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Takin' A Walk - Music History with Buzz Knight
Adam Wright-The Inside Story of One of Music City's Premier Songwriters-Takin A Walk Nashville
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- [00:01]
Adam Wright
Taking a Walk Nashville. If that is something that you feel is important to you, to make a piece of work and put it out in the world, that's a hard thing to not do if you have that inkling.
- [00:13]
Sarah Harrelson
Hi, this is Sarah Harrelson, your host of Taking a Walk Nashville. Today I am sitting down with Nashville songwriter Adam Wright to talk about his new album, Nature of Necessity. Join me as we unfold his journey from Georgia roots to pursuing a music dream with his wife, Shannon. Adam Wright is a twice Grammy nominated songwriter, singer, producer and musician and is signed with Carnival Music. His songs have been recorded and performed by artists such as Alan Jackson, Leanne Womack, John Legend, Brandy Clark, Troy, Tricia Yearwood, and Garth Brooks, just to name a few. Let's take a walk with Adam in Nashville together.
- [01:00]
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This is an iHeart podcast.
- [01:02]
Sarah Harrelson
Guaranteed human.
- [01:05]
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10 athletes will face the toughest job interview in fitness that will push past physical and mental breaking points.
- [01:15]
You are the fittest of the fit. Only one of you will leave here with an IFIT contract for $250,000.
- [01:23]
Adam Wright
This is where Mindse comes in.
- [01:25]
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Someone will be eliminated.
- [01:27]
Sarah Harrelson
Pressure is coming down.
- [01:30]
Trainer Games Announcer
This is Trainer Games.
- [01:32]
Adam Wright
Watch it on prime video starting January 8th.
- [01:36]
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Sarah Harrelson
Uh, limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.
- [01:55]
Adam Wright
Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty Liberty, Liberty. Liberty Savings Ferry unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance company and affiliates, excludes Massachusetts.
- [02:05]
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- [02:37]
Adam Wright
Welcome to Taking a Walk Nashville with your host, singer, songwriter Sarah Harrelson.
- [02:44]
Sarah Harrelson
So, Adam, thank you so much for being on Taking a Walk Nashville. Today. Your songs have been recorded by Nashville giants like Garth Brooks, Alan Jackson, Leanne Womack, and one of my favorites, Brandi Clark. Yeah, can you just start by telling listeners how you got your start in songwriting and where you're from Originally, I'm from Newnan, Georgia.
- [03:07]
Adam Wright
Which when I was growing up, there was a small town, and after the Olympics in 96, there were no small towns that close to Atlanta. It sort of swept. Swallowed everything. So. But, you know, I grew up. My dad was a piano player mostly, you know, church music. My grandfather was a piano player, and it was mostly.
- [03:34]
Like jazz standards, you know, from the 30s and 40s, 20s and 30s and 40s. So I started as a piano player, I guess, is what I'm trying to get at. And then I heard a Chuck Berry record when I was about 12 years old and just lost my mind about guitar and needed a guitar immediately. And. But so that was a lot of musicianship, you know, went on for years. And I think when I was a teenager was when I started getting interested in how to write songs, because my friend and I started a band and we, you know, we sort of ran out of COVID songs and started writing songs that emulate the bands that we were into.
- [04:16]
And professionally, gosh, I guess I was living in Atlanta in my 20s, and my wife and I had a band. My then girlfriend who would become my wife, we had a band and we were writing a lot of songs, and I had an uncle in the business, and I would send him songs occasionally. And. And he. He was the one who was like, you guys ought to move to either Austin, Texas, or Nashville and. And sort of pursue this, you know, do it. And we didn't know anybody in Austin, so we moved to Nashville and got started learning how to, you know, professionally write songs by going to writers nights and trying to get in the room with what we considered real songwriters. And. And that's a. You know, no matter how much you do before you get to town, when you get to town, you're starting over. It doesn't really matter what you've done before you got here. At least it was that way when. When we came here.
- [05:13]
Sarah Harrelson
Yeah, absolutely. And. And it sounds like you grew up around all sorts of genres growing up, and that's so special that you were able to write and do songs and come out and pursue music with your wife and do music together.
- [05:27]
Adam Wright
I mean, some of my favorite. We toured a lot, and some of my favorite memories of playing music were the two of us just dragging a giant PA system around to bars and restaurants and setting up ourselves and playing all for. It was not very much money, but a whole lot of fun. It was a lot of sweat at the time, but, man, we had a. We had a really good time. It was what bonded us was playing music together, singing together. That's how we met. We met on a gig.
