Michael Barbaro

She's sung about smoking weed, about being who you are no matter what your sexual preference is.

Follow your arrow.

That was a song that was written by Brandi Clark and Shane McAnally.

another great Kacey Musgraves song, kind of her debut single, I believe, a song called Mary Go Round, which was written by Josh Osborne, Kacey Musgraves, and Shane McAnally.

And that song is a kind of gritty look at small-town life in, I believe, East Texas, where Kacey is from.

It looks at things like adultery, dead-end lives in a unvarnished way that was very surprising.

Shane McAnally and Josh Osborne have written a lot of songs with Sam Hunt, who's a big star down there these days and who is another kind of innovator.

He really has brought an R&D sound and sensibility to country music.

Well, talk about your conversation with them and what you learned about how this trio, and I know it's sometimes in different formations, three or just two, how they do this work.

Yeah, so I went down there and interviewed them in a place called the Bluebird Cafe, which is a legendary songwriter's hangout.

They spoke a lot about how they're kind of constantly writing and how that even impacts their everyday life.

Ha!

This is our life.

But that's how it happens.

It's scary how accurate that is.

Another thing they said about their dynamic is how they kind of function as a support group for one another.

Osborne and McAnally were talking about the process of working with Sam Hunt on one of his very first psalms, a great psalm called Take Your Time.

Sam Hunt brought that idea into a session and there was an older writer there.

And...

That idea landed with a thud.