keyboard player for Merle Haggard, Kris Kristofferson, Marty Robbins, and Willie Nelson, and Mickey Gilley's Urban Cowboy Band at the Blackboard, and then the legendary club in Los Angeles, the Palomino.

Ed Hill:

Now, Kris Kristofferson, that was in Bakersfield, that's when he came through a couple of times. I ended up living pretty close to where Merle Haggard's office was at the time before he moved to Lake Shasta. And this was about 1976 when I was with Merle. And I was only with him for a few weeks. But back with some of these other guys, a lot of them it was at the Palomino in Los Angeles. Marty Robbins and people like that would come in. A lot of times they would use the house band, which is what I was in. So we were there every night backing whoever didn't have a band, but there were always big stars who came into Palomino. And that was during the '70s. Bakersfield, I lived there for seven years. I was raised on the radio. I wasn't raised on country music, even though I'd hear a little bit on the radio, but I was just raised on whatever was on the radio. I mean, it was from the Beatles to the Animals, to the Stones, a little bit of Johnny Cash. No Hank Williams, none of that stuff. Even though I liked it, I wasn't raised on it. I couldn't make any money playing rock and roll. And I would just be hauling this organ around and this keyboard and all this stuff around and a friend of mine, about 1972, called me, who used to be a guitar player in a band I was in, and his aunt and uncle lived in Bakersfield. And he said he had a job coming up to play in the Blackboard, and it would be a sit-down job, a six-night-a-week job, and wanted to know if I was interested, and they actually paid a paycheck every week. I was like, yeah, I'm not that busy, I'll go try it. So that's when I was starting to learn about the country. And we went into that club a few weeks after I got there. Bakersfield was only like 90 miles from where I was born and raised. So if I had to get in trouble or I was really in dire straits, I could just drive back home and go to bed there. But I ended up sleeping at the drummer's house underneath my keyboards in the sleeping bag for a few weeks. And then I finally just got a little real cheap apartment. I liked country music when I did that because it had more of a formula, whereas rock and roll, and I mean, when you're playing rock and roll back then, the songs, they wouldn't have a formula. Whereas in the country, there would be a verse, chorus, maybe a bridge. It was easy to figure out. But I was really lucky because the first guitar player that I had in that band, was a guy by the name of Jim Williams, and I got him in the book. But Jim was a nerd about chords. He drove a little Maverick car, it was worth as much as his guitar. He looked like a nerd. He hated club owners. The club owners hated him because he wasn't a real good looking handsome guy and he didn't care. All he wanted to do, he just wanted to play chords and he could play anything. He could play Glen Campbell or Elton John or Bobby "Blue" Bland, and he knew all the country stuff. But he loved chords, and I would listen to him because I was infatuated with how good he was and nobody appreciated him. And he liked me because I was a great student because I just wanted to learn. So that's how I learned a lot about writing songs and pedal tones and how to color your music with chords. I learned it from him.

Doug Burke:

And that's when you started writing songs. Have any of the songs that you've written from that era been recorded?

Ed Hill:

Yeah, but not with anybody you would know about. I'd get a few done here and there. And then what I started doing, I started buying a little bit of equipment to record my own songs. But I wrote songs in high school and in rock and roll bands. I mean-

Doug Burke:

What was the first song you wrote?

Ed Hill:

I wrote a song called Foggy Day. That was probably one of the first songs I ever wrote. I just remember the title. I don't remember how it goes, but I'm sure it was bad. But when I started learning the songs to play in a band in high school to play after-game dances and stuff, we would learn what the kids like. And I thought, well, why don't we just write one of our own? So eventually we do that. And then we just did a lot more. And by the time 1969 came around, we were writing a lot of songs.

Reba McEntire:

White light shadows gather around my door, they find me dreaming all alone once more. Memories come around to haunt my sleepless sounds, now's the time I must be strong. I believe it won't be long. Till love comes again, to end these lonely nights. Till love comes again, to drive these tears I cry. It's darkest just before the dawn, and I'll just keep holding on, till then.

Doug Burke:

Do you remember where you were the first time you heard your song on the radio?

Ed Hill:

I remember where I was. The first big song was a Reba song called Til Love Comes Again, in 1989. It was a big single. And I can remember in Nashville, I was coming up I-65 South, I was going North to Nashville, and it was about four o'clock in the afternoon, and it came on the radio and I was by myself. And I rolled down my window and I yelled at the car next to me and they sped off because I was like, "It's my song on the radio." And they had no idea who I was, but that really never goes away at any age. When you're not the artist, I don't have the luxury of writing a song and putting it on my own record. I have to write a song that somebody else is going to do, which in a lot of ways, it's a lot more difficult. Because you don't know, first of all, they don't have the publishing and they don't have the writers on it and they don't know what you're looking for. They don't want to do your song, they want to be a writer on it. The record label has got something to do with it, so you got to get past all these things. If you're an outside writer, you got to have a better song. The good thing about that is I want a better song. I want a song that's going to go last in history. I want one that's going to be good in 10 years from now and 20 years from now, and that's the goal. It's a longevity thing.

Doug Burke:

Ed, have you ever been to a karaoke bar where they played one of your songs?

Ed Hill:

Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

Doug Burke:

Have you ever sung one of your songs in a karaoke bar?

Ed Hill:

No. Because I've never gone to a karaoke bar. But I've been a few times, a long time ago. But I've had people send them to me when I see a video of them sing in bars and in bands in general. I mean, because a lot of times a girl will get out and she'll sing It Matters to Me, by Faith Hill or she'll sing Be My Baby Tonight, John Michael Montgomery. A guy will sing it, it's been done a lot. It's a little flattering. The thing is about what I do or have done for so long is I'd rather get one big song than a bunch of little ones. I'll take any of them, but say on Faith Hill back then on It Matters to Me, that was a huge song. And I'd rather have that song on that album than the other nine I'll put together because that's the one that's going to be remembered. You don't remember the other nine. I mean, you might remember one or two of the other singles, I'm not saying that the writers weren't great writers, but I was fortunate enough to have that one surface. And the thing is that song doesn't have any bridge. It's just a verse, chorus, verse, chorus. And it's like, that's what great songs are. They're simple. There's not a lot of words. If you go look back in time... I'm into history when it comes to music and I think young people should be into the history of music. Listen to the songs from the '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s. What do you like about some of them? They're not all great, but you can pull some from that. How bad do you want it? This doesn't work for me. I'm looking for ideas all the time. And my dad, when he got older, would try to give me song ideas. He thought it was pretty cool. It's just a brain exercise. It's just an exercise. And at my age, I'm like, well, maybe I won't get Alzheimer's quite as quickly if I just keep trying to think of songs. It's kind of a math project. The art of making something sound really simple.

Doug Burke:

Til Love Comes Again, gets recorded by Reba McEntire, and you wrote this with Bob Regan and it's released in 1989. One of your real long-term relationships, Karen Conrad, was kind of the birth of a real strong business partnership between you and Karen Conrad.