- [06:01]
Sarah Harrelson
Oh, yeah, that's special. So you and your wife, you're out here, you're playing at bars, doing gigs, you know, trying to make it in Nashville. What was the turning point in your career in Nashville? How did you get into country music and get your first major cut as a songwriter?
- [06:20]
Adam Wright
Well, let's see, the first major cut as a songwriter was an Alan Jackson song. Two of them @ the same time. So, you know, we were writing and sort of trying to, you know, learn how to do things. And we had a handful of songs and I took them to Alan and this was like, you know, pre Napster and all of that stuff when records were selling. So if you got a couple of songs on a record that did well and a lot of records did well, like, you know, a lot major artists went gold a lot, you know, so you could make a pretty good living with album cuts without hits. And so anyway, I got a couple of songs to him that he really liked. One that Shannon, my wife, and I had written together, and one that I'd written by myself. These were songs I wrote in Atlanta, I think. I can't remember. But anyway, he liked them, recorded them, put it up, put them on a record by the. I mean, we didn't have publishing deals or anything. We just. They were just our songs. And, man, the record did well, as all his records were doing at the time. You know, we made enough money to put a down payment on a house. And I remember telling her, I was like, I thought, you know, we can do this. Like, if we keep getting better at writing songs and keep meeting more people, we can make a decent living writing songs. Almost immediately, Napster sort of gobbled up the publishing business or the record selling business, I should say. So most of that, the way that that all worked changed, like immediately, like overnight. So then you had to kind of figure out new ways to do it and sort of stay alive. But it was an interesting little window that, you know, kind of closed as soon as we jumped through.
- [08:12]
Sarah Harrelson
It. Well, I love that you brought that up because I think a lot of people don't realize that it's tough for songwriters to make a living now just as a songwriter getting cuts unless it's a hit song. So I. How do you navigate that change in the industry when most of the income is based on streaming royalties that aren't as much as back in the day with.
- [08:36]
Adam Wright
CDs. Yeah, and it's really. They're geared towards the ownership of a master recording, which for People that aren't, you know, music business savvy, like, basically means the record company that owns the record makes money off of streaming and songwriters. You know, the publishing money off that is almost non existent. So, yeah, all of that did change. And so what if it's a hit? That's different. Where it used to be, if it was on an album, you still made some money, you had a hit, obviously you made more money, but you could still make a living off of album cuts, which there were plenty of. You know, a lot of artists weren't interested in writing back, you know, back then, unlike now. So I personally offset, you know, that change by doing studio work. You know, I play guitar and piano and sing in the studio quite a bit with a lot of it with Frank Liddell, who's. Who runs Carnival Music, who I'm signed to. And he's a brilliant producer and a great publisher and a pretty good guy. So I work a lot with him in the studio and that's been a great thing. And I play shows and whatever else you can do to sort of hang in there if songs are your.
- [09:52]
Sarah Harrelson
Passion. Right. You definitely have to wear a lot of hats in the music industry nowadays. But, you know, besides being a songwriter and studio musician, you're also an artist and just released your new folk album, Nature of Necessity, back in.
- [10:06]
Adam Wright
September. Yeah, that's.
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Sarah Harrelson
Right. Yeah. And what's interesting, when I was reading about your thoughts on this new album, you said there's no story behind the album. You quoted. The story is there's no story I didn't get sober. There was no breakup. You know, you're just a lyric junkie with a melody addiction. And, you know, I believe there's a story behind every song. So if. If there's no story of the album, what made you put this collection of songs together and put it out in the.
- [10:39]
Adam Wright
World?
- [10:41]
A habit, probably. Like, it's, you know, I'm just. I've always been in the habit of releasing music from way before we moved to Nashville, we were making and putting out records, either solo or as a band, whatever we were doing. It's just, I think if you have that in you, you just always. It's real hard to get out. Like, if that is something that you feel is important to you, to make a piece of work and put it out in the world, that's a hard thing to not do. If you have that inkling. And I've just always had that inkling as a part of, you know, whatever I'm doing. And this collection, like all records, to me, I think they're all born out of the same little swell of. I guess I'll call it inspiration. You know, you sort of get on a kick with a certain thing. And there's a new excitement around some. You've turned some corner in your process or journey as a songwriter, artist, or whatever. And when you do that, there's all this. You get new wind in your sails and, you know, a lot of new material that way. And so every album that I've done has always been a collection of whatever that particular moment was, you know, and then maybe long moments. It may be a year that it takes to get all of that together. But they all hang together in the same way. They're all kind of born out of the same new, new mindset or experience. So. And these were that. With the exception of a couple, some of these songs were a lot older than the others. Particularly Dreamer and the Realist. And Heaven When I Die, I think, predated the writing of a lot of these other songs. So they were the outliers, I guess. But they. They fit together with all of.
