Inside Track: Morgan Wallen & Post Malone

Songwriter and producer Charlie Handsome has drawn on his huge array of influences to reinvent modern country music with Morgan Wallen and Post Malone.

“Many people spend a lot of time trying to get the perfect sound,” says Charlie Handsome. “I don’t like doing any of that. When I work with people, I’ll say, ‘I don’t know shit. I don’t know how you guys do any of this stuff.’ I’m the least knowledgeable about the technical side of sound of all the producers that I work with. I just do the bare minimum. It’s about getting out the idea, as long as it sounds cool enough.

“One of my first major records was Travis Scott’s ‘Drugs You Should Try It’, from his mixtape Days Before Rodeo [2014]. It was just re‑released on streaming platforms a week or two ago [reaching number two in the US]. I played guitar on that song. My friend FKi and I made the beat, sang some shit over it, and sent that to Travis Scott. He recorded over our vocal. That’s the song. There never were any stems. There was no additional work. It’s out. It sounds fine. Nobody gives a f**k. People like that song.

“Artists will go, ‘Oh, we should get this song mastered.’ You could. I’m not saying you shouldn’t. But you could also just put the shit on Spotify. They’ll run it through an algorithm that’ll match your sound level with other records on Spotify. It’s almost like they master it. My point is this: pick one of your favourite songs. If the sound quality isn’t all the way there, it would still be one of your favourite songs. You wouldn’t say, ‘Oh, they didn’t record this through this or that.’ You wouldn’t care. The song is the most important thing. If something I’ve done sounds polished, it’s probably because whoever I collab’ed with worried about that. Or it’s the mix. Because we still use mixers and mastering people to finish records.”

Cultured Palate

Charlie Handsome’s success thus demonstrates the truth of the old adage that good songs count more than everything else. In the 10 years since ‘Drugs You Should Try It’, Handsome has become one of the world’s leading songwriters and producers. His Instagram account lists Morgan Wallen, Post Malone, Juice WRLD, Drake, Jack Harlow, the Weeknd, Khalid, Kanye West, Young Thug, Travis Scott, Lil Uzi Vert, Kodak Black, Kid Cudi and Lil Durk as his main credits, and there are many more, including mike, Cardi B, Tate McRae, Lil Wayne, Gunna, MIA and the Kid Laroi.

Handsome has been involved in some of the biggest songs and albums of the last decade, among them Jack Harlow’s ‘First Class’ (2022), and Morgan Wallen’s Dangerous: The Double Album (2021) and One Thing At A Time (2023). Handsome has won several BMI Pop Awards, Album of the Year at the Country Music Awards for Wallen’s Dangerous, and a Grammy nomination, for Best Country Song, for Wallen’s ‘Last Night’ (2023). In September, Handsome was number one in MusicRow’s Top Songwriter Chart, due to his work on all 27 tracks on Post Malone’s number one album F1 Trillion, as well as on Morgan Wallen’s ‘Cowgirls’, Dylan Scott’s ‘This Town’s Been Too Good To Us’ and Moneybagg Yo’s ‘Whiskey Whiskey’.

Charlie Handsome had a big hand in the making of Morgan Wallen’s hit albums Dangerous and One Thing At A Time.

It’s a hugely impressive list of credits, which is all the more striking for its variety of genres, from hip‑hop and trap to pop, rock, and country. There are similarities in this respect between Handsome’s journey and that of star producer Andrew Watt, who featured in last month’s SOS. Both started out as aspiring rock guitar heroes, got into production through an obsession with hip‑hop, and ended up working across multiple genres. “It probably starts with being a fan of music in general,” reflects Handsome. “I was buying CDs back in the day, and after that you had Limewire, Ares and Napster, and I would download as much stuff as I could. I would listen to a wide variety of music. When I first started playing guitar, I was learning all the Nirvana songs and all the Led Zeppelin records. From those two, I tried to learn every classic rock song, all the ’80s heavy metal records, all the metal stuff. I used to shred. I put on all the effing Yngwie Malmsteen and Joe Satriani records! At the same time I was listening to rap the whole time. I was playing everything I could on guitar, and in my free time I was listening to rap. I just wanted to have a wide palette.”