Ed Hill:

Yeah, absolutely. She's still a great friend of mine. I don't talk to her very often, but I love her. I was really fortunate to come across her and I came across her through another writer that wrote for Karen Staley. She's had a lot of hits herself. She's a great songwriter. I was doing little demos when I first got to Nashville that I wrote by myself. I'd be writing at night, I'd work in the daytime, painting houses or whatever I had to do. Where can I go to put these songs down? To get a guitar and drums and stuff? And I finally came across this guy named Jackie Cook, who I can do a demo for. I mean, this is back in the '80s. So $200 coming out of my own pocket for my song I wrote by myself. So I got a lot better, a lot quicker over a year. I did 12 of them. I did one a month at Jackie's studio. And after a year I took the eight, what I thought were the eight best ones, and I asked a girl, Karen Staley, who sang a few of them for me because I had a few girls’ songs. I asked her, "Who can I show these songs to? Because I don't know how this town works. All I see on every publishing window is it says no unsolicited material." I go, "What's a guy to do?"

Doug Burke:

How do they find material? Do they have to solicit it always?

Ed Hill:

My publisher is a good publisher. She's an independent publisher, and that was Karen Conrad. So I went about 10 o'clock, whatever morning it was. I walked in and Karen Conrad was... Or morning it was. I walked in, and Karen Conrad was at the front desk checking her mail and I gave her my CD. Or not a CD, it was a cassette. She goes, "Well, come on to the office, and I'll listen to them with you." And I was really thin-skinned because I hadn't been used to doing this. And I was like, "Well, I got to go do something." I made up some reason why I had to go because I just didn't want to sit in the room and have somebody critique my songs. So where I was staying, I went there, which was at a fiddle player's house. As soon as I got to the house, she called me and she wanted four of those eight songs that I gave her. I went back and... So what we did, we did single song agreements. I didn't get any publishing. I got all my writers, no publishing, four single song agreements, and she went back and paid for the demo cost. So, she paid my $200 I paid a piece for those, and then we were off and running. I just had to show her the songs before I demoed them, and she would pay for them. So we did that, and the 20th song that I got in her catalog was to Love Comes Again, Reba McEntire.

Doug Burke:

It goes to number four on the charts. So, your very first song breaks the top 10, which is pretty impressive.

Ed Hill:

Yeah. And then, it was with Bob Regan and she had all of Bob's publishing too, and so she had a hundred percent of the publishing. But as that song made its course up and down the charts as time went by, I remember the first time I got any money at all writing a song was from her. I got a check for $50,000, and I'd never gotten any money writing a song. And I called my dad and he goes, "Well, maybe you ought to keep doing that." So, I had confirmation from him. I lost my parents in the 90s, they both got to see me get to number one records, which was very rewarding for me.

Doug Burke:

So this song has a fiddle intro, and I would maybe call it a barroom, style piano, which when I hear that in your songs and I'm listening to the Ed Hill Songbook on Backstory Song, I hear that sort of barroom piano style. Did you contribute that to the song, is that one of your signature things?

Ed Hill:

Sometimes. When you spend a lot of time in honky-tonks I did in Bakersfield or whatever, you get a real feel for what people like. And record label people should have hired me to be a consultant, because they make choices of, well, what's going to work on the radio? There's so much payola and crooked crap going on, the bottom line is if you have a song that people really love, it'll breakthrough if they can just hear it. They just need to hear it. I could see that night after night. They'd come in, when I played those places, man, I'm in a band, I'm watching them they're watching me, and you know what they want. They let you know. So, I had that ingrained in me. But I would see other piano players and honky-tonk piano players and whatever. I had played bass in rock and roll bands before I played keyboards, and our keyboard player, his mother made him quit when I was in our high school band, so I had to play the organ on the next gig. I didn't even get a chance to practice or anything. But back to Jim Williams in Bakersfield, he showed me really how to be a bass player because the left-hand of the piano goes with the bass player, which goes with the kick drum of the drummer, that all work together. And so, he would know how to color in music, where you would dock the one before you go to the four chords, or you'd dock the one before, let's say, Dottie, you hit the root before you go to your next chord. And a lot of people don't know that, and he would teach me things that, that just became part of my songwriting thing of how do you move people? You can move people's emotions by getting from one chord to the next, with a passing. It's not like row country where everything is one, five, six, minor four. Like Gentle on my Mind, John Hartford doing... They're beautiful chords. And this guy, Jim Williams, loved rhythm and blues, and he loved pop songs. And I love all music. It's either good or it's not good. It's either really good or it's okay. I don't care what genre it's in, I go by my heart. I'm not like a record label. The record label, they do market analysis. My market analysis is what does it do to my heart? And that's what everybody in the world out there, that's what they're going by. So, they're missing the boat a lot. Posers, they want to set you up with somebody so they can get a favorite done for themselves. They want you to ride with somebody in another company where they can get these favors. They don't know who's good and who isn't good, because they're not in the room when the songs are being written. They don't know who's really, really gifted. Some things you can't teach, some things you can. Just because you come out of Belmont, doesn't mean you can write a song. That just means that you went to a math class and you know that a bridge isn't the same as a chorus, a verse, you know what I mean? So, the people that do this, sometimes just do it without money.

Doug Burke:

So, one of the characters in your life who co-wrote your first number one hit, Be My Baby Tonight, was Richard-

Ed Hill:

Actually, Running Behind was the first number one. It just all depends on which chart you're on. When you look at certain charts, you're not number one, but I've gotten awards for songs that are number one that wasn’t on certain charts.

Doug Burke:

Let's talk about Running Behind.

Ed Hill:

Running Behind was with Mark D. Sanders. That was his first number one. Now, it might not have been number one on whatever chart you're looking at. I got a number one plaque for it, and they had a number one party, and it's BMI number one.

Doug Burke:

Well, that counts as number one in my book. Do you remember the number one party?

Ed Hill:

Oh sure, I remember them all. Yeah, they're just really nice, and you get to talk a little bit. BMI, they'll give you a plaque and they'll give you a cup, a silver cup. Be My Baby Tonight, after a few years I went back in and they gave me a certificate because when it went like seven million airplays, it's a standard now. When you get so many airplays, at least it used to be, It Matters To Me or Be My Baby Tonight, they've gotten so many airplays that they become a standard, what they call a standard. And I don't know if that changes the way you get paid, it's probably not to my advantage, but they've been played so many times. Anyway, but Running Behind was just a fun song that Mark and I wrote one day, and I had that title written down. We had that one pretty quick, didn't think that much about it. My dad used to say, "A day late and a dollar short."

Doug Burke:

But I like what you did there, you flipped it around to make it rhyme.

Ed Hill:

It had to rhyme with something, that's why. "One dollar short, one day late," that wouldn't rhyme. We cheated a little bit. But you notice how simple that song is, there's hardly anything to it, and that's what people remember. If you look back in the history of almost any music, if you can look at Love Me Tender, Elvis Presley, if you saw that lyrics were written on a piece of paper, you'd be like, "Well, there's nothing there. Love me tender, love me true, never let me go. For my darling, I love you and I always will." And it's an iconic treasure because people don't have to think. People don't want to think. Sometimes writers, if you're going to write something really complicated, well just go on some island and go ahead and do it. But if you're trying to connect with other people, Wild Thing has connected with more people than anything, you know?