- [12:28]
Sarah Harrelson
This. They do, yeah. It's. I think it's beautifully pieced together. Dreamer and the Realist is one of my favorites. And I think you did such a great job with just the detail tale of all of the songs and listening through the album. Was Bob Dylan ever a lyrical influence of.
- [12:45]
Adam Wright
Yours? That's funny. Nobody's ever asked that. And I think I have, like, a complicated relationship with Bob Dylan's catalog. And maybe most people do. I don't know. I don't talk about it much, I guess, but, man, I think some of his work is very good and important. And I think some of it is not very good. And I almost think that's a hot take, I guess, for a songwriter. But I also think.
- [13:17]
His figure looms so large over the craft of songwriting. It's hard to accurately assess the quality of a lot of his work in the same way that I think Picasso is that way in the art world. He looms so large. He's so iconic. He's synonymous with being a painter the way that Bob Dylan is synonymous with being a songwriter. So it's very hard to accurately assess the quality of it because he's synonymous with it. But. So I. I try to. I don't know. I have a weird relationship now. Some of my favorite songwriters are just absolute devotees of Bob Dylan. Like Mark Knopfler, to me, is, like, the greatest living songwriter, in my opinion. And he's an Absolute worshiper of Bob Dylan's writing. But I think Mark Knopfler's writing. I hold Mark Knopfler's writing in higher esteem personally. Yeah. He does something for me that Bob Dylan does.
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Sarah Harrelson
Not. Okay. And you talk about painting, and you're also a painter. I saw some of your work on social media. It's really beautiful. And you have a chalkboard wall behind you of all sorts of drawings, too. So is that.
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Adam Wright
Something? Making messes? I make noise and messes, I guess. I don't know.
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Sarah Harrelson
Yeah. So you just love painting in your free time when you're not making.
- [14:44]
Adam Wright
Music? Well, you know, I don't know if I love it, I do it. And, like, it's. It's as frustrating as, like, writing songs is kind of frustrating to me. And painting is very frustrating because I'm. You know, I have. I mean, I've been making some sort of visual art since I was a child, but I'm still not very good at it. Like, it's still very. It's still a really frustrating thing for me to do. My wife will say, why don't you go relax in pain? And those two things are not compatible. Relaxing, like, it's a. It's a. It's just a different. A different frustration to pick up when that's not a guitar. And some words, I guess, but. But I appreciate your kind words about it. It is something that I enjoy the frustration of it, I guess. I don't know what's wrong with.
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Sarah Harrelson
Me. Well, you definitely have many creative talents. I want to go back to your new Al. When I first listened to it and heard Yellow Bird, I was really enthralled by the female voices I kept hearing on the album. Who were your background vocalists for the.
- [15:52]
Adam Wright
Album? Well, thank you. One of them is Shannon, my wife. And the other is Anna Liddell, who mixed the record, actually. So she was our mixing engineer and recorded, like, all of the overdubs that we did post tracking. Yeah, the two of them together, man, they're just. What they sing to me is so unpredictable. And the texture of their voices is unique. And that was sort of. We recorded this album with the idea that it would be live, three piece, myself playing and singing live, and Glenn Wharf and Matt Chamberlain, bass and drums. That was it. That's all. That was the whole album. That's what it was going to be. So we tracked the album that way. You know, there's some problems in that. Like, things don't. Things don't happen that you're so used to. Hearing happen. And I kind of liked the wonkiness of it, the fact that it did not satisfy you in the ways that you're used to being satisfied by production. You know, I was. I was kind. And Frank was excited about it, too. But we both love, you know, harmony so much. And once we got Shannon and Anna to sing on, like, one song, which I don't know what that was. It might have been Yellow Bird, that was pretty early on in the mixing process. Once that happened, it just opened the can of worms. And then we started, you know, overdubbing all kinds of things, but we still kept the bones of it, which is my playing and singing and Glenn's bass and Matt's drums. We kept all that live just to bother ourselves, I guess. I don't know. There's so many imperfections in it that I've come to find charming in a way. But. But, yeah, their voices kind of started the whole. We're overdubbing on.