Emo Country

Handsome was born Ryan Vojtesak in 1989, in Atlanta, Georgia. He started playing guitar when he was 13, and during his teenage years “played in bands, doing metal, emo, post hardcore, pop punk, whatever was popular at the time. But hip‑hop got me into production. The whole journey of my career was because of hip‑hop. I could cite a lot of references, but some of my biggest ones were Dungeon Family, OutKast, and especially Kanye. Because hip‑hop was sample‑heavy for so long, you were getting many different genres. Soul, rock, blues and jazz records all went into hip‑hop songs. The sky was the limit in terms of what you could do with hip‑hop beats. My first beats were all sample flips, essentially Kanye beats. And then I started finding my own sound and stepped out of sampling, because at the end of the day, if you want to make some money, you got to stop sampling records.

“I’ll give you an example: the song ‘Go Flex’ on Post Malone’s first album [Stoney, 2016]. I wrote the music for that at 18 or 19, when I was in college. It was a different song at the time. Fast forward almost 10 years later, with Post and I in the studio. It was by then a mix between a folk guitar with trap drums and claps in the hook, because at that point I was already doing trap production. So that is why that song is such a mix of genres. But it was not intentional, as in ‘Oh man, I want to mix all these different genres.’

“I could keep going. If you look at the Juice WRLD records I did, a lot of them are based on my emo sound from when I was in emo bands, with those types of riffs, and then combining that with trap drums. Same with the Travis Scott record, ‘Drugs You Should Try’, which was essentially what I would have done on a dark emo record. So I’ve always mixed genres, and I think that’s helped me in my career. It’s also helped a lot with my transition to country music. Morgan [Wallen] and I ended up doing records that no‑one else in country had done yet. Obviously, Tim McGraw and Nelly paved the way back in 2004 with their collab ‘Over And Over’, but I feel Morgan and I pushed it even further down that road.”

Hey, Good Looking

Handsome took on his artist name at the start of his career, when told by a friend that Vojtesak was “too difficult to pronounce and too weird for a producer name. Purely as a joke I thought of Charles Manson, the cult leader, and Handsome, because a friend of mine was poking fun at me, saying I was ugly. I needed an artist name quickly, because my career was beginning to happen, so I combined the two.” In 2014, Handsome was introduced to Che Pope, president of Kanye West’s label GOOD Music, and decided to move to Los Angeles. He met up with Post Malone in that same year, and in 2016 he worked with his idol Kanye on the track ‘Fade’, which was released on The Life Of Pablo. Handsome conducted his first country session in 2017, with Ernest, and then Florida Georgia Line, and the enormous success he achieved in the genre, plus lower taxes, contributed to his decision to move to Nashville in 2021.

Although Handsome claims to be “the least knowledgeable” about the technical side of music making, he does know his way around “the bare minimum”. He recalls: “When I was in college, I was writing songs on my acoustic and got an eight‑track Korg recorder that went to hard disk. This allowed me to layer guitars and make up stuff. Then I got Fruity Loops, from a room-mate. I’m really competitive, and thought, ‘I can make better beats!’ He gave me his program, and I fell in love with that and started making beats all the time with Fruity Loops. In 2011 or 2012, I downloaded Pro Tools for the first time. I switched to Logic in 2016, and I am still using that.

“I prefer Logic because I do a lot of time‑stretching and a lot of pitch stuff. It’s on almost every song I do. It really is a lot. When you hear the final product, you don’t realise that the song started in a different place. For example, you’ll hear a song I did that is in, let’s say the key of D, with a tempo of 120 bpm. But when I started, I probably played that song at 90 bpm in the key of G. I then sped it up and then I switched it. I treat a lot of the riffs and a lot of the vocal recordings I do on the mic almost as a sample. I flip them. By the time you hear the beat or whatever we end up doing, it’s completely different.

“Pro Tools is very slow at doing that. You have to do five, six things to make it work and sound good. Whereas, in Logic, you can put on the varispeed function and it literally needs just one click of a button to up or down the tempo, or the pitch, and it sounds great. So that’s what I do. People are always aggravated in the studio with me for my tempos, because when you’re using varispeed, for the song to stay perfectly in a key, something in the algorithm means that you end up with a tempo with decimal points. My tempos are like 83.946 or 140.323 bpm. Just weird. Afterwards, a lot of times we’ll time‑stretch it to the nearest whole number, but sometimes we don’t.”

Riffing

“I have a few different formulas when it comes to creating stuff. Most of the time I make stuff very, very quickly and very mindlessly. I don’t really sit around with an intention. I don’t sit around and think, ‘All right, I got to make a song and it needs to have this feel.’ Throughout the years when working with different artists and producers, a lot of people come from the approach of ‘We want to make a song like...’ and then they have a reference song. I hate to make songs that way.