Doug Burke:

It might be the most covered song. In your book on Running Behind, you wrote this phrase that really caught my attention: "The hook seemed right when we placed it at the end of each verse," that's like an intuition for you, I think.

Ed Hill:

Well, I was told back then. Actually, Karen my publisher, she's always trying to help. And she had a real good knack for stuff. But when you listen to other stuff, there's publishers today, and there's a good friend of mine who runs a record label. If the hook isn't at the beginning and the end of the chorus, it's a real hard time to get him interested. That's just his mindset. I'm like, "Listen to the song." But what it was back then, it was the same thing. Most of the songs that were singles on the radio, the hook was at the beginning of the chorus. and it was at the end of the chorus. And they're telling you, "Well, when you're writing, make sure your hooks at the beginning of the chorus and at the end of the chorus." Well, my first number one there, which was Running Behind, the hook was at the end of each verse, and there wasn't a chorus, there was just a bridge. So, that shut them up. And then they go, "We need a bridge," and I go, "No, you don't need a bridge. It Matters To Me doesn't have a bridge. Be My Baby Tonight doesn't have a bridge, a lot of my songs don't have a bridge." The bridge is an important thing, it needs to say something. If it's not called for, if you don't miss it, it shouldn't be there. Sometimes there's a reason for it, you got to go by your gut instincts. But years ago I read Napoleon Hill's book, The Law of Success, and it's just the law of success, there are 15 laws of success. It's a real common book. Everybody should read it. It really helps when you study what you're doing, making it, where people can... They don't have to think. It's like, they want to relate to it, they don't want to think. A lot of those things in that book, I apply to songwriting. It's the law of attraction, that's one of them. Why do you, like it?

Doug Burke:

Let's talk about Be My Baby Tonight, which is probably one of the most hook-filled songs you've written. Certainly, that lyric is a grabber, and you wrote it with Rich Fagan. I read his bio, and he seemed like he was quite a character and a half.

Ed Hill:

Yeah. Rich is a really interesting guy. Before I knew Rich, really, we did a lot of our demos at a recording studio called County Q. And they're still open, but every month we'd go in there and do demos, and Rich would do his. And so anyway, the guy who ran the studio, who's owned it, Paul Scholten, I asked him one day, I said, "Paul, you know anybody that I may be able to hook up with?" I like to try out writing with somebody else, maybe four or five people every year, that I haven't written with to see if we gel. And usually, if I do that, maybe one of them will work out. If we don't see eye to eye, well, we'll just be friends, it's no big deal. But see if you can find a new writing partner that you might work well with, and you might not. You might write one, you might write 10, you might... Whatever. So anyway, he goes, "I bet you and Rich would work well together. He knew both of our writing because Rich would come in there and do songs. And I thought I'll give it a shot. And so, we got together and we wrote a few songs. And this was probably, I'm going to take a guess and say maybe our third or fourth song. And he had a little apartment, and he smoked pot and drank wine, and he was a hippie, and he had tattoos, and he had knives, and he had beads. Really nice guy though, talented guy. And Rich used to live in, I think Philadelphia, and he was homeless. And I thought that was... And Rich, he's older than me. I don't know how much older, five years, 10 years, I don't know. He didn't look it. I went to write with him one day, and he always wrote on an Ovation guitar. And I had this cheap piece of crap, K guitar that I bought for 50 bucks. That day, that's just what I brought over there. So I didn't have anything better, and he goes, "Well, I've had this idea that I can't get any money to write it with me. And I turned three or four songwriters onto it, and they all turned it down." He said, "It's just something that I had when I was homeless in Philadelphia, singing around the fire trash barrel, trying to stay warm with three or four other guys." And Rich is a small man, so he's singing with big guys to protect him and stuff. And it was a doo-wop thing, and it was just, "Could you, would you, ain't you gonna, if I asked you, what would you want to?" That's what he had. But he went with something else, "Could you, would you, ain't you gonna, if I ask you, would you want to? baby don't you..." Something, it was just that's the doo-wop. I honestly thought it was stupid, and I had nothing better. I was like, "Okay, well let's..." What the key is, is when you're writing with somebody, you really try to find what they're good at. And they might be different things, but Rich was good at phrasing. He could phrase something, and he really had a knack for it. And so, I went for it, and I did come up with the second half of that was, "Take a chance, slow dance, make a little romance, honey, it'll be all right," which wasn't near as good as what he had: "Could you, would you, ain't you gonna, if I ask you, would you want to?" My only question was before that, Les Taylor, who was in exile, he had a song should, Shoulda, Coulda, Woulda, that came out on the radio about a year before. And I was like, "That's pretty close." But whatever. So we wrote this three-chord song with no bridge, we demoed it a County Q, and got a demo singer named Ron Wallace to sing it for us. It probably sat in a catalog for a year, maybe longer than that, maybe a year and a half. Then I had already graduated where I was getting a quarter of my publishing because I was starting to get a little bit of success. And so, I asked her, I said, "Can we..." It was just a handshake, we didn't have no contract. I never had a contract with her for seven years, it was a handshake. But she said, "Okay, I'll give you a quarter of your publishing," because I was starting to get interest from other people. Scott Hendricks, who was producing John Michael Montgomery at the time, and a friend of Karen and Ron Stubie who worked there. He used to come in once in a while to listen to songs, he never took a song, never took a song. Nice guy, everybody would go to the lake and go skiing and stuff, we were all friends. And now he's running Warner Brothers and he produces Blake Shelton. Anyway, back then he'd never taken a song, and somehow they played him Be My Baby Tonight, and he took a copy for John Michael Montgomery. I don't know if he ever put it on hold, but he took a copy. I remember later, him saying it was hard to get John Michael Montgomery to hook it, singing it. Anyway, but he did. And it became the second single off his second album after I Swear. Which, "I swear, by the moon and the..." Which is a beautiful song, they're still playing that song, still playing my song. It's amazing, the simplicity. And I've even done another recording of it slow, I've done an R and B version of it, and I've heard a lot of different versions of it.

Doug Burke:

So, in your book you say, it says, "There's no burn factor," which I thought was interesting, that it's still played on the radio because there's no burn factor. And you said, "It's not stupid. It's fun." And I wanted to ask you, what's the difference between stupid and fun in a song?

Ed Hill:

Well, that's up to each individual to say. I don't know, they might be the same thing. I don't know. But kids really love Be My Baby Tonight, because it was something to learn. It was a tongue twister that people like to learn. The way those words went together, it was crafted very well. And that was him, but when you think about four guys singing it on the street corner for probably two years, they perfected it. Now stupid, I mean, I love Wooly Bully. I will listen to Wooly Bully if it comes on the radio.

Doug Burke:

That crosses from stupid into fun, if you ask me. That becomes fun, even though it's stupid.

