Remaking Country’s Gender Politics, One Barroom Weeper at a Time

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Monday morning at the office: Shane McAnally was writing a country song with Josh Osborne, a regular collaborator. McAnally, compact and tight-strung in jeans and T-shirt, sat on a chair with his sneakered feet up and a laptop balanced on his thighs, an acoustic guitar and an enormous carryout cup of iced tea within reach. Osborne, mellower, in a purple hoodie, sat on a couch cradling another guitar, on which he picked out a loping groove in the key of A.

They started with a line they heard spoken at a songwriters’ gathering, “I drank alone a long time,” when someone raised a glass in appreciation of getting together with fellow musicians after pandemic-induced isolation. McAnally recalls that he and Osborne exchanged a wordless look: That’s a song! Now they were writing it. When one of them had an idea, he would half-moan nonsense syllables as placeholders for the parts he hadn’t worked out yet: “Yeah that whiskey sure used to burn, now it’s sweet on your lips mmmmhmmmm anana turn …” The other would murmur along in harmony, a fraction of a beat behind, testing resonance and mouthfeel.

The lines of the first verse had a cantilevered quality typical of McAnally’s songs, surprising the ear a little and adding a sense of urgency by going past the expected rhythmic endpoint and wrapping around into the next in a lilting run-on: “I don’t mind if they turn on the lights/And last call don’t faze me at all/My glass was half-empty before you were with me.” The developing song featured McAnally’s favorite chord change — “a 3 minor just breaks my heart,” he says — but his distinctive lyrical flow was the surest mark of his authorship. Plenty of popular songwriting sounds as if the words have been written to fit the groove, but McAnally’s songs sound as if the groove grows organically from the poetic rhythm inhering in the words. “I can almost instantly tell when I hear something Shane has written,” Kacey Musgraves told me by email, “even when it’s sung by another artist.”

Once McAnally and Osborne got going, the song came in a rush. After they finished, they recorded a rough take to serve as a guide for a demo they could pitch to singers. McAnally would normally sing the rough take, but he had been having problems with his voice, so Osborne sang it. They talked about whether the song might be right for Blake Shelton. (“I Drank Alone” is currently on hold for Carly Pearce, meaning she has the right of first refusal to record it.)

Afterward, McAnally told me that Sam Hunt, another regular collaborator, talks about “the window being open for a few minutes — it’s like God walks through the room and you better be holding a guitar when it happens.” Such inspiration makes frequent visits to this cozily appointed room in the Nashville headquarters of SMACKSongs, McAnally’s music publishing and management company. Framed posters of country artists who have recorded McAnally’s songs cover one wall. Another is tiered with “10 Songs I Wish I’d Written” awards from the Nashville Songwriters Association International, honoring songs like “Merry Go ’Round” (a hit for Musgraves), “John Cougar, John Deere, John 3:16” (Keith Urban) and “Body Like a Back Road” (Sam Hunt — 34 straight weeks at No. 1, a record at the time). The windows look out on Music Row, the stretch of 16th Avenue South lined with the offices of record labels, radio networks, recording studios, public-relations firms and music-licensing and publishing outfits like ASCAP and BMI. It’s the Wall Street and Madison Avenue of country music, as well as a hub for gospel, pop, Christian music and other genres. Possibly it’s the place on earth with the greatest concentration of expertise for creating and distributing popular songs.

McAnally, who has been wildly successful at reaching a lot of listeners and winning critical acclaim by making songs for other people to sing, would seem to be the quintessential Nashville insider. He has co-written or produced 39 songs that reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Airplay or Hot Country Songs charts; Country Aircheck, which tracks radio airplay, puts his total at 43; and, depending on how you count Canadian, European and other charts, the number passes 50 — plus, of course, many more hits that topped out short of No. 1. He revived and is co-president of the historic label Monument Records, a joint venture with Sony. He has produced albums by Musgraves, Hunt, Pearce, Walker Hayes, Midland and Old Dominion, among others. He has won three Grammys, 19 N.S.A.I. “I Wish I’d Written” awards and an armful of honors from the Academy of Country Music and the Country Music Association. He has more C.M.A. song-of-the-year nominations than any other songwriter in history.

But while McAnally may be a high-end craftsman operating deep within Nashville’s music-industrial complex, he also sees himself as an insurgent who has put himself in position to work subtle, far-reaching changes on an industry that has historically been hostile to what he represents. For most of the past 15 years, McAnally has been known as one of the very few out gay men in a position of creative influence in mainstream country music. Attentive listeners can discern in his body of work a gradual effort to rewrite the genre’s DNA to encourage mutation in its famously hidebound assumptions about sex and gender. It’s not that the industry doesn’t know about the full range of human sexual behavior; rather, part of its brand has been to act as if it doesn’t want to know about large sections of that range.

