Mo Pitney — New Home, New Baby, New Album
This has been a huge year for Pitney...
Mo Pitney has lived a lot of life since his 2016 debut album, Behind This Guitar, earned him “Artist to Watch” status with multiple publications and heralded his arrival as one of country’s most talented new traditionalists. This summer, Pitney has settled into a new home, welcomed a baby daughter and released his sophomore album Ain’t Lookin’ Back.
“I’m so proud of the song selection. I think there’s a message there,” Pitney tells Sounds Like Nashville of the 13-song set. “I think we met our goal, which was ‘Pour your heart out. Make sure they see the depths of who you are, the depths of what you believe while simultaneously showing the fun side of your life.’ That was the goal and I really think with [producer Jim] Moose Brown’s help, we achieved that. I couldn’t be more proud.”
The album’s new single, “Ain’t Bad For A Good Ol’ Boy” has been featured on the Netflix original series The Ranch, and is gaining traction at radio. Pitney says they almost released the song “Local Honey” as the single, but “Ain’t Bad For A Good Ol’ Boy” just felt more appropriate in the current COVID climate. “Due to COVID these days, people really have a hard time finding songs that celebrate home life. Since we’re all stuck at our houses now—and potentially we’ll be stuck at our houses a lot more often—it’s like they picked up on that song being a country celebration of home life,” he says of his team getting behind the single. “It just kind of stuck out in everybody’s minds as potentially being the thing that needs to be on radio right now and that’s what caused us to lean that way versus the other way. I’m glad that we did because it sounds good on the radio and it’s very much my life. I feel like I can travel the country and promote the song shameless and say, ‘This is kind of how I see my life here at my three acres close to Ashland City, [TN]. I can’t believe I’ve gotten this far. I look over the land and who I’m spending my life with and I do say ‘it ain’t bad for a good ol’ boy.’”
Pitney co-wrote the single with Phil O’Donnell and Trent Willmon. “Phil and Trent actually started the song and I think they had it partially in the can for a few weeks and ended up I had a writing session just with Philbilly,” Pitney says, calling O’Donnell by his nickname. “He played me what they had started, and Philbilly and I finished it in a few hours. We sent it over to Trent and asked if he’d change anything and he said no, so it was an interesting write. It’s the first time it’s ever happened to me where I’m co-writing with somebody that wasn’t there, but Philbilly just played it for me and obviously I loved the idea. It’s very much me. We did a few things in the song to make it even more my story and just kind of tightened up the screws and there it was.”
Pitney is hoping fans will embrace the song as their own. “I think that we all have dreams of settling down a little bit and having a wife and kids, and sitting up on a hilltop in a farmhouse or barn home like ours,” the Illinois native says. “I know other people have a little bit different dream of what their house will look like, but I think anybody might be able to put something together where they can stand on their driveway and look back at what God has given them and say, ‘You know what? This ain’t a mansion, but it sure ain’t bad.’ That’s the kind of place we come from. I try to stay down to earth. That’s just who I am and who I hope to always be, so I hope other people will relate and see life through the lens that I see it. I think that’s why they’ll embrace it.”
The album is filled with songs that reflect the way Pitney sees life, including “Old Stuff Better.” “I wrote it before the first album and I played that song live throughout the first album and in between albums,” Pitney says of the nostalgic song. “I just knew I was going to play it the rest of my life, so I thought I needed to put it on this album. A lot of people feel this way in this new age world of screens and buttons. Some things just tend to stick around and some people that are rooted in history seem to like to hold onto the things that stick around forever and have stood the test of time. That’s who I am and obviously anybody who knows me can see that. I don’t know if that will be a single or not. I recorded it hoping that it would be a single because I would like in the future to not only have up-tempos, but I have a dream of being able to have a big ballad come out to radio.”
The album opener “A Music Man” is a song Pitney co-wrote with Bobby Tomberlin. “God gives us all talents. They are all different kinds whether you are cutting hair, kicking a soccer ball, playing a guitar, painting trucks, whatever that might be,” Pitney says. “You get this talent that you figure that you’re good at and it might be something that you just hope that it could be your hobby the rest of your life. For me, that was music. The hope is at least you can do it the rest of your life. The dream is that you can do it and make just enough living to survive, so you go down this path. I would have played music the rest of my life if anybody had paid me a dime or not. When you move to Nashville, it’s very easy to get caught up in everything and you start using your gift for the wrong reason, maybe using it to be famous or having a bunch of money, and it will steal your joy from the thing itself. Bobby and I talked about that. I feel everybody gets tangled up in that. I got tangled up in it for a while. Bobby’s gotten tangled up in it. I had to remind myself why I came to Nashville. So it’s kind of a letter to myself and a letter to Nashville. The song came out in about an hour and half. It’s one of the easiest songs that I’ve ever written and it’s there to remind me of why I’m here.”