Ed Hill:

But it's still a great song, and I will still listen to it. I love it. "Matty told Hatty about a thing she saw , had two big horns and a wooly jaw." I mean, come on. Having fun is part of the deal. People listen to music because they want to get away from the drudgery of their life. But then, on the other hand, sad songs, I like sad songs, I like the other side too. Because they're talking about things that relate to you. That's the deal when the country gets away from real songs, that side of it's great too, George Jones, I Stopped Loving Her Today, that wasn't supposed to ever be successful. Because it's about a guy that died, and it's the biggest country song that there ever was.

Doug Burke:

Yeah, Bobby Braddock talked about that on our show.

Let's talk about one of the sad songs, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, by Reba McEntire is your second Reba charting song.

Ed Hill:

Yeah. That song was the fastest rising number one Reba ever had. It was number one in eight weeks after it came out. There was a book called The Heart is Lonely Hunter, and a movie.

Doug Burke:

Did you read the book? I wanted to know that.

Ed Hill:

No. I just go to bookstores, and I look through stuff. And I walk down there, and if I see something that caught my eye, I didn't even think that I brought it up. I think Kim Williams brought it up, it's been a while. We wrote that, and Reba had already recorded her album, whatever album that was on, and they were all done. Somehow there was one song, where apparently she didn't like it that well or something. And so, she heard our song, and it became the last song on there, and it became the big song, but it was the last song they recorded. Same way with Running Behind on Tracy Lawrence. They were all done with the album, and they took a song off and put our song on at the very end. But The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, a producer now, Dan Huff, he had just come to town. He's a great guitar player, and he's the guitar player on The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and really helps sell it.

Doug Burke:

I kind of felt it got a different style of piano from you. I wrote in my notes, like a Bruce Hornsby style. I don't know, maybe it's an Ed Hill style, Bruce copied you.

Ed Hill:

I don't know about that.

Doug Burke:

Do you remember writing the piano line on this?

Ed Hill:

I don't think, I think I was playing guitar that day.

Doug Burke:

Oh, you were?

Ed Hill:

I didn't play piano. That was all in the studio. It was a lot easier to bring a guitar than a portable piano, because it's just easier to haul around, and I would write a lot on that. So it all depends where I was and what was available, and you write different songs. I have a lot of girls' songs, singles, and just in general girls' songs that got cut. Because I guess I had an epiphany one time. I was like, look, this is hard getting guys' songs cut. I'm going to write girls' songs and see if I can get them cut. Because first of all, there's more liberty to say things. Girls will say more things than the guys would. The guys are just partying on the truck and drinking beer. But the women actually were talking about heartbreak and talking about more things. If you take for example, It Matters To Me, Whatever You Say, and How Far, Whatever You Say and How Far are Martina McBride singles. Those three songs, How Far, Whatever You Say, It Matters To Me, are all the same concept. It's a woman talking to a man about, "I'm going to leave if we don't figure this out. Right now, it depends on whatever you say, whether I stay or whether I go." Same thing with, "How far do I got to go? Do I have to just leave, can we figure this out?" Same thing with It Matters To Me, "When we don't talk, we don't touch. It matters to me. I don't know if I can do this." So, I didn't know it at the time, but those are all three the same concept. But it gives a woman something to talk about. Like when Sarah Evans came to town, I started using her to sing demos. She got mad at me because one of her demos, the same record label, they gave it to Martina. Sarah Evans sang Whatever You Say in the studio as a demo, and then when she took it over to play it for RCA, they all give it to Martina, and then she got mad at me. I had nothing to do it, but I'm really glad Martina did it. So, you never know how that's going to work.

Doug Burke:

Well, I find it interesting that you were so capable of writing songs from a female perspective. And I think a lot of your songwriting is not so much autobiographical, it seems to me from having read your book. Did you draw on your personal life, or how did you put yourself in someone else's shoes?

Ed Hill:

I don't know, other than the fact that feelings really get to me. If I look back, I've been told my bread and butter are emotional songs, big ballads or whatever. The thing is, they're always looking for, "Give me a-" Sure, whatever. The thing is, they're always looking for, give me up-tempo positive, up-tempo positive, but the songs the last through time, a lot of times aren't that. They're a great big song. Just getting them cut is hard. I don't have the answer to any of that. It's just lucky and a lot of miracles. I'm still doing it. I just don't do it at the pace a publisher wants or whatever. I'm trying to do something I really like, but this is such a rigged system. Last year I had a song I wrote with Billy Lawson called My Friend Fred, and it's about drug addiction. Sammy Kershaw begged us to do it and he doesn't have a record deal, and so we were like, yeah, go ahead, and he did it and it was an independent thing. It got to 39 on the charts and the video to number one on Taste of Country for seven weeks in a row and all of a sudden it was gone. The whole song was gone, not to be heard because when they find that someone's doing good and it's not a major label, it's all Payola, all the stuff intertwined with iHeart. This is all run by so few people, they nix it, and so not a fun business to be in when you look on the inside unless you've got something where you're on the inside. I mean, luckily I got, most people are good. Cut my Luke Bryan, who's never done a song like that, and I'm surprised he did it, but I think his mother talked him into it. But that song shot to number one because it was a real song. It wasn't just crap about getting with a chick. It was before everybody else was writing them too. It just getting over the hump, a record label and an artist has to feel like your song is going to propel their career. It's going to make them elevated into another, whereas when they write the songs themselves, I'm not going to get an album cut anymore. Album cuts used to make money. They don't make any money anymore, but I'm not going to get one because the artist is going to have their name on everything. The only time I'm going to get a cut is if the thing is going to be a career record. So that's quite a challenge if you think about it, but that's the way it's kind of always been to some degree. I'm not here to write a piece of shit, I'm just not.

Doug Burke:

Thank goodness. Thank goodness.

Ed Hill:

In time. You know what? The people that I idolize, songwriters that came before me are in my class over the years or whatever, they're that way too. I have all the respect in the world for these people that are in the Nashville songwriters hall of fame, and maybe I'll be in there before I die. I don't know, but it's not my call.

Doug Burke:

We're going to get you in there. Ed, you touch on this in your book, you quoted Mark Twain. "The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a larger matter. Tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning." I asked songwriters this question all the time. How do you know when you're done with the song? When it has that feeling?

Ed Hill:

Every song is different and there's not a hard and fast rule. Here's what you think about to really help you out when you're writing the song, it'll never be worse than where you are. So you think you're done. Okay? It'll never be worse than that. So it only can get better. So you just, I don't know who you think you are, but why don't you just look at it some more? Can you make it better anywhere? One word, anything, a melody, anything, can you eliminate something? Bob McDill who writes great songs. He's got all the awards. He said you got to take out all the Bondo. You got to take out everything that holds it, take it all out. You want simplicity. You want none of that, every word counts, and it's like, so when you're looking at it, man, can you make it better? Sometimes it's best to sleep on it. Maybe you have to sleep on it for two weeks. Maybe you don't. One of the songs I'm most proud of is How 'Bout Them Cowgirls, by George Strait, walked in at 10 o'clock in the morning by 12 o'clock the song was on hold for George Strait. It was done and they already had it in his camp. I've never had that happen before, and it's one of the most complicated, best-written songs I've ever done. That's just persistence and determination, which goes back to Napoleon Hill's laws of success, persistence, and determination, and that's what a farmer is.

