The Writers Round With Ben Johnson

The singer-songwriter recently released his debut country single “Met Me Now” with his family band Track45 and has cuts by other artists including Lee Brice’s “One of Them Girls,” Dierks Bentley’s “Gone,” HARDY’s “Give Heaven Some Hell,” Charlie Puth’s “Patient” and Weezer’s “All My Favorite Songs.”

The Writers Round With Ben Johnson
Dallas Davidson, Lee Brice, Ben Johnson, Ashley Gorley; Photo credit: Hunter Berry

Welcome to the Writers Round, a monthly column where Sounds Like Nashville sits down with Nashville-based songwriters and learns about each writer’s journey to Music City. This month, Ben Johnson sheds some light into his life as a songwriter as well as shares the stories behind some of his many hits including Lee Brice’s “One of Them Girls,” Dierks Bentley’s “Gone,” HARDY’s “Give Heaven Some Hell” and Charlie Puth’s “Patient.”

Ben Johnson has been writing songs since he was six. He remembers creating an instrumental song on a toy piano his grandmother brought to a beach vacation that year with his family. Soon he was mimicking the Beatles with his early creations, including a song called “Holding My Hand.”

“I basically just ripped off ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ by the Beatles because I love the Beatles,” he tells Sounds Like Nashville over the phone from his studio. “It was not very good, and no one will ever hear it.”

Johnson, who is also part of Track45 with his sisters KK and Jenna, says he always knew he wanted to be an artist and a songwriter. He spent endless hours in the basement of his childhood home in Meridian, MS, using GarageBand on his dad’s old Mac computer. In high school he bought a $100 microphone and used a keyboard his uncle gave him to make beats and try to reproduce his favorite songs.

“A lot of how I learned production and songwriting was just trying to mimic other people’s records down there and then trying to make my own,” he says. “The first one I did was ‘Hey Jude’ and I would play ‘Hey Jude’ and then I would reproduce it. The next day I would go down there and try to make my own version of it.”

Johnson and his siblings frequently performed around Mississippi together and one night music industry veteran Marty Gamblin was in attendance. After their set, Gamblin told the trio that he thought they had what it takes to move to Nashville and pursue music as a career. Johnson said they had always dreamed of moving to Music City but didn’t have the confidence to make the leap. Gamblin’s praise was what pushed Johnson and his sisters to save up their money and move to Nashville the following year.

Still in high school, Johnson earned money by giving music and tennis lessons. He began teaching piano, guitar, cello, mandolin, banjo and voice. In the fall of 2013, Johnson got a cello scholarship to attend Belmont University and moved to Nashville with his sisters. Once in Nashville he recognized the talent of the musicians around him and soon discovered co-writing.

“One of the first gigs we played here a writer named Rivers Rutherford came up to me afterwards and was like, ‘Hey I would like to co-write with you sometime,’” Johnson recalls “He’s a legendary writer, in the [Nashville Songwriters] Hall of Fame, and we were like, ‘We don’t need help.’ We didn’t even understand that that was a thing. That’s how oblivious we were.”

Rutherford taught Johnson about co-writing and was a mentor to him in his early years in Nashville. Pretty soon Johnson was writing two songs a day and expanding his network. After several months in town, he knew getting a publishing deal was his next goal.

“I always wanted to be an artist. I knew I wanted to be a producer and a writer ever since I studied Max Martin records,” he says. “Ryan Tedder is who I’ve always wanted to be because he has OneRepublic, he’s a writer and producer. I wanted to have my own band and be a writer-producer for other people.”

Johnson continued to write and produce songs while attending Belmont. He didn’t sign a publishing deal until 2019, more than five years since he moved to Nashville.

“It’s very, very frustrating and disheartening at times to be honest, but I kept my head down and I kept writing and kept working and eventually I got some lucky breaks with Tape Room,” he says.

Johnson was introduced to ace songwriter and Tape Room Music founder Ashley Gorley through his sister, KK, following a visit Gorley made to Belmont. The siblings had a meeting with Gorley, and Johnson played him Track45 songs and his pop and country creations. Gorley wasn’t looking to sign any writers to his publishing company at the time, so Johnson asked if he could continue sending him songs every month for feedback and Gorley agreed.

“Thankfully he did because that changed my life,” Johnson says. “For about nine months I sent probably 10 songs a month to him and he would break them down and give me feedback. Sometimes it was real simple like this idea isn’t good enough to write and sometimes it was a little more nuanced. … That feedback was invaluable and eventually I played a song for him that he was like, ‘This is really good.’”

That song was “Patient,” an apology that Johnson initially sang into his phone at a Kroger parking lot following a fight he had with his wife. Charlie Puth went on to record it the day after he played it for Gorley. Around 3 a.m. Gorley called Johnson to tell him Puth was in the studio recording his song.

“They say one song can change your life and that song changed my life,” Johnson says. “It literally started the dominos that led to everything that I’ve done up to this point. After Charlie cut the song, then I had Charlie calling publishers for me, and that was really helpful. I ended up doing a deal with Ashley, of course, because he made it all happen, and then a joint venture with a company in L.A. called APG which is Charlie’s publishing company.”

