When members of the Nashville music community head to Las Vegas for the 64th annual Grammy Awards on April 3, much of the commentary will surround the entertainment value and the fascination with celebrity that are part and parcel of the ceremony.
But one of the major reasons the Recording Academy’s event has endured in music circles is that its focus goes much deeper than surface power and popularity. The Grammys often recognize music that falls beyond the top 10, and this year is no exception. The nominee list includes outliers such as Mickey Guyton’s “Remember Her Name,” heralding a woman’s reclamation of her original self; Brothers Osborne’s “Younger Me,” in which a man imagines the words he would have told himself when he felt bullied and disconnected; Yola’s “Diamond Studded Shoes,” an Americana call for common-man engagement in reshaping the culture; and the Alicia Keys and Brandi Carlile release “A Beautiful Noise,” an underdog anthem up for song of the year that features six Nashville-connected women among its eight female co-writers.
Sure, the Grammys recognize fun favorites, too — Walker Hayes’ “Fancy Like,” Elle King and Miranda Lambert’s “Drunk (And I Don’t Wanna Go Home)” and Dan + Shay’s “Glad You Exist” are also among the finalists — but the weighty material is more prominent at the Grammys than at the other major music awards shows, in part because it’s voted on strictly by the creatives. And they tend to focus as much on making emotional connections as financial ones.
“Completion of the songwriter circle is when we create it and then somebody says, ‘Me, too,’ and they grab a hold of it,” says Grammy-nominated Josh Jenkins (“Fancy Like,” “Buy Dirt”). “There’s this bond that’s formed with the art and the person, and as a songwriter, you get to partake in that. That’s the gift.”
The power of music has been on tragic display over the last month in basements and piles of rubble in Ukraine. A 7-year-old girl sang “Let It Go” from the movie Frozen for adults sheltering from bombs, inspiring tears around the globe and earning an invite to perform her country’s national anthem at a stadium in Poland for a Together With Ukraine charity concert. A Mykolaiv resident played the national anthem on saxophone from his balcony daily. A Kharkiv cellist offered a Bach suite from the street in front of a bombed-out police station. Bon Jovi’s “It’s My Life” provided a soundtrack as defiant Odessans stacked sandbags as they prepared to defend their city.
It’s easy to take music for granted, especially when millions of songs are available through a handheld device, but its ability to change a mood, to motivate a crowd, to bond people with their neighbors or to simply remind us that we’re still alive is what makes people engage with it in the first place.
“It communicates louder than any news headline, for some reason, because we’re musical people,” says songwriter Laura Veltz, who is nominated for co-writing Maren Morris’ “Better Than We Found It.” “We’re affected by the sound of poetry and song.”
Morris’ emotional track exemplifies the thought. It was written in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder, when COVID-19 was killing thousands of people weekly and America was in a contentious election cycle in which many felt democracy itself was under siege.
“This song particularly was written in a state of panic,” Veltz says. “We wrote it on Maren’s porch with all of us wearing masks and worried as hell and concerned about the world. And I mean, it was very like, ‘We have to do something,’ and it’s amazing how much those moments continue to rise. I do believe in the power of music, and I hope that song soothes somebody because that’s how we’re going to heal the world.”
That does not discount the impact of dance songs or high-energy music as a form of transcendence. A CNN interview with a Ukrainian teen on March 24, found the boy — bedridden with leg injuries sustained during the war — crying as he talked about his mother, who had been killed in a blast. But he temporarily regained determination, pride and even a hint of joy as he played chords for the interviewer on his guitar.
Similarly, the Grammy-nominated “Fancy Like” — as whimsical and carefree as it seems — was a sort of antidote to a really tough day.
“When we wrote ‘Fancy Like,’ we talked about God for three hours, and then that song came in about 30 minutes,” co-writer Shane Stevens says. “We were just talking about what we’d all gone through in the year and how grateful we were to be [together] in a room.”
Kacey Musgraves’ plaintive divorce song “camera roll,” Chris Stapleton’s fiercely bitter “Cold” and Luke Combs’ convincingly committed “Forever After All” each own a complex set of emotions that helped them earn their Grammy nominations. Their ability to assist listeners in accessing those feelings and processing them for a scant three or four minutes is what makes music — and the people who create it — so valuable in the culture.
And it’s why the Grammys call attention to songs like “A Beautiful Noise,” a work that celebrates protest, demonstration and freedom of speech, the very foundation of America. Watching the Russian government close off its society from the truth is a stark reminder of what Ukraine is fighting for — and what some U.S. citizens take for granted. The Grammys, at their best, recognize the artists, musicians and songwriters who help free societies express their truth.
“I feel like my job is to write songs for people who can’t write songs,” says “Noise” co-writer Brandy Clark. “So if something touches me, I should put it into words and music because someone else who doesn’t write songs, that’s when they hear it and say, ‘Oh my God, I feel that.’”
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