“A Music Man” features vocals by Jamey Johnson and Melonie Cannon. “I’m so honored that Jamey would be a part of it, him and Melonie both,” he says. “I don’t think they made the song better. I think they made the whole album better by being a part of that one song. I couldn’t be more thankful.”
Another song on the album that holds special significance to Pitney is the closing track “Jonas.” “The first time I heard it the song wasn’t finished,” Pitney says of hearing Dean Dillon perform the song on a trip to Canada. “We were sitting around the campfire and Dean played this song that was about 90% finished. He hummed through some of the lines that he hadn’t quite finished, and it just absolutely undid me. I heard that part of the song, I think, before I was converted to Christianity. I grew up in a Christian home, but I don’t believe I really believed in the gospel until after I had heard the song.”
By the time Pitney had gone in to record his sophomore album, Dillon had finished the song with Tom Douglas, and Pitney definitely wanted to record it. “Before we even made the record, I knew that I wanted to end the record with that song so we had that guiding light before we even started,” he says. “The song means the world to me. I love tagging it on the end of this album that has a potential to get into a lot of people’s hands because there’s a type of truth that is easy to let go. There’s a type of truth that, ‘Oh yeah Jesus is some people’s savior,’ and that type of truth is easy to let go of, but when you have to face that man historically, it’s hard to get around that he actually rose from the dead. That’s the type of truth that keeps you up at night. I know I had to reckon with that and I think all of us have to reckon with that at one point in our life. I’m thankful that there is a song that causes people like myself to reckon with that. So if this album gets into a lot of people’s hands maybe it will change a lot of people’s lives.”
In addition to preparing for the release of his new album, Pitney has been busy on the home front too. He and his wife, Emily, welcomed their second daughter, Audra Elaine. “She is the most docile, just sweetest baby,” Pitney says proudly. “She doesn’t cry very often. She let’s us sleep at night unless she’s just too hungry to let us sleep. We are in love that’s for sure.”
View this post on InstagramI can’t wait to take both my girls fishin’ 😁 #girldad
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Little Audra joins her big sister Evelyne, who is three and a half-years-old. Though older siblings can sometimes get jealous, Pitney says that hasn’t been a problem. “I’ve heard some horror stories of bringing babies home and siblings saying, ‘Can you take that little one back to the hospital?’ But that was very much not our story,” Pitney says. “I walked the baby inside and Evie was already in bed. I brought the baby into Evie’s bedroom and she was almost in tears to hug the little baby. She was kind of patting her on the top of her head and Evie said, ‘Don’t worry Audra. God is always going to be with you and I’m always going to be your big sister. No one will ever pull us apart,’ and she kept saying that. We’ve let her feel like this is OUR baby. This is your sister as much as she is our daughter and it’s because of that I think Evie has just taken on the role and embraced it. It’s been really sweet for me to see. I’ve definitely spent a lot of time with tears on my face watching them interact.”
The Pitney family has been enjoying their new home outside Nashville. “It’s pretty simple and that kind of was our goal,” he says. “We wanted it to be a work horse home, something that was good for us to be coming in and out with our suitcases and our vegetables from the garden and our fish that I caught. We wanted it to be a house that was lived in because we do a lot of things. We wanted to have concrete floors and we wanted to build a pole barn house. A lot of people who would be reading this would understand them to be barndominiums, something that got really famous in Texas. I hired a barn company to put up a pole barn house and it’s just a 2,000 sq. foot home and it has a 900 sq. foot wrap around porch, which is really cool. I hired them to put up a barn and then I built a house on the inside. It has a big great room on one half of the house, our bedrooms are a little bit smaller because we look at our bedrooms as something to go back and hibernate in. We want to do most of our living out in the great room. We want to have people over and feel like they have plenty of room to visit.”
With a new home, new baby and new album, Pitney is obviously enjoying life, and he’s excited about fans hearing Ain’t Lookin’ Back. “I have a hard time listening to my own music. I don’t know if that’s a common thing or not,” he says. “I probably listened to the first album four times. I just have a hard time listening to my own records and with this record I’ve noticed I’ve listened to it a lot more. I’ve probably listened to the whole thing front to back probably 15 or 16 times and I’m not left with that feeling of, ‘Oh I wished I would have done that so much differently.’
“I feel like I’m always going to be refining who I am and I think that’s really important because music is meant to communicate,” he continues, “and the way communication happens most effectively is if the communicator believes in what they are saying and how they are saying it. My desire to keep defining or pulling back the layers of who I actually am in regards to music, lyrics, melodies, grooves and feels is because I think I’ll be a more effective communicator. I’ll have more of my heart excited to share the music as I move forward. I look forward to doing that the rest of my life.”