“What I do generally is pick a random tempo, the first tempo that comes in my head. Then I press record, not knowing what I’m going to play. I play for eight bars. I hit stop, open a new track, hit record, layer the eight bars with a lead, stop, start again, and layer the eight bars with a pad guitar, for which I use Valhalla Shimmer most of the time, with a big reverb that sustains for a long time. Once I have those three layers, which takes about two minutes or less, I’ll usually sing over it and then chop up the vocal like a sample, and I’m done. And I move on. I make usually 10, 15 of those in a row. After that I take a break and then I look back at them and pick the best ones and/or put drums on a beat.

“In doing these ideas, I really homed in on a style of guitar playing that mixes my influences, and that’s less about soloing and shredding, and more about good riffs. The vocal melody also is very important, but I try to make sure that there’s some sort of riff or musical direction or melody in the beat itself that can carry it. I try to make beats that are already a hit, and then all we have to do is write the right song to it. And, if you have the right hook, you can have trash verses that nobody cares about. You shouldn’t be doing this, but if you have a hook that’s a hit song, you can get by with bad verses.

“A lot of the time I don’t do the full production any more on these initial ideas, because I don’t want to waste time. It’s more efficient to do the full production once we have a song. So I build up a huge library of music. When I’m in sessions with people and we’re figuring out what we’re doing, rather than play something on a guitar, I just pull from my library. Many of the songs that I worked on started this way. Every Juice WRLD song was probably made this way. ‘Last Night’ by Morgan Wallen was based on a voice note on my phone, that I’d chopped up and made into a loop in my computer, adding some layers. It was just eight bars and one day in the studio I pulled that up and we wrote the song to it.

Charlie Handsome: "If Morgan doesn’t take a song I’ve written, I don’t call a different artist and give it to them. The song is dead. I’m not giving his sound to somebody else."

“There’s not just one way to write songs. I make a lot of music, and in the hip‑hop world, I used to send my music out to friends who do rap production, and vice versa, a lot of those guys will send me their music. I’ll put on drums and will make beats out of their stuff. I have more fun putting drums to someone else’s music than my own. It’s a new challenge to figure out what works for their stuff. But that’s predominantly not any more how I’m approaching the business these days. The idea of ‘I send this loop to this guy and hope he makes a good beat and that he plays it for somebody,’ is somewhat of a lottery. Now I mostly sit in the room with the artist and figure out what kind of songs we want to do. I do still collab, in the sense that I flip other people’s music. As I said, for the most part I don’t make full beats unless we start writing a song, at which point I’ll finish it. There are a lot of songs where I’ll do the music and the beat. Or, I’ll hire a band. We’ll get a seven‑piece band and we’ll track, remake the song, and just build it up.”

Old School

F‑1 Trillion has been a worldwide hit for Post Malone.Handsome was heavily involved in the making of Post Malone’s third UK and US number one album F‑1 Trillion, on which he applied all the above‑mentioned writing and production methods. It’s not the first time Malone has flirted with country, but it’s his first album that contains authentic‑sounding country from start to finish, with guest performances by country stars like Dolly Parton, Brad Paisley, Tim McGraw, Chris Stapleton, Luke Combs, Morgan Wallen and others. The album also features an all‑star band, including pedal steel player Paul Franklin, fiddle player Larry Franklin, guitarists Bryan Sutton and Derek Wells, keyboardist Dave Cohen, drummer Aaron Sterling, and more.

“The album started with Post’s vision,” explains Handsome. “We had both wanted to do a country album for a long time, but if he hadn’t had his own idea of how he thought his album should be and had just given me a blank slate, there’s a chance that I would have taken it in a very progressive country route, which is a sound that I’ve been creating. I would nevertheless have figured out a distinct and unique sound for him, because that’s something I do with all artists. For example, if Morgan doesn’t take a song I’ve written, I don’t call a different artist and give it to them. The song is dead. I’m not giving his sound to somebody else. I try to keep the sounds separated.

“Post had a specific vision. He told me that he did not want a lot of the elements of progressive country I do with Morgan. He said, ‘That’s not what I’m looking for. I’m looking for like an older sound that’s more reminiscent and classic. I love the ’90s. I want a lot of the influences and sounds that feel like ’90s country.’ Later we expanded to also include influences from the ’80s or ’70s, going all the way back to ’50s and ’60s in some cases. Obviously you can’t recreate the past and you can’t contend with the classics, because they’re classics for a reason. They’ve been around for 60 years. Instead he wanted songs that could live next to those songs.

Charlie Handsome has worked with Post Malone since his first album in 2016.