Most country music fans may simply assume that the many romantic songs McAnally has written refer to loved ones of the opposite sex, especially when sung by singers they assume to be straight. But, as he likes to point out, those songs work just as well for same-sex attraction. The whiskey-sweet lips in “I Drank Alone” could belong to a man or a woman, and he would rather not force the listener to choose. When I asked him how conscious he was of trying to transform country’s gender politics, he said: “Oh, it’s conscious, but it’s also just who I am. I think part of it is being gay. I don’t like speaking in the masculine or the feminine. I feel like it corners things, compartmentalizes.”

As far back as McAnally can remember, he has thought in songs. He hears fragments and nuggets of song in the speech and lives of family, friends, colleagues, strangers and characters in the Southern memoirs and biographies he likes to read. His mother’s turns of phrase, for instance, have helped inspire the choruses in hits like “Merry Go ’Round” (“Mama’s hooked on Mary Kay/Brother’s hooked on maryjane/And Daddy’s hooked on Mary two doors down”) and Miranda Lambert’s “Mama’s Broken Heart” (“Go and fix your makeup, girl, it’s just a breakup/Run and hide your crazy and start actin’ like a lady”). When McAnally was a little boy in Mineral Wells, Texas, he would pace around the perimeter of the parking lot at his grandmother’s clothing store, making up lyrics in his head about people he knew, superimposing the words onto the melodies of songs he had heard at home, in church or during rides in his father’s Jeep, when the playlist skewed to the classic country of Merle Haggard and George Strait.

That primal songwriting scene in the parking lot serves as a reminder that new songs come, at least in part, from old songs. Standard country music templates like the heartbreak tale or the evocation of small-town life stood ready to hand when someone said something that suggested the germ of a song. Think of a song as an ancient technology for imposing form and meaning on experience, a device for filtering the chaotic noise of inner life and the world around us so it can be translated into meaningful signal. Or think of a song as a container into which you can pour a distilled feeling that others can then imbibe by playing or singing or listening to it.

The signature feeling in McAnally’s songs — even “I Drank Alone,” a story of love found — is a yearning, restless quality he described to me as “that sense of unrequited ‘almost’: it’s almost right, you’re almost there, but you can’t quite. …” Musgraves told me, “Shane and I always love finding the melancholy aspect inside of the greater feelings of happiness and love.” Or, as his friend and frequent songwriting collaborator Brandy Clark puts it, “He’s just a little bit addicted to heartbreak.” The unrequited almost running through McAnally’s songs makes an ideal fit with the cathartic blend of sadness and joy that comes factory-installed in country music, a hurt-obsessed genre rich in dark songs about love and jaunty songs about sorrow.

McAnally cites a past toxic romance as a continuing inspiration, but when we talked about his own experience, he kept coming back to his father, “a certain ultimate concept of a Texas man.” He went on: “He and his two brothers, they played football, there were stories about how wild they were. He was a badass, and they were small-town kings.” McAnally’s parents, high school sweethearts, had a volatile relationship. “It lasted 12 years, and they got divorced and remarried in the middle of it — very George Jones,” a reference to the towering marital melodrama between Jones and Tammy Wynette, owners of two of the greatest heartache-drenched voices of all time. Classic country music themes like hard work, prison (he recalls that his father served a four-year term that ended the marriage for good) and abandonment also figure in McAnally’s family story; a gingerly respectful cordiality now prevails between son and father. “I wanted to be like him,” he told me. “That was the great out-of-reach thing I aspired to, and, being gay, thinking of it as being a sissy, that kept me in the closet for a long time.” In our conversations McAnally pointed to Dolly Parton’s “Here You Come Again” and the Eddy Arnold-Ray Charles ballad of hopeless longing “You Don’t Know Me” as touchstone songs for him. Both are nominally about romance, but the feelings they express extend well beyond. “Continuing to reach out for someone who’s just not quite available,” McAnally said. “That’s my dad.”

McAnally wasn’t out yet when he sang and wrote his way from Mineral Wells to Nashville in the 1990s and took his shot at an onstage singing career. When stardom eluded him, he moved to Los Angeles for a few years, where he heard more than his share of last calls and wrote a lot of songs, some of which were picked up by well-known singers. In 2007, he returned to Nashville as a battle-tested songwriter, and he also came out as a gay man in an industry that had always insisted on the closet. Now, at 48, he’s two years sober and raising 10-year-old twins with his husband, Michael McAnally Baum, who is the president of SMACKSongs.

