On any given day, whether he has a new album in the works or not, there’s a good chance that you’ll find Thomas Rhett somewhere writing a song. The 16 songs on Thomas’ latest album, Center Point Road, represent less than 10 percent of the songs he actually wrote while working on the album. He says, “It was a little over two hundred songs. Like every bus trip I would come home from a three-day run, we would have nine to ten new songs that were written. It’s nuts. Not all of them were the best quality, but you know we did write a lot of songs and really just tried to chase a lot of different types of songs.”
Thomas explains that the way he writes songs and gets to the songs that will eventually make it onto his albums is to write all kinds of songs, about all kinds of subject matters, in all types of styles of music, until he finds what he’s looking for. That’s kind of my process,” he says. “It’s like, this week we’re gonna write something that I feel like Eric Church would’ve done. This week we’re gonna write some R&B jams – not that we’re ever gonna cut them, but just because I’m feeling it.”
It’s those songwriters who indulge him and allow him to write songs all over the map that Thomas works best with and who he tends to write the best songs with, because he says, “When songwriters accept the fact that every song you write is not going to get cut, that’s when you write the best songs, because if they will go with you for a weekend and write songs that you’re feeling, even though they probably know in their brains, ‘This is not where he’s going to end up’… If you can let an artist or songwriters get that off their chests and out of their head, those are when the best ones pop up. And so yeah, we write way too many songs, and probably cut too many songs, but that to me is the process and that’s the fun of it.”
Interesting fact about Thomas’ latest single, “Remember You Young,” is that at one point, it was a completely different song. Thomas reveals that he and Ashley Gorley and Jesse Frasure had written the song, but it wasn’t what he wanted it to be. So in a very rare move, they scrapped the first song and completely re-wrote the title into a new song, and that’s the version that ended up on Thomas’ album.
Thomas Rhett – discipline of songwriting :50
“It was a little over two hundred songs. Like every bus trip I would come home from a three-day run, we would have nine to ten new songs that were written. It’s nuts. Not all of them were the best quality, but you know we did write a lot of songs and really just tried to chase a lot of different types of songs. That’s kind of my process. It’s like, this week we’re gonna write something that I feel like Eric Church would’ve done. This week we’re gonna write some R&B jams – not that we’re ever gonna cut them, but just because I’m feeling it. And that’s what makes songwriters amazing, is when songwriters accept the fact that every song you write is not going to get cut, that’s when you write the best songs, because if they will go with you for a weekend and write songs that you’re feeling, even though they probably know in their brains, ‘This is not where he’s going to end up’… If you can let an artist or songwriters get that off their chests and out of their head, those are when the best ones pop up. And so yeah, we write way too many songs, and probably cut too many songs, but that to me is the process and that’s the fun of it.”