Great article about Billy Joe Shaver. 

Billy Joe explains how to write a country song. 

How to Write a Country Song

JUNE 12, 2015

By Malia Wollan

“You don’t have to be from the country to write a country song — but it helps,” says Billy Joe Shaver, who started songwriting as a boy in Corsicana, Tex. Shaver, who is now 75 and lives in Waco, sings and plays guitar, but his lyrics are better known coming from the mouths of other performers. Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings and Elvis Presley have all recorded his work. In the 1970s, Shaver wrote a number of anthems in the rougher, less-polished-than-Nashville subgenre called outlaw country.

Geography matters, but authenticity matters more. “Country is honest,” Shaver says. Your lyrics should tell your story; no matter how dull it may seem to you, it will be novel to others. “We’re all born different, that’s what we got in common,” he says. While lyrics don’t have to be 100 percent factual, they should be based in the particularities of on-the-ground experience. “Even someone from Manhattan can write a country song,” he says. You might start a song with a single word or image. Let it roll around inside for a time before you put it down on paper. Once you feel confident you’ve got something worthwhile, test a song’s viability by writing the lyrics out longhand, then “go through it just like it was a letter being sent to someone you really love.”

Allow for melancholy. “If you feel down and you write that down, most of the time it is going to be a country song,” says Shaver, who likes to call songwriting the “cheapest psychiatrist there is.” Many real-life misfortunes turn up in his songs — his mother’s abandoning him as a boy (“Georgia on a Fast Train”), for example, or the time he shot a man in the face outside a bar in 2007 (“Wacko From Waco”). He has composed songs with his son, the guitarist Eddy Shaver, who died of a heroin overdose in 2000, and he has written about the sort of tumultuous love that led him to divorce his first wife twice and marry her three times.

After you have your lyrics, call in the musicians. But first, “mash everything down,” mull every phrase and rejigger every rhyme until all you have left is the heart of the thing.