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’.

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...