Doug Burke:

On that song, How 'Bout Them Cowgirls, you wrote in your book that it's the first time that you rhymed girls four times, but I actually think this is one of the best rhymes of your career, the way you do this.

Ed Hill:

I did rhyme the other part of the chorus and stuff like that, but this just says it a lot. It's just, how 'bout the cowgirls, sure are some proud girls. You rhyme girls a lot, but it just seemed right. I tell you right now girls, there just be seven wonders of this big old around world. Then there's the rhyme. How 'bout them cowgirls. But I got cowgirls everywhere and I wrote down with Casey Beathard, and Casey's real good at all that stuff, but I can remember liking the bridge. She don't need you and she don't need me. Well, we added she don't need me after a while because it's like, wait a minute. I don't want George, I want him to be humbled too, I want him to be down there, like she don't need me. You got to make the singer want to sing it. The singer has to be in a certain light and that light there it's like, she don't need you and she don't need me, and that makes a girl feel good, and that's one of George's favorite songs to do live. He does every show to this day.

Doug Burke:

Yeah. Yeah. Often I think closing the shows with it, right? I was listening to it last night again and I was like, that bridge is one of the best bridges I've ever heard because not only does it say that it says, she can do just fine on her own two feet, but she wants a man who wants her to be herself. I mean, that's a cowgirl, man. Like you just captured it.

Ed Hill:

Well, the second verse was different. The second verse is, she's riding colts in Steamboat Springs. Originally that was she's bucking broncs in Steamboat Springs, and when George got it, him and his wife, Norma, got a hold of, I think Tony Bran, the producer, who got a hold of us and they wanted, and George is like, she goes, well, George wants, says, Norma wants to know if you can change that to riding colts in Steamboat Springs because she don't buck broncs in her real life. George goes why? What was crazy about it, it's a better ride. She's riding colts in Steamboat Springs. So you got the colts in the boat. They all rhyme, they come out of your mouth real nice. Whereas bucking broncs has got those-

Doug Burke:

Little internal rhyme, huh?

Ed Hill:

...hard. Yeah. So that was a better thing, and then I use Steamboat Springs because my friend Mark Sanders, who I wrote a lot of those other songs with, he had bought in a place in Steamboat Springs and I love the name. I also, when I got songwriter of the year, they went to Steamboat Springs to ski and we all went and stuff. So I had it in my head. Mark was always wishing he was a writer on it later on because I had Steamboat Springs in it. But Mark wrote, I Hope You Dancing, and I go, I wish I was on that one, Mark.

Doug Burke:

So this song has strings on it and not all of your songs have strings on it. Very few do, in fact.

Ed Hill:

George isn't afraid to put strings on. Tony Brown, when they had that song done, and he let me Casey come in and listen to it before it came out, he's like, the strings, he says, this is George's rhinestone cowboy and there's a lick in there that is the actual rhinestone cowboy string part. Na, na, na, na. Like if you listen to the song in the middle of it, it doesn't rhinestone cowboy string lick, because George, in some of his songs, he's not afraid to put strings, that's just him. So this song here, there's been like four or five different videos done on the song, cowgirls and they're all good. Some of them are just stills of cowgirls and horses, but I'm so proud of that song and it's like, I've had people call me up that are musicians.

Ed Hill:

I had one guy in Ohio or something and a friend of mine I knew, and he said, man, we learned this song. He says, I had no idea it was just hard to learn. He says, man, you guys wrote that? I don't know how you do that because I can't even figure out how to play it, and I was like, well, and I've had the same thing happen on there. The Martinez song, was in a movie. I've had a keyboard player goes, man, that sounded really easy until I tried to figure out how to play it. It's in two separate keys, like the verse is in one key, then you got to transpose to another key but if you do it right-

Doug Burke:

It bounces between G and D. But it's very subtle, is it why?

Ed Hill:

I don't know what key she's doing it in. Yeah, it will be where the root will be the one, and then all of a sudden the root is the five chord. I don't have on the tip of my fingers right now, but you listening to it and you try to play it. It'll twist your head around a little bit, but it sounds so natural when you listened to it.

Doug Burke:

Yeah, no. It's like this overlap. Yeah, that was in the movie Where the Heart Is with Natalie Portman, Sally Field and Ashley Judd, in the wedding scene, and I think this is in some respects, been a wedding classic song. This song has been played at a lot of weddings because it's such a beautiful love song. Do you think this is the most beautiful song you've written?

Ed Hill:

Well, I don't know. I got so many songs that have never been heard. I have a song called I Want to Marry You. That's actually only about a year old. That's just absolutely gorgeous. I wrote it with Billy Lawson. It may get recorded here pretty soon by a pop artist. I don't know, but I've got songs, it'd be great to hear somebody like an Adele-

Doug Burke:

A cross-over pop artists like that.

Ed Hill:

Oh man, Lady Gaga or Adele. I mean, those women, they sing so good, and then there's songs like, I got a song That's a Man that Jack Ingram made a single out of. Jack Ingram from Texas. I wrote that with Mark and Steven Dale Jones in Steamboat, but That's a Man was written about my dad in the last verse and it would be a great song for Bruce Springsteen, and so would Drinking Class, Lee Bryce single, that'd be great for Springsteen.

Doug Burke:

Well, he just got in a little trouble with drinking. I don't think he's going to do that any time soon.

Ed Hill:

That'll make him do it, Doug.

Doug Burke:

Maybe, it seems like he was set up there. He had a 0.2 rating.

Let's talk about Drinking Class because that is a different song for you. It's got the fake rhyme of Monday through Friday, man, we bust our, you just feel the word ass coming and instead you give them the backs and you guys did that by design I imagine. Did you talk about that?

Ed Hill:

Oh yeah. We talk about it. Oh yeah, for sure. No doubt about it because we knew people. Well, first of all, you don't even know if anybody's going to ever do it when you're writing, but you like, no let's do back because you're really busting, in the jobs I've had, when I really work my back would hurt at the end of the day. So it really is your back that is hurting. But bust your ass is of course the saying, and we knew that, but we thought if they want to change it, if somebody wants to record it and put, bust your ass, then go ahead. There's a lot of times they'll want to change it because it used, actually Brice, we call it a Drinkin' Class without the G, like drinkin'. He asked if he could change it to Drinking Class. We're like, well sure, do it. Best your back was on purpose and when we were interviewed after it was number one, which also went number one on certain charts, they asked that question a lot and we were like, well, it's bust your back, and by creating controversy, it makes it more interesting because everybody's going to come up with bust your ass. I'm going to bust your ass man. Like, well, okay, whatever.

Doug Burke:

Anybody can rhyme ass with class, to rhyme backs with class takes a real songwriter, huh?

