Travis Denning
Mercury Nashville Recording artist Travis Denning recently released his sophomore project Dirt Road Down, which provides a well rounded spectrum of Denning’s personality.
With a long song (“Dirt Road Down”), a bar-burner (“Call It Country”), a wise look at life (“I Went Fishin’”), and a tongue-in-cheek ditty Denning is becoming known for (“ABBY”), the ever-charming artist shows off his songwriting chops on the six-song set.
Denning recently spoke with MusicRow about his Dirt Road Down project.
MusicRow: You wrote over 100 songs during the pandemic. Other than your current single, “ABBY,” are the rest of these songs from that period of time?
“Jack And Coke” is an older song. The other four were all pandemic songs.
How did you pick four out of 100 for this project?
I still don’t really know to be honest with you. It’s tough when you’re looking at an EP and you have all these songs that you want to put on there. But for me it was more about the balance. It was a crazy year, people are tiptoeing back into life, realistically. And so I was like, “I want to show-opener and I want a slammin’ song.” I love nostalgic love and heartbreak songs, so that was “Dirt Road Down,” I always try to have a song like that on an EP. And I wanted to put something really personal in there and that was “I Went Fishin’”. So it was more about a checklist of songs that fill these slots in my head for the whole thing.
“ABBY” is currently climbing at country radio. Do you ever notice people in the audience the moment they get that “Abby” is “any body but you?”
Oh yeah. The the first time we ever played it was in Tulsa, Oklahoma with Riley Green. It wasn’t even out yet, it wasn’t going to be out for another couple of months, but I was like, “Here’s a new song. Just pay attention to it and you’ll get it.” You see some people get it immediately when I say “any body but you,” you see some people go “Oh my God!” But there’s some other [that don’t get it that quickly]. I remember that show looking at the band and going, “This might be something right here.” Luckily now most people have gotten it, but every now and then I have some people tweet me and say, “Oh my God, I just got this.” I’m like, “Well it’s only been out for two years, but it’s all good.”
“Call It Country” is a jam, and so wordy. Tell me about writing that one with Jessi Alexander and Chris Stevens.
Jessi is one of my best buds in town, especially in the songwriting community. I just walked in there and said, “I don’t want to write anything slower than 120 BPM. I want to write a bar burner.” She immediately was like, “Thank God. I’m so down for that.” Me, her and Chris Stevens actually ran to the gas station and bought beer because we had to have beer for that song. I just wanted it to be very rhythmic, that was the thing. I had the guitar lick right off the bat. I wanted it to be very staccato and very bouncy. So for the melody, I was like “We’re gonna put a lot of words in this bad boy,” and treated the melody more like a rhythm or a pattern or a drum. It adds a layer to that song.
You wrote “Grew Up With A Truck” by yourself.
I partnered with Charles Schwab to debut their giveaway for their PGA tour stop. They called me and asked, “Can you write a truck song?” I was like, “Yeah, I probably can. I think I’ve written about 9,000 of them.” I just sat down and took that as an opportunity to write it myself. I had a lot of time to write it and it was really cool just to be in that process of picking at it for like a week versus going, “Hey, I’ll meet you at 11 o’clock at this office and we’re going to write this song.” Being able to do it like my idols and heroes, like Neil Young, Gregg Allman and Steve Earl, I got to spend some time and really put every little piece that I can remember growing up into that song. I’m gonna try to do that a little bit more often because I felt like I got a little better at writing.
“I Went Fishin’” was written a few days after you got the news about the Sam Hunt tour that you were supposed to be on was canceled.
It just sucked. It was the realization that COVID wasn’t going anywhere, that we weren’t going to be on the road anytime soon. It was just an overall bummer. I had the title in my phone prior to that, because I really just fell back in love with fishing when the pandemic hit. I fished a little bit growing up. I really do think people are born with certain passions and it just takes the realization of it. And truthfully, it’s up there with playing guitar and being a songwriter for me. It’s just something I really love to do. It gives me a lot of joy and happiness.
But even with the headspace I was in after the Sam tour was canceled, I realized I had the opportunity to go out on the boat and do things. I was like, “You know, this sucks and this pandemic is not going anywhere, but I don’t think about it when I’m out there. I just think about trying to catch a damn fish.” It seems so simple, but just that moment of peace, turning the world off, that’s when it all really clicked for me and I realized that for a lot of people, that is what fishing is for. I thought about the times in my life that I felt like it wouldn’t get better during first heartbreaks and losing the dog I’d had my whole life, and it just fell out of us. I wrote that with Thomas Archer and James McNair, it literally just fell out of us. We all sat there and went, “I think this could be something special.”
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