Old Dominion Talks Riding Into the Battle for Listeners with 'Coming Home'

From the first five rows at a concert, the life of a touring artist looks pretty glamorous – singing songs for an adoring audience and (perhaps) a lot of money.

But many performers insist on playing the show for free, and the pay is for the long hours stuck in a metal tube traveling down a lonely highway. This is especially true for artists who have a spouse and family waiting for them.

“I think the longest we've ever gone was 67 days or something without coming home,” says Old Dominion frontman Matthew Ramsey. “It was brutal. I mean, those were the days when we were like, “I don't even know where we are and I don't care where we are.”

“We really hit a random time where we had to fly home for 24 hours. And we went home and then I found out, for me and my kids and everybody, that it was actually almost worse. Like, when you're going to go, go. and when you're home, be home.”

Of course, for country artists living in Nashville, being home usually means there's other work to do. Like recording new music. And starting April 30, Old Dominion took over the Sound Emporium to work on a single. They had a song they were ready to cut, but they also had enough extra time to try and write something new. Studio Writing previously credited “Make It Sweet” as well as the entire 2021 album Time, Tequila & Healing. Hanging out in the Sound Emporium lounge, producer Shane McAnally (Carly Pearce, Sam Hunt) mentioned a title he associated with returning home after a long absence. McAnally had read a book about the Vietnam War and with each chapter he imagined a soldier returning from the front lines.

“My favorite thing to watch online is people coming home from service,” he says.

It had a three-word title, “War” — “I thought it was interesting,” McAnally recalls — and had the payoff, “I love you like I'm coming home from war.” “It was just a line,” says McAnally. “I had no idea what to do with it.”

The hook received a slight revision, “Kiss you like me coming home from the war,” and Old Dominion's Trevor Rosen began cycling through possible chord progressions. Once they settled on a path, they brought in the rest of the band—guitarist Brad Tursi, bassist Geoff Sprung, and drummer Whit Sellers—to hit it big.

They focused on the chorus first, slipping into a line for a “Midnight Rider” that celebrates The Allman Brothers Band, even if it's not really about them. “They were street dogs like us,” says Ramsey. “We have that connection.”

A few lines later, a strong comeback was promised when Rosen sang “Katie, bar the door,” a line that proved surprisingly unfamiliar to some of the group. “Half the people in the room didn't even know what that saying was,” Ramsey recalls. “I did, I think Shane did, I think maybe Whit did. But then Brad said, “I don't know what that means. But I do not care. It is nice.”

They finished writing it in about 45 minutes and then moved into the studio to record it. Tursi created a hilarious guitar riff and McAnally made sure it wasn't lost.

“As a group, they have ADHD,” says McAnally. “If you put all these personalities together, it's like, 'Oh, what about this?' 'How about it;' And no one ever goes, “That's great.” With Brad especially, everything he starts playing sounds so cool. But he played this lick, and he described everything perfectly through a guitar lick. I knew what the song was. I think that was the extent of my – quote – “production”. Just go, “Don't change this.”

Old Dominion made several musical choices that reflected the song's lyrics. Chief among them was the decision to lean toward a ragged, high-energy sound instead of precision. “That's an ongoing conversation among us in this band, how stylish do we want to be?” says Ramsey. “And how much do we want to be a band?”

But the text also created a dilemma in the rhythmic composition of the song. The sellers started with a light, steady pace that grew more intense. By the end of the track, he hit the snare with a wild riff, but the guys disagreed on where to make that transition. One idea was to hit the crash-and-burn pattern on the first chorus, 42 seconds in. But anyone who has been home knows that the feeling grows stronger as the destination approaches. Uploading early will ruin this effect. Ultimately, they waited until the second chorus – more than halfway through the song – for Sellers to get into full rock-'em-sock-'em mode.

“Sometimes,” Ramsey says, “you have to have that conversation: 'Okay, it feels great, but does it serve the message of the song as well as possible? Do we pay attention to the verse, instead of going in there?' Because we like to bump and rock the hell out of it.”

To help it build more gradually, Sellers and Ramsey recorded handclaps that arrive during the first chorus.

“We have funny videos of the two of us around this mic,” says Ramsey, “and as we're doing it, the mic stand starts to drop and stuff. It slowly just lowers, and he and I both clap , but we're slowly squatting down to match the microphone level.”

Tursi also added a gurgling six-chord banjo part at the beginning of the second verse that helps lift to that full energy. An added percussive nuance came when McAnally introduced the idea of ​​dropping militaristic snare rolls after the “coming home from the war” hook. Sellers took the cue, making them visible, but not too obvious.

“I really took advantage of the opportunity to be laughed out of the room, because it's so on the nose,” McAnally recalls. “Whit did it right away, much better than I heard it. He made it subtle – it doesn't hit you over the head – but when you've heard it a few times, you're like, “Oh, that kind of puts me in an army position. ''”

Another important decision came with the instrumental solo. A harmonica seemed to fit the tattered target, but at first they weren't sure who to hire. Ramsey, who played harmonica during his pre-Old Dominion days in Virginia, volunteered, lending an earthy Bob Dylan/Bruce Springsteen dimension to the track on its second take.

“It's not like I'm a virtuoso,” he says with a laugh. “I was like, 'Just let me give it a shot.' I went in and played it and then I could hear everyone in the control room going “What the hell was that, man? We've known you for 25 years and you've never told us you could do this.”

Old Dominion and the team agreed that “War” was a better choice for a single than the other song they cut, but there was some pushback on the title. As provocative as the word was, it didn't represent what was going on in the song. They eventually settled on “Coming Home” and Columbia Nashville released it to country radio via PlayMPE on June 27th. It is at No. 47 on the Country Airplay chart dated July 27.

“It's a full-band effort, and we're trying new things, harmonicas and all that,” says Ramsey. “We feel like we're known for bringing a little bit of joy and happiness and light and levity, and coming out of 'Can't Break Up Now,' it was just like, 'Oh my God, we've got to get things going.' “