Ed Hill:

You know, there's a line you try to walk. You try to make it the best you can make it, where you don't regret it. That song, I didn't think anybody would really do it because first of all, it's like, we're up when the rooster crows, is the first line, and the thing is, that's an old line. The rooster crows, that could be a song from the thirties, but it's just real, and Lee Brice, who's a great writer, he listened to it and apparently he looked at it like it's the real working man song, and it really is a working man's song. The drinking class, working-class, and there's been a lot of songs talking about raise your glass. So it had a lot of things that probably were working against it, but he made something out of it. Then again, there's a real simple song. He does have a bridge, but the bridge is real cool. It's almost like a gospel church thing. We all know why we're here. Little fun, little music, little whiskey, little beer.

Doug Burke:

It's almost like he's talking to the audience.

Ed Hill:

Absolutely. It's got the Oregon ladies break out your dancing shoes. I don't care what night it is. It's Friday, it's Saturday, it's Sunday. Come on, sing it with me. Got personality.

Doug Burke:

It's the church of country music or it's the gospel of country music being talked to you here.

Ed Hill:

You don't hear about the thousands of songs I never got cut. Those are just lucky that I got them through. You got to do a lot to get a little, but a little gets you a lot. That's kind of my theory too. It matters to me than all the other songs on that album.

Doug Burke:

So, you obviously named your book after this song. It matters to me, and I have to say to you, the opening line of this song is one of the most remarkable lines and lyrics. When you wrote this, you must have been like, this is a song. Baby tell me would you ever learn to fight without saying a word. Like that just tells a story, man. You're like, give me more that. Tell me where that came from?

Ed Hill:

Well, I got to give Mark Sanders credit on that one. He didn't want to write with me that day, and we always wrote on Fridays, Mark's retired now. We always wrote on Fridays, but I'd have to bug him a lot of times to do it because he was successful before me. I always really admired his ability, how good he was because he used to be an English teacher. He was real good with words and stuff. A real smart guy. So he didn't want to write that day. I talked him into it and it was a cold Friday in the winter and he had this little office in Reeba's building, it had no windows, is just about the size of the desk, and you go in there and just barely squeeze in there. Mark usually doesn't bring ideas with him. He's one of those kinds of writers. I had that yellow pad and I had some stuff written down. Finally got him on it and about halfway down these ideas I had, I had written it matters to me. Some of them are ideas, some of them are not, it's just a stirrup, and I had it written down there and I went by it, got to the end. He goes, well, go back to that it matters to me. Then that's when he said, there's a certain thing about hymns, people in their subconscious, it reminds you of mama. It's an endearing quality about hymns in a title of a song, and I thought about that ever since then, whether it is or not. It's very interesting when you think all the things that you don't realize are affecting you. Everything's affecting you, everything. The sun going down, the wind, the days, earth moving. I mean, things are affecting you.

Doug Burke:

For most babies, that's their first-word, mama, and that M sound is the first thing that many, many children utter.

Ed Hill:

Yeah. So it's comforting. It's a comforting word that you don't even think about. Anyway, and it's a nice alliteration, it matters to me. So we tackled that and he had had an argument with his wife that morning. That's why he didn't want to write. That's the game they were playing. I do the same thing or I used to hear whatever, you just clam up, you don't talk and I've gotten more compliments on that line than anything because it's just, people are like, it's simple, it's right. It's like, there's nothing wrong with that line. I can't find anything wrong with it. It's just following it up. So we did and it's real simple song, and then the second verse is, tell me how far it is, the distance between a woman and a man. This doesn't say much, real heartfelt.

Doug Burke:

Yeah. Maybe I still don't understand the distance between a woman and a man. So tell me how far it is.

Ed Hill:

Yeah. So really not saying anything because I'm not sure I can. Well, I'm not sure I can, I put that in there because Mark was going to put, I can't, like he was going to say, no, I can't do it that way, and I said, no, man, leave some hope, leave some hope. I'm not sure I can. That leaves some hope, and I would do that a lot when I'm writing songs. A lot of his other songs I would do it. I'd just leave just a little bit of hope.

Doug Burke:

You can't be all about despair, right? You got to have some hope in the song. You got to mix a little positivity in with the negativity.

Ed Hill:

Like watching a movie, if you had an ending on the movie that's just awful and likes to have a little bit of, leave you with a little bit of hope. It's just life. I don't know. I don't have the answers to stuff I'm always searching, but some songs take a lot longer, some don't. That didn't take long. Now when I had Whatever You Say on Martina, which was a big song. The last verse on that song, I remember taking it in. I was still with Karen Conrad. I had a different last verse and I played the song for her and she goes, and I don't think you've got it. That last verse ended up being, you say, yes, you need me, no, you wouldn't leave me and that should be enough to make me stay. Even though I want to, I don't hear I love you in whatever you say. That wasn't the last verse originally, I went back, the song was weeks old then before we demoed it and Mark and I, we changed that last verse because we didn't have the impact. She has a woman heard it and I respected her opinion. So I went back and delved into it and I'm glad I did.

Doug Burke:

You wrote in your book about this song. Sometimes my job seems to be to know when to stay out of the way of greatness. It's important to guide the best ideas to the front. What do you mean by that on the writing of this song?

Ed Hill:

Part of the collaboration thing, if somebody is on a roll or somebody, in your opinion, and when you wipe away all the bull shit else going on, like if they're coming up with the best stuff, let them come up with it, encourage it. It doesn't matter who comes up with them. Doesn't matter. The song is King. The thing is, you and your co-writer, you both have to win. If I win, they win. It doesn't matter. It's the end product. The song is King. The writers are servants and that's what you have to do, and so you have to, I'm thinking about stuff all the time. I'll be on the lawnmower thinking about stuff, and if it bothers me, it's not right. If it bothers me, it's not right. That's just all I know.

Doug Burke:

That's a good rule, I haven't heard that before. If it just bothers you.

Ed Hill:

Well, if a red flag pops up or you keep questioning it, then it can be better and it's never going to be worse than it is. So you got that. So don't sweat it. Can you notch it up? What's the goal? My goal is to get somebody else to do it. I got to write something better than them.

Doug Burke:

So the song has an octave jump from the verse to the chorus, and you obviously wrote that by design, and you talk in your book about how great singers love that.

Ed Hill:

A lot of them can't do it. So when Martina, I had three singles on her and two of them like, How Far, it jumped up an octave. She did all right. It really is empowering to a singer because it just shows that they are really a singer and they separates them from the other ones, and so certain songs not everybody's going to do. If Martina didn't do that song then nobody would do it, probably. Even other types of songs, like How 'Bout Them Cowgirls, if George Strait didn't do that song, there was no pitches. There was nobody else who was going to do it. There's nobody, maybe Ronnie Dunn. So a lot of times publishers, they want you to write a song that they can play and that 20 people can cut. Well, the people that are recording songs don't want songs that 20 other people can do. They want songs that are just for them. So there's that line you got to walk, and you don't know what they've cut already. It's sort of like being in the front of the ship. They're the ship, you don't know if they've cut six songs, they don't tell you. You don't know if the six songs, what grooves they're in, what subject matter they are and what they have open left, and you just have to take a guess. Is trying to like look through a locked window that's curtains drawn. It's not easy.

