Songwriter Spotlight: Natalie Hemby
The fact that Natalie Hemby scored her first pro credit — singing backup on Songs From the Loft, an early Nineties praise & worship collection from Amy Grant — when she was merely in her mid-teens ought to be a clue that she came up around the music industry.
Her dad, Tom Hemby, made his name in Nashville as a touring and studio guitarist for Grant, who also hired her mom, Deanna Hemby, as a personal assistant. And her uncle, Ron Hemby, sang in the gospel group the Imperials, before launching forgotten Nineties country trio the Buffalo Club.
But having family in the biz didn’t guarantee Natalie anything but an early window into what it meant to be a professional. “I watched Amy very closely throughout her career,” the younger Hemby notes. “I always respected her so much, because she was a very respectful person. I always had her to gauge whoever I would meet who was famous. It was almost like, because she was so kind and respectful, if anyone was a total asshole, I’d be like, ‘There’s no reason they need to be, because she’s not that way.'”
Grant would eventually record one of Hemby’s songs, called “Overnight” — as in, success. It was about the experience of traveling a long road to a breakthrough, and for Hemby, it was more than a little autobiographical.
She was just 19 when she signed her first publishing deal. At the time, she wanted to be a pop-rock singer-songwriter like Sheryl Crow. It took Hemby a decade’s worth of close calls and aborted deals with major labels in New York and L.A. to conclude that she didn’t, in fact, want to be a touring, singing celebrity.
“Now that I’m older,” she says, “that is not me at all, really, to be famous. Because that is a major sacrifice. That is a sacrifice of your time, of your life, of your family. I like staying connected to people.”
Hemby turned her full attention to writing songs and singing demos — like the one for “I Would’ve Loved You Anyway,” which became a hit for Trisha Yearwood. “I became a better singer because of it,” says Hemby, “because they were all super rangy songs that sometimes not even the songwriters could sing themselves. I literally would knock out seven [demos] in a day. That’s how I paid my bills.”
Then her producer husband Mike Wrucke began working with a gutsy new singer-songwriter from Texas by the name of Miranda Lambert. At first, Hemby was just brought in to sing backing vocals, but by Lambert’s third album, Revolution, she’d been welcomed into the artist’s select circle of co-writers.
“I knew that she could write the ‘Gunpowder and Leads’ and the ‘Crazy Ex Girlfriends,'” Hemby observes. “I wanted to just try to add something different, you know?”
She’s written with Lambert for each album since, a partnership that has yielded chart-toppers like “White Liar,” “Only Prettier” and “Automatic,” along with a slew of acid-tongued, sharp-witted album tracks. It also helped earn Hemby a reputation as a nervy writer. The only collaboration in her career that rivals that one in importance is an ongoing partnership with fellow Row writer Luke Laird, one that often yields buoyant, groove-driven songs like “Pontoon,” whose rhythmically fluent feel and phrasing are essential to their catchiness.
“Luke usually has killer tracks he brings in,” Hemby explains. “The thing about it is, I have this R&B side that I love to write. I grew up with Babyface and Mariah Carey and Toni Braxton on the radio, the melisma singing. That stuff is so good. I love that [Luke] incorporates that in country music, and I feel like melodically, I’m allowed to do that as well.”
Songwriter Spotlight: Natalie Hemby, Page 1 of 2