This Week’s Backstage Country Host: Chris Janson
Fresh from the release of his new album, Backstage Country’s Elaina Smith’s co-host is none other than Chris Jansen! Aside from talking about his brand-new album, Wild Horses, the ACM award-winning, gold and…
Fresh from the release of his new album, Backstage Country’s Elaina Smith's co-host is none other than Chris Jansen! Aside from talking about his brand-new album, Wild Horses, the ACM award-winning, gold and multi-platinum selling hit maker with five number one songs, will talk about anything and everything in between his life as a country music artist.
Chris Janson on Wild Horses
Janson shared that the title track “epitomizes all the songs as a collection, and it is just a great snapshot of my life, sort of a wild horse if you will, and I don't really follow the leader. I don't follow the leaders at all, actually. I don't walk between the lines. I make my own lines. In reference to horses, I'm very much unbridled and untamed. And there was an article that somebody wrote about me, and it said, ‘Chris Janson's live shows are in so many words unscripted, untamed, unbridled.’” He chuckled, ‘Just crazy and all over the place in a good way.”
On Writing a Song
The Missouri native revealed that he co-wrote “Wild Horses” with his wife, Kelly, and another lady, Pat Bunch, an 83-year-old songwriter who recently passed. Janson called her a “genius” and also a collaborator on one of his earlier hits. Smith noted that the track was like a reunion of sorts for the three of them. He agreed, “Yeah, absolutely. It was the first time we'd written in a long time. Anyway, she called and told Kelly and I that we were driving in the car. And I looked at Kelly, I was like, ‘Dang, she spouted out the whole chorus!’ Pat spouted out the chorus, and I was, like, ‘God, we got to write that immediately.’ So, I wrote it right there on the card over the phone.”
Janson also shared his mindset when it comes to writing a song. “Sometimes the way that I like to write songs is if they just fall out. If I have to work at it, I don't want to write it. I've always been that way. If I had to work on a song or sit in one of these writing sessions where people want to whittle back and forth and go to lunch and come back and spend eight hours trying to write something, to me, is not worth it. So, it was a really wonderful thing. We wrote it in the car for probably 10 minutes.”