- [17:41]
Sarah Harrelson
This. Yeah. Their voices are so beautiful on the album. And you also feature Leanne Womack and Patty Griffin on a couple songs on your.
- [17:49]
Adam Wright
Album. I love both of them so much, and they were so nice. They've just been so good to me over the years, and it was great to have them be a part of this and. And talk about two really unmistakable voices. I mean, like, you know, each of them when you hear, you know, just a few notes out of their. Out of their.
- [18:09]
Sarah Harrelson
Voice. Yeah. And where in Nashville did you record this.
- [18:13]
Adam Wright
Album? Is East Iris. It used to be the House of Blues.
- [18:18]
Sarah Harrelson
And.
- [18:18]
Adam Wright
Okay. You know, you're.
- [18:21]
Sarah Harrelson
Local. Yeah, I am.
- [18:23]
Adam Wright
Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. They might have changed the name from then. Even I can't remember, but.
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But, yeah, that's where we recorded the. They call it the Sun Room. It was kind of modeled after Sun Records, you know, but it's the only time I've ever worked.
- [18:38]
Sarah Harrelson
There. Oh, it's the only time you've worked there. Okay. I was gonna ask if you recorded your previous albums.
- [18:44]
Adam Wright
There. No, that's the only time I've ever been there. I've been in a lot of studios in Nashville, but. And I've worked in. I think I've worked in that room before, but not. Not on a thing for me. I was, you know, playing on something for someone else. But it's a cool.
- [19:02]
Sarah Harrelson
Studio. Yeah, it's a. It's a great studio. And your new album, it's so beautiful. So what's next for you now that you have this new album out? Are you playing Any shows as an.
- [19:12]
Adam Wright
Artist? I am, yeah. And probably not as many as my wife and Frank would like, but I'm playing as many as I can. I say yes to a lot of things. Yeah. I'm actually going to North Carolina tomorrow to play a show. So, yeah, I'm playing as as much as my life and.
- [19:33]
Bones will.
- [19:34]
Sarah Harrelson
Tolerate. And can people find your website to see where your upcoming shows.
- [19:40]
Adam Wright
Are? Yeah, it's all on the AdamRightsongs.com and, you know, I try to be pretty good about posting what's coming up on social media.
- [19:51]
Sarah Harrelson
Stuff. So we're on Taking a Walk Nashville. So I always like to ask guests this question. Do you have a favorite place that you like to take a walk in.
- [20:01]
Adam Wright
Nashville? Let's see. In Nashville. See, I live just outside of Nashville and I walk a lot.
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So I usually walk around there just kind of near my house. But we used to go to Percy.
- [20:16]
Sarah Harrelson
Warner. It's my favorite a lot when.
- [20:18]
Adam Wright
We lived on that side of town. That's a good walk.
- [20:23]
Tell you what, you can get a little turned around over there sometimes there's.
- [20:26]
Sarah Harrelson
A. You know, you can. I always rely on my husband because he's run those paths so many.
- [20:32]
Adam Wright
Times. Yeah, because you can get lost. I took a bike up there one time when we lived over there years ago, and I genuinely got lost. I did not know where I was, and I had been biking for hours at that point. I remember I had to call my wife and say, you have to come pick me up. Like my legs are jello and it's getting dark. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was. I guess that was probably my favorite. I like walking around Music Row during the daytime. You know, my office is on Music Row, so sometimes if I have a few minutes, I'll just walk around here and remember all of the little buildings that.
- [21:08]
Sarah Harrelson
Were. I know, yeah. Now there a lot of condos on Music.
- [21:13]
Adam Wright
Row. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Condo city. I.
- [21:15]
Sarah Harrelson
See. Well, Adam, thank you so much for being on Taking a Walk Nashville today. Everyone should go check out your new album, nature of Necessity, and find your website for your upcoming shows. Thank you for being on.
- [21:30]
Adam Wright
Today. Thanks, Sarah. I appreciate it. Thanks for listening to Takin A Walk Nashville with singer songwriter Sarah Harrelson. And check out our other podcasts, Music Save Me, Comedy Save Me, and Takin a Walk, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your.
- [21:49]
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Adam Wright
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Sarah Harrelson
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Adam Wright
Down. This is Trainer prime video starting January.
- [22:21]
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