If these days McAnally is no longer regarded as a lone exception, you might credit his prominent example — Nashville’s mayor presided at his nuptials with Baum in 2017 — for helping embolden other gay men and women associated with country to come out, a growing list that includes T.J. Osborne of the Brothers Osborne, Lily Rose, Orville Peck, Lil Nas X, Brandi Carlile and Brandy Clark. But McAnally says: “I don’t think we’ve actually come that far in terms of major commercial figures. Baby steps are huge, but they’re baby steps.” He notes that most of the names on the out list are identified with Americana, pop or behind-the-scenes songwriting.

“I’m stuck in the habit of ‘what Nashville thinks,’” he says, by which he means that he measures progress in terms of onstage stars in the industry’s commercial mainstream. “T.J. is such an important part of the long-term story, because he’s trying to show his queerness and his allyship to any sort of queer person, but he’s half of a duo, and they’re not in competition with the Jason Aldeans and Luke Bryans of the world because they’re left of center. And Lily Rose seems totally authentic, and she’s getting close to a big hit, but she hasn’t had one yet. I do see that people are fighting for it, though, and that matters.”

At times he has felt that he had something extra to prove. “When gay songwriters come up to me and they’re like, ‘You inspire me,’ I say, ‘You just have to be better and outwork them,’” McAnally says. “I was like, ‘I can out-bro you, I can out-country you,’ which comes from this fear of being stereotyped. Like, ‘Well, he’s gay, so he probably can’t write songs that Luke Bryan or George Strait would want to sing.’”

Thinking constantly about what others want to sing and what the industry would allow them to sing has taken a toll on McAnally, a feelingful guy prone to intense self-examination. He believes that it’s at the root of his voice problems. After a lifetime of being able to sing whatever he felt like singing, in the last couple of years he has lost the ability to sing in full voice or even hold a note. He can knock around musical ideas in a songwriting session, but any attempt to stretch his voice, even to make himself heard in conversation in a loud room, can cause it to seize up.

The diagnosis is muscular tension dysphonia, a vocal cousin of the yips, the twisties and other such sudden inexplicable crises that can render a seasoned athlete unable to perform. “What happened to Simone Biles is what made me decide to get help,” he told me. “They tell me there’s nothing wrong with my body that they can find, so it’s mental, spiritual, but it feels physical.” Dysphonia troubles many singers — his vocal therapist told him that she counted nine other artists with whom she had worked when she saw him on a C.M.A. awards telecast — and its onset can be mysterious, often causing profound doubts to set in. It’s hard not to feel that your body’s trying to tell you something by refusing to do what has always come naturally.

As McAnally tells the story of his career, the music he made in his youth as a would-be Nashville star was less than authentic because he was closeted, then he came out and wrote more authentic songs for himself to sing that, it turned out, others wanted to sing. But hitting the jackpot as a songwriter ushered in another phase of unrequited almost. “My material voice has diminished as my metaphorical voice has diminished,” he says, tracing the roots of the affliction to the moment he realized he could win praise and riches by writing songs for others to sing. “You become a box-checker,” he says. “Especially if you’ve had a lot of hits, you can’t help but imitate what’s worked before. If you’re always saying, ‘Would Luke Bryan say this?’ you have compromised yourself.” Yes, his success has taken him deep into the machinery of Nashville’s establishment, but the words he uses to describe his situation there — boxed-in, claustrophobic, smothered — are the same ones he uses to describe the panic that comes over him when he feels that his voice is going to fail and make him look foolish.

McAnally has been spending more time away from Nashville of late — in New York, traveling in Africa with his family, pricing houses with his husband in California — and that seems to revive his voice. These days he finds that sometimes, under certain conditions, he can sing. “There will be an hour when my voice feels all right,” he told me, “and I can do it where it’s quiet, nobody in the studio but me and the engineer, the right reverb and vocal sound in my headphone, and I feel very safe and very much in control of my singing.” He has been using such moments to record songs for a self-funded solo album he plans to put out this year. They’re quiet, introspective songs written from his own hard-won, middle-aged perspective, a point of view of little interest to country-music stars. “ ‘Too young for the old, too old for the young,’” he said, quoting from a song on the album. “They don’t want to say that.”

Saying that, singing that, speaking as himself, may be a remedy. He expresses confidence that his voice will recover. “I’m closer to it every day,” he said. “My physical voice has some spiritual link to finding my own voice. And I know that when I finally get to say it the way I want to say it, my voice will be there.”