Johnson says Puth recording his song was a “massive” turning point for him as a songwriter. It gave him the credibility he needed and opened doors to more career opportunities. While he didn’t get a cut his first year signed as a writer at Tape Room Music, he laid the groundwork for his future songs.

On Father’s Day 2019, Johnson was driving home to Mississippi when he got another call from Gorley who had scheduled a writing session with Lee Brice later that night. Johnson turned his car around and found himself in the room with Brice, Gorley and Dallas Davidson writing “One of Them Girls.”

The session beginning at 10 p.m. with a guitar riff Johnson had while Davidson and Gorley shouted out song ideas and Brice pulled them together. By 2 a.m. the song was finished, and they all ate a strawberry cake that Davidson brought. Johnson finalized the demo at 3 a.m. and the next morning the writers got a video from Brice in the studio cutting the song. It was released as Brice’s single April 2020 and spent three weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart that September. “One of Them Girls” became Johnson’s first No. 1 song.

“That was about the fastest turnaround I’ve ever had on a song from writing it to an artist cutting it and then the next week he was like, ‘This is going to be my single,’” Johnson says. “It was a pretty surreal moment. You dream about those things.

“To have it with Ashley, obviously who is my mentor and my champion and who without him I literally would not be here … It was really special to get to write it with him for my first No. 1.”

Johnson currently has three songs at country radio, Track45’s “Met Me Now,” HARDY’s “Give Heaven Some Hell” and Dierks Bentley’s “Gone.” He also recently celebrated another No. 1 song at rock radio with Weezer’s “All My Favorite Songs.”

While Johnson’s experience writing with Brice was a quick journey to radio, “Gone” took much longer. He wrote the song in 2019 with Nicolle Galyon and Niko Moon. Initially written for Moon’s artist project, “Gone” sat on the shelf for over a year before making it to Bentley.

“I had this idea in my phone for a long time: ‘I’ve been gone since you left me.’ I just thought it was an interesting play on words,” Johnson says. “A couple hours later those guys help whip it into shape and make it sound way better than I had it sounding. We finished it, sent it in, never heard anything back.”

A year later, Johnson received a text from Christina Wiltshire at Warner Chappell Music who discovered the song. She thought “Gone” sounded like a Dierks Bentley song and sent it to his manager.

“Dierks heard it and said, ‘I’m cutting it next week.’ Three weeks later it’s on the radio,” Johnson says. “That was an unusual series of events for it to be over a year after we had written it and I had never even gotten feedback from anyone on that song.”

The idea for “Give Heaven Some Hell,” which was recognized by the Association of Independent Music Publishers in April as the 2021 AIMP Nashville Awards’ Publisher’s Pick, was inspired while Johnson was writing another song called “Truck” with HARDY and Hunter Phelps. During the session, HARDY threw out the line, “And he’s giving heaven some hell.”

“Hunter and I looked at each other and said, ‘Wow that sounds like that’s a whole song right there.’ HARDY’s like, ‘Shoot, well that’s a really special idea. We’re all in with Ashley next week, let’s wait till next week and write it with him.’ We came in the next week and we were nervous almost because we knew it was such a special idea, we didn’t want to mess it up.

“I started playing the piano chords and HARDY’s like, ‘Can’t believe that you got me in a suit and tie,’ and 30 minutes later the entire song was written,” Johnson says. “We’re all geeking out over it the rest of the night and hoping that people get to hear it and can connect with it like we were and thankfully they did.”

Johnson admits that his career trajectory sounds better when you name all the hits next to one another. He stresses that it has been a long journey to get to where he is now. “Mostly it’s days banging your head against a wall hoping that you got something good and then there’s five or six days a year it’s like, ‘Oh this is special,’” he says.

One of the songs that Johnson wrote during the darker times is a track called “Believe” which was released in 2018 by Meek Mill and Justin Timberlake.

“I went a long time writing a lot of songs without really seeing any success,” he says. “I got turned down by almost every single publisher in town. I wrote that song as a message to myself because I was really depressed and down on myself one day. The lyrics are, ‘I believe in you/ I believe in you/ I believe in you.’ I was trying to tell myself don’t give up and I believe in you.”

Johnson finished the song in L.A. the following year with Timberlake’s producer, Rob Knox. Two months later he received a FaceTime from Timberlake in the studio recording the song.  

“That was a really special thing to get to see him bring it to life. What’s crazy is that song got released two years to the day from the day I wrote it. That was a really, really incredible series of events for a song,” he says. “Sometimes you have to write the songs to keep you going, to motivate yourself and pick yourself up.”

After years of writing for other artists, now Johnson is seeing his own success as an artist with the release of “Met Me Now” with Track45. The band’s debut single, “Met Me Now” was the most added song to country radio the week of its release in March.

“The dream has always been to have my own artist project, my own band and to do it with my sisters who are my best friends,” he says. “That is the most special thing that I’ve gotten to see; the response from everyone for our artist project. To be able to have a song on the radio with that, I can’t even put that into words.”