Songwriter Spotlight: Jon Nite Shares Stories Behind Keith Urban, Tim McGraw Hits
Writers always embrace a good metaphor, which is why it was so apropos that the day before Jon Nite left his hometown of Amarillo, Texas, for Nashville, he was literally wading knee-deep in sewage.
“The last day on my job, my boss called me two hours before closing time,” Nite tells Rolling Stone Country, seated upstairs at Nashville’s Music City Tippler. “On Route 66, there was an old gas station, with a 15-foot hole in the ground. He said, ‘Go in there and dig it out” — and it was a burst sewage pipe. I was so pissed. When we were saying our goodbyes back at the shop, he said, ‘You know why I did that, right? It’s so you never come back here.’ And I never did.”
It’s a few minutes before the Number One Party for the Keith Urban/Miranda Lambert duet “We Were Us,” written by Nite, Nicolle Galyon and Jimmy Robbins, is set to begin, but Nite still shudders humbly thinking about those early days. Writing songs since his teenage years, Nite honed his chops singing in church and playing his father’s guitar — it was a friend who challenged him to compose his first piece for a television contest. “He dared me to do it,” Nite says, who would go on to pen hits like Thompson Square’s “Glass” with frequent collaborator Ross Copperman and Jake Owen‘s “Beachin’.”
He was 18 when he left his plumbing boots behind and took his infant son and wife with him to Nashville on a scholarship to Belmont University. A publishing deal came fairly easily, but he learned just as quickly that unfortunately that’s not all that it takes to crack the charts — and that country music can be a pretty fickle mistress.
“I turned in my first 10 songs, and Blake Shelton cut one of them,” he recalls. “I was like, ‘Oh gosh, this is easy!’ It was a song called ‘Don’t Lie.’ I thought, it will be the single, and I’ll ride off into the sunset. Then it never came out.” He frowns a little, the memory still heavy. “The rest of that writing deal was incredibly difficult. I was out of money, and they couldn’t keep me any longer.”
Nite worked day jobs, unsure if he could go to battle any longer. “I had a summer when I didn’t know if I could even keep doing music,” he says. “But that summer, I wrote 45 songs. I learned how to program tracks and stayed up all night, all summer.” Turns out, there was no alternative. Memories of wading around in human waste can do that do a guy. “Glass” and Dierks Bentley‘s “Tip It on Back” came soon after, and Amarillo started to seem very, very far away.
Like many on Music Row, he has a “hook book” — a little book of song ideas and tricks — but he never uses it. “I write from an emotional place, mostly,” he says. “I want to find whatever true feeling is going on in my life and just follow that. ” Which is why the stories behind some of his biggest hits that he shares here with Rolling Stone Country are most often pretty surprising — from a bit of family news that inspired “Beachin'” to a glimpse of a terrifying future that prompted “Tip It on Back.”
Adds Nite, “A lot of people write from a hook or title. I do none of that. If you write what you are feeling, and what you are trying to get to get across, the hooks always come.”