Inside Track: Zach Crowell

Although he grew up aspiring to be a hip‑hop producer, Zach Crowell has made it big by leaning into his Nashville roots.

“My career took off when I began combining urban music, which I loved and had been doing for a long time, with country, the music I grew up around in Nashville,” recalls Zach Crowell. “As soon as I started being honest and making the music that was naturally in me, my career officially started. It also felt very natural because this was right at the time when country music started going that way, with the group FGL (Florida Georgia Line) making country with hints of urban music, and R&B and rap rhythms in their flows and melodies.”

FGL broke through in 2012, as one of several acts that reshaped country with crossover hits. Two years later, Crowell enjoyed his first major success, and went on to become one of the leading country producers in Nashville. To date he’s enjoyed more than 30 number one hit singles, and most recently a number one album with Jelly Roll. Crowell’s remarkable achievements are built on a unique set of skills and musical sensibilities that he developed as a teenager and while working as a hip‑hop producer.

Coming Up

“I grew up in Franklin, south of Nashville, which is where I live today. My family wasn’t in the music business, but I knew people who were, and I was aware that making a living from songwriting was an option. My dad is an amateur musician, who still plays guitar, bass and sings in the band he started at middle school with his buddies. He did not teach me to play, but we were constantly in record stores buying whatever new music had come out. Loving music seeped in my bones more than playing it.

“At high school I was the DJ with a big stack of CDs. In the ’90s I was in love with hip‑hop and R&B. It was when Tupac and Babyface were huge, and Southern rap took off, with No Limit Records and Cash Money Records. When I graduated from high school, I wanted to make music, and bought an Akai MPC2000, had Cubase, and started making rap beats. I had no idea what I was doing. I gradually bought more pieces of gear, and collaborated with people in Nashville. We had a small record label and put out independent music. That got me into writing R&B as well. I wanted to be Mannie Fresh, who produced a lot of the Cash Money Records stuff! By that time I was selling beats to rappers around town for $50 or $100, and in 2008 I sold some beats to Jelly Roll.

“My cousin is a successful country songwriter named Josh Hoge. I was his tour manager when he was a pop artist around 2007‑8, which led to me also writing pop music. He was collaborating with Ashley Gorley, one of the most successful country songwriters of all time. I eventually started writing with Ashley as well, and he signed me to Combustion Music in Nashville. I was supposed to make urban pop, but there wasn’t much of an outlet for this in Nashville at the time, so someone at Combustion suggested I try and write some country songs, and put me in rooms with other writers.

“I had been producing for 15 years in the underground rap music world, and was able to quickly make professional‑sounding demos in a normal room. I could make a song in 30 minutes or an hour that was fresh and innovative, and this led to me getting into rooms with more heavy hitters really quickly because I had skills that not many people had in the Nashville community. I would make beats on a drum machine and play guitar loops and edit them in a computer and make it sound all weird, which stood out in Nashville. When I showed up in the country world, what I was doing was new.”

Urban Music

Crowell’s first big placement was still in urban music, when he co‑wrote and co‑produced the song ‘Confe$$ions’ by Christian rapper Lecrae in 2012. The next year he was a writer and producer on the song ‘Strong’ by country singer Will Hoge, which was followed by what Crowell now describes as his big breakthrough.

“The song that changed my life wasn’t a number one song. It was a Keith Urban song called ‘Cop Car’ that died somewhere on the charts. I wrote that with a new artist at the time, Sam Hunt, and a buddy of ours named Matt Jenkins. It was a very different song that really stood out. The whole of Nashville was talking about that song at the time. It had a cool vibe and a bunch of artists wanted to record it, including Sam. But I’ve always been a mega fan of Keith Urban, so when he called I was not going to say no. He wanted me to produce it as well. It was a huge opportunity, because I had no money and no big credits.”

‘Cop Car’ was released as part of Urban’s album Fuse in 2013, and as a single in January 2014, earning Urban a Best Country Solo Performance Grammy Award nomination. “That song put Sam, Matt, and I on the map in the Nashville songwriting community,” recalls Crowell. “The other thing that changed my life was meeting Sam Hunt. His career started around 2014 and quickly became a big deal. He was making bizarre country music and sold a lot of tickets and a whole lot of records. I’m forever thankful to him.”

Crowell has been at the heart of Hunt’s “bizarre country”, having co‑written and co‑produced almost all of the singer’s 14 singles to date, many of which have been to number one, as well as most of Hunt’s two albums, Montevallo (2014) and Southside (2020), and his mixtape Between The Pines (2015). As a writer and/or producer, Crowell has also been involved in many other high‑profile country releases from artists such as Carrie Underwood, Luke Bryan and Dustin Lynch. His work on Jelly Roll’s two most recent albums revived an old connection between the two of them, and helped the rapper become a star by crossing over into country singing.

Crossing Paths

There’s been a common theme in several recent Inside Tracks, with producers like Andrew Watt, Charlie Handsome, Sean Cook and Nevin Sastry starting out as guitarists, becoming interested in production through hip‑hop, and then crossing over into other genres. Crowell’s career has followed a similar path, except that he did not start out as a guitarist. “Charlie is a great guitar player, and has a rock background. So he plays country riffs in a different, fresh way. I’m not a great guitar player, so I have to make up for this in some other way. We all try something that makes us stand out a little bit, and I’ve realised that for me it’s the fact that I come from the underground rap world and have a hip‑hop record label background and did all the things associated with it, like pressing CDs, printing flyers and passing them out, and making our own music videos. I was also a tour manager. So I have a manager brain. I also think a bit like an A&R. A lot of songwriters are just focused on the song, but I can step out and look a little more at the bigger picture.

Zach Crowell works mainly from his own home studio in Franklin, near Nashville.

“I also do my own engineering in my studio, and have mixed about half of...