“We did do some modern stuff, but we also reached back and we wanted to give everything an authentic feeling. That’s why we got people like Paul and Larry Franklin on the album. These are the guys who have been giving records that authentic country sound through the years. At the same time, what makes the record different is who Post is as a writer. Some of his lyrics, some of his phrasing, some of the melodies, definitely took a direction that feels more authentic to him. You are not listening to a country song, you’re listening to how Post Malone is doing a country song.”

Grown From Seeds

F‑1 Trillion was co‑produced by Handsome and fellow star producer Louis Bell, with help on a few songs from Jonathan Hoskins. Handsome, Bell and Post Malone have co‑writing credits on all songs. As is common these days, several other songwriters were involved as well on most songs. The writing and recording process took place for the most part at The Cave in East Iris Studios in Nashville.

F‑1 Trillion was recorded in surprisingly traditional fashion at Nashville’s East Iris studios.

“Some of the songs started in the room, sitting around playing acoustic guitar together, usually Post, one of the writers, and me, and we’d just kick around ideas. If someone had a good chord progression or another idea, we would build on that. But I think the bigger, more memorable songs, the singles and so on, came from me already having a riff or an idea. I’d have half of a track made, and we wrote to that. We brought in the band later. For me, that’s how we got the best results.

“So I tended to come in with the musical seed idea, and then I co‑wrote the lyrics and the melodies. I also figured out who I wanted to work in the room together, as in ‘I want this writer with that guy.’ Regardless of whether I had the concept for a song or someone else, it’s also my job as a producer to say, ‘You know what? I don’t love that idea.’ Or ‘I do like that one, but I think we should switch it to this. Instead of making it about this girl, let’s make it about that part of the relationship.’ It was a matter of coaching the room once we got something going.

“The lead single, ‘I Had Some Help’, is an example. That song started as a riff I recorded as a voice note on my iPhone. I just take my phone, press record, and make something up. Then I’ll either chop up what I have done, or I have another producer work on it who is signed to my company, Jonathan Hoskins. In this particular case, I sent the voice note to him, he chopped it up, added some drums and bass and different stuff, and sent it back, so I had something that I could write to. Musically and beat‑wise, that song was just Jonathan and I. We then wrote the song to it, with input from co‑writers Post, Morgan Wallen, ERNEST, Ashley Gorley and Chandler Walters.”

The Cave and The Sun Room at East Iris are perfectly set up for recording multiple musicians at once.

Finding The Music

Regarding the many country legends who made their way to East Iris, Handsome notes: “Post and I invited the guest singers on the album, and I picked all the writers and the musicians. I hand selected everyone as far as the personnel went for this project. When it came to track the records, we tried to stick with the same players as much as we could throughout. Once the band gets to the studio, they listen, chart the song, and play it immediately. And then we start doing live edits. The guitar player may play a riff and we’ll say, ‘Let’s switch it to this.’ Or we say, ‘Let’s move this note here.’ Stuff like that.

“One of the things we were looking for was musicality. Instinctively, I would have no guitar solos, because the modern‑day young listener doesn’t want to sit through that. They just want to click a two‑minute song and move on. But for this album, it was like, ‘No, we’re going to have fun,’ so we had ripping guitar solos and did musical breaks. We were like: ‘All right, all four of you are going to solo. Let’s go!’ We had all these great musicians involved, and they can jam and create bigger sounds. There’s more layers on these songs than any of the other songs I’ve done in my career. Normally I don’t go that far. I try to do minimal things.

“Louis [Bell] was involved in the writing and production, and he recorded Post’s vocals. I think he’s done that for nine years now, and they have their routine. And Louis is good at creating libraries. At the beginning of the project he AI‑ripped the drum beats of tons of classic country songs. He had hundreds of them. So while I was doing the music, he would go, ‘What tempo are we at?’ I’d say ‘135’, and he’d have 50 drum grooves that work at 135 bpm. There was this huge catalogue of ideas we could aim for, and that we could time‑stretch if needed to make them fit. However, this album was not about programming. I had hired Aaron Sterling to play the drums, and while the libraries sometimes provided a guide, Aaron would play something new.

Charlie Handsome worked with super‑producer Louis Bell on F‑1 Trillion.Photo: Genelec

“Everything we did was part of creating an album as an entire body of work. I do hope that albums will be able to co‑exist with individual songs. Doing an album meant that we were able to explore having many ups and downs and different moments. That’s a big part of it, and I like that. Even the track listing was important. How do you start? Then what do you want to feel as you’re listening to the songs in succession? When listing to the whole album, you want to feel all the highs and lows and emotions involved.”

And, Handsome could have added, making the songs the most important thing is far more likely to make the journey of listening to an entire album more rewarding.