When Randy Travis emerged as a game-changing country icon nearly 40 years ago, he won over audiences by mixing songs of infinite love—like “Forever and Ever, Amen,” “Deeper Than the Holler” and “I Won't Need You Anymore (Always and Forever)” — with songs about mortality like “Three Wooden Crosses,” “He Walked on Water” and “Before You Kill Us All.” And he combined love and perfection with the promise of “ till death do us part' in 'Forever Together'.
Russell Dickerson has mostly stuck to the first half of that equation throughout his career, embracing long and lasting love on his singles “Yous,” “Every Little Thing” and “Home Sweet.” But with his latest release, “Bones,” he manages to combine both of Travis' grown-up themes: commitment and the end of life.
“Bones,” he says, “is like 'yours' with a mortgage payment.”
Dickerson proposed “Bones” during his final writing session in 2023, held around Thanksgiving in a wood-paneled studio on his Tennessee property. Co-writers Parker Welling (“Blue Tacoma,” “What's Your Country Song”), Chase McGill (“Chevrolet,” “Next Thing You Know”) and Chris LaCorte (“23,” “Wind Up Missin' You” ) was on the road with it before someone mentioned that Maren Morris already had a major recent hit called “The Bones.” No one was particularly concerned.
“I felt like we were pretty good,” McGill reflects. “They're just completely different songs.”
Dickerson started running through a guitar and LaCorte found a hard riff that created a gritty musical tone for the project. Lyrically, they wanted to find different ways to incorporate the title throughout the song, so they developed a list of phrases that contained the word “bones,” including “shaking to my bones” and “flesh and bones.”
And as Dickerson continued to sing a chorus setting line, “I'll love you 'til I'm six feet down on the ground,” they played with several paylines until McGill finally found the winner: “And the gold on the finger wrapped around me/ Nothing but bones.”
“That was just a nail in the coffin – no pun intended,” says Dickerson. “It's like, 'Holy cow, this is a song right here.'
The melody for this chorus began on an anthemic level and maintained its power through most of the stanza until it came to a close in calm serenity. As a result, this chorus sonically reflects the story of the relationship it covers: intense at the beginning and steady over time until death brings it to an end. “We didn't intentionally do that, but I think there's a feel to that song that we kind of just followed,” suggests Welling. “I think that's why it all fits together.”
Welling had been friends with Dickerson and his wife, Kailey, since they all attended Belmont University, and described specific descriptions of Kailey and the couple's early relationship. This verse ended with the singer “shaking to my bones” as he suggests. The second verse finds him putting the woman on a figurative pedestal, comparing her to an angel, while grading himself as “only flesh and blood.”
“It's like, 'Thank you for choosing me,'” Dickerson says.
They introduced new verses in the final chorus to drive the point of “Bones” home, folding part of a wedding vow into a line that suggested LaCorte carve a promise on his tombstone, a word the group changed to “tombstone.” The visual came earlier in the writing process, but they saved the drama of that visual for the song's closing moments.
“We thought the gravestone line in 'Bones' would be pretty good halfway through [an earlier] chorus and then land on “gold on my finger wrapped around nothing but bones,” says Welling. “This is very, like, casket.”
It was intense, but no more so than the death stories in Travis' songs, George Jones' “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” Verne Gosdin's “Chiseled in Stone,” or The Carter Family's “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” “What I love about the country is that you can go there,” says McGill. “You can say that.”
LaCorte produced most of the demo that day, creating the intro by layering two different acoustic guitars, one playing a pulsating figure and the other building melodic tension with the main riff in minor keys. It was a bit raw, as LaCorte recorded the part in an awkward position. “It was recorded so randomly,” he says. “I had an SM7 mic, but it was just laying on a table and I was trying to get next to it to play this thing.”
Dickerson re-recorded the demo vocals over a few weeks to ensure he had a version that represented his band well, and recorded the final version in the spring. Producer Josh Kerr (Scotty McCreery, Ryan Hurd) asked LaCorte to co-produce with him and Dickerson and insisted they use LaCorte's unfinished acoustic parts from the demo. The session came together so quickly that the night before they weren't sure where this would take place. Eventually, they booked Peter Frampton's Studio Phenix for a 6pm date. with drummer Evan Hutchings, bassist Tony Lucido, keyboardist Alex Wright and guitarist Nathan Keeterle. After a passage that included some syncopation, Dickerson asked the band to play the beats straight through, like an elephant walking through the jungle. It had to sound simple and decisive, even if it was compiled from different sources.
“A lot of the track is Chris and the bones of demo – pun intended – and then some other layers,” says Kerr. “I added some drum programming to the second verse and some new synth layers, so it's a real conversation about the things going on in this song.”
Many elements provided a fantastic effect, including a stormy sound in the opening section. “This is my old Moog Model D synthesizer, and it has this function that's just called 'Noise,'” says LaCorte. “Sometimes it just adds a cool texture to the background, [but] it is more felt than heard.”
LaCorte's Dobro solo from the demo was left on the master, though Kerr had him double it with electric guitar to create an almost slide tonality. Dickerson intentionally sang parts of “Bones” a little off-key. The phrasing in the opening verse is deliberately awkward, and in the final chorus, he sings two lead vocals for a brief period that lend their own haunting quality as the voices engage in a short-term battle.
“It's gritty, it's crunchy, it's got a lot of depth and dynamics,” Kerr says of Dickerson's performance. “That's something we really made a point of in this song.” Kailey was so in love with “Bones” that she stayed out late one night just driving and listening to the cut. “If he digs it,” says Dickerson, “then that's a good sign.”
But not everyone at Triple Tigers believed he should be single. Several alternative titles were floated, though Dickerson held out for “Bones.” The label released it to country radio via PlayMPE on July 15.
“It's a little jarring at first,” he admits, “but once you really get down to the song, that kind of goes away. I had to fight for this song to be the single, but I'm betting everything on this song.”
from our partners at https://www.billboard.com/music/country/russell-dickerson-bones-makin-tracks-1235757452/