If Nashville is the problem as well as the promised land, where does McAnally go from there? Warner Bros. is currently developing a TV series he created that is based on his life, and maybe there’s a book or two in his future. But right now there’s his current big non-Nashville — or get-out-of-Nashville — songwriting project, the one that has been taking him to New York: “Shucked,” a musical he co-wrote with Brandy Clark that will open on Broadway on April 4 (previews begin March 8). “The musical is this great source of inspiration,” he said, “because it’s something else entirely different.” Writing show tunes allows him to use a greater variety of chords and different emotional colors than he does in country songs, he told me, and also requires him to do some things he isn’t used to doing, like writing songs that tell only part of a story.

“Shucked” is a fable about Maizy, a girl from a rustic hamlet cut off from the world by fields of corn, and a crisis that obliges her to journey to the big city to save her fellow provincials. The songs mostly have a traditional Broadway feel, including one in which Maizy glories in the cosmopolitan wonders of Tampa, though a couple of rousing numbers for supporting characters display the expertise of veteran country hitmakers. The book — by Robert Horn, who wrote the Broadway musicals “Tootsie” and “13” — is full of broad, frequently ribald yuks that try to tiptoe between lovingly evoking small-town sensibilities and exploiting crude stereotypes.

That’s where “Shucked” displays its origins in “Hee Haw,” the TV variety show that ran for 23 seasons fueled by a blend of cornpone humor and high-test country music. More than a decade ago, the keepers of the “Hee Haw” franchise approached McAnally about adapting the show for the stage, a connection that has mostly disappeared into the musical’s developmental back story, but it persists in the way “Shucked” goofs on country ways, a deceptively delicate layering of irony and shtick. McAnally says that he was also inspired by “The Book of Mormon” to write songs with the simple objective of having fun, rather than the endless descent into heartbreak that he pursues at his day job.

At that day job, meanwhile, McAnally is still writing and producing songs for other singers. “I have more songs in the pipeline than ever, and six songs I wrote or produced in the Top 50,” he told me in early February. “I work more efficiently when I’m away from Nashville.” His ongoing revision of country’s gender politics also continues to advance, one heartbroken or party-hearty line at a time. Sometimes it’s McAnally who writes the line that says something that hasn’t been said before on country radio, and sometimes he’s the collaborator giving someone else permission to write or sing such a line. Progress might show up as a little surprise that tests taboo with a light touch, like the singalong chorus of Musgraves’s “Follow Your Arrow”: “So make lots of noise/Kiss lots of boys/Or kiss lots of girls if that’s something you’re into/And if the straight and narrow gets a little too straight/Roll up a joint, or don’t/And follow your arrow wherever it points.”

Country radio, which still exercises outsize influence on what becomes a hit, wouldn’t play the song. And yet, “Follow Your Arrow” is one of the lowest-charting songs ever to win C.M.A.’s song of the year, which McAnally takes as a sign that the industry recognized the change it made in what mainstream country music could say. McAnally is known for songs, like “Follow Your Arrow” or Ashley McBryde’s hard-bitten “One Night Standards,” that open up new dimensions of agency for female narrators and for songs that open up new dimensions of vulnerability for male ones. Kenny Chesney told me by email that he was eager to record the angsty “Somewhere With You,” which became a No. 1 hit for him, because it was “unlike anything out there, anything I’d heard in terms of the intensity of the emotion or the way the song moved.”

When popular genres change, they do so almost imperceptibly at first, then all at once. Like writing a haiku about cherry blossoms or a Western about a laconic hero with good aim, writing a barroom weeper or a cheatin’ song means walking the line between doing it right and making it new. A commercially successful country song must nail obligatory elements of the form so that music-industry insiders and fans hear it as something they’re already inclined to like, but it also must rearrange familiar elements to refresh the formula. If enough bits of genetic information are rewritten in that process, though any individual change may be tiny, after a while you might suddenly notice that the songs on country radio are about inviting your gender-unspecified object of affection to climb into your hybrid pickup so you can drive down a dirt road to the unfracked watering hole, where bathers of all identities and preferences are welcome.

Carlo Rotella is a professor of English at Boston College and the author of “The World Is Always Coming to an End: Pulling Together and Apart in a Chicago Neighborhood.” Kristine Potter is an artist and an educator. She was a 2018 Guggenheim fellow in photography. She is an assistant professor at Middle Tennessee State University. Her monograph “Dark Waters” will be published by Aperture this spring.