Doug Burke:

It's a tough business that you're in and one of the songs that you wrote that went to number one is Find Out Who Your Friends Are. What's this song about?

Ed Hill:

That's this what it's about, right there. And you read the story on that and it's pretty scary because that song got number one because head of a record label decided to put out a cease and desist order on it. And that's not nice. That's when we had Kenny Chesney and Tim McGraw did a version with Tracy Lawrence. And so, that song struggled to get up the charts until most of you guys were on it. There's another version of just Tracy. Then it got to number four, the head of the record label of one of those guys decided he didn't give his guy permission. So, he has his lawyer put a cease and desist order out to the programmers to quit playing the song because he didn't give his artist permission to play on, which upset his artist because his artist was a big artist. He's one of those guys. The radio station, I read this, they got back the next day. And they're like, "Well, we thought we did something wrong because the cease and desist order, that's mean. We thought we did something wrong, when we looked up the law and it says when these albums come out, we can play anything off of it and the album had already come out. If the album hadn't come out yet, that'd be one thing but it had come out. So, our fans request we play this song, so we are not only going to make it a number one record, we're going to make it vocal event of the year. The next week on Monday, it was number one and it was a vocal event of the year at the ACM's come up two months after that. That's the fight that radio has with labels, who's got the power? They looked it up and that was it. It wouldn't have gotten to number one, otherwise probably. And it's a big song and I've gotten a lot of ... I had a guy get a hold of me yesterday because he broke his leg and his friends came over and helped him put in a driveway thing where he can get his wheelchair down his driveway for free. And he goes, "Man, it reminds me of your song, man. I have people all the time telling me about finding out who your friends are," which is another simple song that's written for everybody. It doesn't go into detail that people don't recognize. When your car off the side of the road, it's stuck in a ditch, where you're out in the middle of nowhere, people get that. I love the stuff of this thing where the road comes to an end, this ain't where the bandwagon stops, was it just one of those times? A lot of folks jump off. It's just true. Tracy Lawrence hadn't had a hit for 10 years before that song came out and he got a number one on that and he cried when he got number one because he thought he was out of the picture because he'd been out of limelight for at least 10 years. And Trisha was out of the limelight on Georgia Rain for, she hadn't had a song out in six years and she got a big song on Georgia Rain and ...

Doug Burke:

Georgia Rain, let's talk about Georgia Rain for a second because you originally wrote it as Augusta Rain and I've seen the Masters so I know what the golf tournament, so I know what Augusta looks like. And interestingly on this show, I've analyzed Roger Murrah's Seattle Rain, I've analyzed Kye Fleming's Smoky Mountain Rain and now we get a chance to talk about Georgia Rain or Augusta Rain and can you tell me what is the difference of that rain from any other kind of rain?

Ed Hill:

Well, just the location, it's from Georgia. No, it's just a way to hoop the song. I wrote that with Karyn Rochelle and I used to love writing with Karyn, knowing that we weren't going to get a song only about every four times we got together. Women are, I kind of studied that a little bit about women and those songs are real personal to them. I'm loving to write about anything but I just know that Karen is going to write something that actually affects her. Now, she's actually a background singer in Garth and Trisha's band and she opens a show for them because of Georgia Rain. But Karyn that day, it was a winter day and we started talking about her mother and her mother hadn't been feeling good and she was in Augusta. I think she's from, she might've been from Georgia although she lived in Carolinas and Karyn was always worried about her mom. So, we ended up doing Augusta Rain but then it sounds like a gust of wind, like a gust of rain, a gust of wind. But anyway we wrote that and we hooped it around the rain to make it a, I don't know, that's just way it turned out. When we were doing it I was like, "Karyn, who's going to cut this song? I mean, Trisha, she wasn't even recording anymore. She's from Georgia but nobody else was." And I go, "Who's going to record a song about weather and about Georgia if there's nobody there to do it?" She goes, "I don't know and I don't care. I think it's beautiful. We're going to demo." I go, Yes, ma'am," and that's what we did and it sat on the shelf for two years and then Garth Fundis heard it and Trisha did it and we just changed the first line, instead of being, the first line of the chorus, "Augusta Rain on the red Georgia clay," there's the, "Georgia Rain on the Jasper County clay," whatever. So, they just changed that to make it personal because that's where she's from, Jasper County. Then they did it on the CMA, it' the first time and Maya Angelou and Dennis Hopper introduced her and man, got a standing ovation because it was just real. I got great reviews on it. There's no grades in that song, it's just verse, chorus, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, verse-chorus. That's it. But it tells a great story. And it's like the second verse, you use them like, "Cottonfields remember when, a flash of lightning drove us in," well, I thought about Deana Carter and Patricia Berg doing Strawberry Wine. "The fields have grown over now, years since they've seen a plow. There's nothing time hasn't touched." So, like what's the line in there about the moon saw, the moon saw like in Strawberry Wine, the moon was, I don't know what it is, but the moon was a witness. So I mean the cotton, the entity, like cotton fields, they remember well. So, I use them as a person. And so, in your subconscious, a lot of my subconscious has to do with that because I'm always thinking about the history of those other songs like that and what worked and what I liked.

Doug Burke:

So, one of the songs set is based on one of the sweetest things I read in your book and from your personal life, which not many of your songs seem to be inspired from your personal life is just fishing. Your daughter had said this line or you had said to your daughter, "I love you," her name is Grayson, right?

Ed Hill:

Yeah.

Doug Burke:

And you said, "I love you Gray," and she said, "I know." And I thought, "Oh my God, that makes a dad feel so great."

Ed Hill:

Yeah. I can remember I was in my car about a mile from here taking her to school or something. And at first I thought, "Well yeah, you're taking a lot for granted," but it just means that they're confident. And it's like, anyway, it just stuck with me and then when we're writing it, I brought it up and it ended up being in the song. Yeah and there's something about it. I know. I mean, that's a kid whose parents aren't afraid to say you love them and you do it and I did it all the time and I still do. It's like some kid just it's in their subconscious, they don't have to go fishing for it. And the whole thing's a memory. And when I was writing it too I was thinking, "Okay." At first, it wasn't about fishing, it was about playing catch with a boy and the dad and then it would go, "Well, we went to fishing," and I'm just thinking, "Man, my two girls, they love fishing. Maybe it's a girl, maybe it's a daughter and a dad." We're like, "Well let's see, Garth has three daughters, Trace has five or three or something? Tim McGraw's got two or three." So, we started thinking, "These guys only have daughters." And there's like, so there's three pitches, four pitches, so we're thinking about that while we're writing it. We had it and I was like, "Man, this is really good because it's not about fishing, it's about a memory." They put it on hold for Trace eventually and it didn't make the album. Trace, he had gone from whatever he was on, Capitol and he went over to Universal South. We didn't make the album that they had the song on hold for. And I was actually picking Grayson up, one of my girls up from school, Mark Wright who produced it or was running the label he goes, "We just finished, it's not going to be on this Trace album." And I was like, "Oh man," and he had already recorded it. He said, "It's going to be on the next one." And I was just going, "Jesus, the next one?" I got to live with four singles, two years, you're going to lose interest in it by then, I'm thinking to myself because they never hold onto them. And there'll be a new producer and that won't be their baby and then they'll be onto something else. So, what am I going to do though? I was like, "Okay, thanks." But I'm glad they did, they'd made it on the next record and became, I don't know, his first single, I think so. He got nominated for a Grammy and I got beat up by Taylor Swift of course, because she was hot. I might have a better song but she won.

