Chris Williamson

In your experience as being a good guy, a performance enhancer, rather than trying to be ruthless and screwing people over?

What do you mean by that?

If you're a nice person...

are they the ones that end up winning in the end?

Because there is a sense that ruthlessness and being cutthroat and, you know, sort of like going for it, aggressive, lean in.

Oh, well, that's how you achieve success.

Well, I'm interested for you, especially about the tension between being a songwriter and an artist, right?

Because you're part of the Nashville engine.

I was talking to a friend yesterday who put you as one of the best three songwriters in Nashville, which is probably about as competitive as it can be.

Yeah.

But you're behind the scenes, you were behind the scenes, then you become in front of the scenes, and now you've got to try and balance these two worlds.

What's the tension like between being artist and also being contributor to other artists at the same time?

What if you write a real slammer?

There must be a sense in your mind where you go, is this me?

Do I just keep this one in the Hardy folder?

I was talking to, uh, John Bellion, he was on the show a couple of weeks ago.

And, um, obviously he took this big hiatus from being an artist to just do the songwriting thing.

And he said he knew when, uh, he was ready to get back to producing music because he would have, you know, this list of demos or whatever, you'd have five,

15 demos and he'd be showing it to uh whoever was in the studio with him and there would always be one or two tracks that he would just like he'd skip over the top of he'd leave that one to one side he'd never show that yeah i thought that was so cute he was like oh i really really like that yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah for me i the la approach is very different i think and

What do people not understand about how the Nashville scene works?