Doug Burke:

Well, I like this song because it's a father-daughter love song. And there aren't a lot of those kind of father-daughter songs. That's a real unique thing. Every father who has a daughter feels that special relationship. And not every daughter likes to go fishing either. Some daughters don't like going near fish and hooks and worms and things like that.

Ed Hill:

Well in the video, the little girl just touches a fish one time. She doesn't even, he makes the hook and everything. But again, it's back to being real, real simple in the simplest terms. Watching her holding that pink rod and reel. "I'm lost in her holding that pink rod and reel, doing almost everything but sitting still," those lines, man, you got to make them universal and simple, but it's nice pictures, it's nice to have nouns and verbs.

Doug Burke:

And did you have pictures of your daughter, Grace in this?

Ed Hill:

Do I have some?

Doug Burke:

No, when you're writing it, did you have pictures of her in your head? Was that inspiring you?

Ed Hill:

My other daughter Savannah, who's just a little bit older, yeah. We hopped to Center Hill Lake one time, they're on the dock and they're just having a ball when they catch a fish. Of course, you got to let them put the fish back, they don't want to kill it. You go fishing somewhere where you don't have to wait when the fish would hit quick. Otherwise, if you got to wait, then the kid's going to get disinterested. But as long as it's hitting man, and there's a place not too far from here, you just put your pole in, put a cicada or something on it man, you'll get something hit real quick. So, they used to like that.

Doug Burke:

Mm-hmm 

Let's finish this episode by talking about most people are good by Luke Bryan. That's sort of been your latest chart-topping song. In this day and age when it doesn't feel like everybody's good to each other always, it's a real inspiring message.

Ed Hill:

I had a songwriter friend of mine he goes, "Most people aren't good, that's not right." I go, "Well, maybe 51%."

Doug Burke:

50.1.

Ed Hill:

Yeah, you're right. But even though politics or everything, everything's really heated up right now but that was just two years ago and it was heated up then but it was before everybody else got on the bandwagon. The thing was Luke Bryan never crossed our mind when we wrote the song, that never ever crossed my mind that a real country Luke Ryan would do this song. We just got to the point after so long, I write with Josh and David a lot, we've been writing together for 20 years. We're catching up on the families and we don't do it all the time, I'm going to see them again here this month. We just find something that we like and simple. Again, back to simple. But Josh came in with that title we were kicking that around and then we had more ideas than we could get in the song like all the things we said in there, we had a lot more of them in there. But the ones that were sticking, it was like, "Most Mamas oughta qualify for sainthood," and that came about because we needed something to rhyme with most people are good and that rhyme but it was like, "Man," we all love that. So, it's like, "Jajing, that line is going to stay."

Doug Burke:

Well, one of my favorite lines, "Because nobody gets a second chance to make new old friends."

Ed Hill:

Yeah, that's a good one. And then, that line at the end of the chorus, "You love who you love and nothing you should ever be ashamed of," is interpreted in a lot of ways. Luke Bryan thought it just meant racial but we're talking about gays, lesbians, it doesn't matter. You know what I mean? You just love who you love and nothing you should ever be ashamed of. You can't help who you love. And it's really a good universal thing to say. And it doesn't eliminate anybody. Also, the streets of gold, even if they were painted in dirt, I still want to go. Well, that doesn't eliminate any certain religion, even though streets are gold sounds kind of Christian, it doesn't eliminate Catholics, it doesn't eliminate anybody who believes in a higher being, you know what I'm saying? It's like, that's what we're trying to do, is not eliminate any listener because everybody has a human thing of, I mean, if you're an atheist, well then that's a different song. I can write an atheist song but why be an atheist? I mean, what if you're wrong? I don't know. But anyway.

Doug Burke:

If you ask that question that would make you an agnostic.

Ed Hill:

Yeah.

Doug Burke:

If you asked, "What if you're wrong?" Once you start asking that question then you’re no longer a qualified atheist, I think.

Ed Hill:

Yeah. And that song didn't get nominated for anything on the CMA and ACMs because for several reasons, one, the year before when Girl Crush came out, "I got a girl," a lot of people thought that was about two lesbians and it's not, it's just about a woman that is jealous of the other woman about the man. But also being, so I'm an independent publisher, these publishing companies, they do a mass voting. In other words, when you work at a big publishing company, you don't know because you're automatically a member of the ACM and CMAs, they make you one in the company. So, if say there's 60 people that work in the company, that's 60 votes. So, when it comes time for the nominations or whatever, so here's a guy running this label, he goes and calls the other label and goes, "Okay, look it. We want him to be the duet of the year. We'll vote for your guy to be the album of the year if you vote for us." So, they have a massive amount of votes, I have one vote and I don't even get to vote. So, we didn't get nominated for anything. If you were, "How come that song didn't get nominated for anything?" Well, that's why because it was an independent deal. Now, Luke's label could vote for it but it's just more people are going to vote for songs that they're all label-oriented and people don't know that stuff. It's called block voting, they block vote. And that's what they do. They don't talk to each other most of the time but I have some inside information. I probably shouldn't have told you that.

Doug Burke:

Well, I have to thank you, Ed Hill. This is truly, truly been a pleasure. Thank you for coming on Back Story Song. Is there anyone you want to thank?

Ed Hill:

I would thank everybody out there, man. I hope I didn’t make anybody mad.

Doug Burke:

I don't know how you could. You're too nice a guy. Oh man, I can't wait until we get beyond this Covid and I get to get out there and meet you.

Ed Hill:

Yeah. Well, maybe we have to write about it, I don't know. But everybody else has written about that. I don't like writing songs that are limited like you write a song about being six feet apart mixing, no it's over. I want something timeless.

Doug Burke:

Well, your songs are timeless, and thank you for giving them to us. I also got to thank DJ Wyatt Schmidt. You can listen to his music out there on Twitch. He's got quite a growing following and please follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. We're posting regularly, all these daily song shoutouts and the weekly songwriter spotlight. I have to thank my top patron, Jim "The Fiend" Newman. Thank you Jim Newman for being a supporter and please we encourage everybody to support Back Story Song so we can keep doing this for you. Please share the songwriter playlist, the songbooks that we're creating because that will help Ed Hill get paid. And by Ed's book, It Matters To Me. Buy it directly from him and he will autograph a copy and send it to you. So, thank you very much, Ed Hill for being on our show.

Ed Hill:

All right Doug, talk to you later.