PT Entertainment
Nicolle Galyon has ordered dinner out almost every night this week. This would not normally be a very notable occurrence for a busy songwriter, business owner, and now solo artist, but there’s a line on the opening track of Firstborn, Galyon’s debut record, that is haunting her a little.
“I sing ‘a high five for the girl making dinner,’ but I have Postmated the past five nights,” Galyon says, sitting cross-legged on a couch in her living room in jeans and a white t-shirt, her hair tucked under a tan baseball cap. She’s referring to a tender line at the end of “Winner,” a song that spells out her story from South Dakota to Kansas to Nashville, juggling the priorities of motherhood, career, and the expectations we set on ourselves. She laughs nervously: how can she preach about the simple pleasures of domestic life, she wonders, when she’s never been gone from home more? Next week, it’s the Today Show, and there’s a quick weekend getaway with her husband, fellow writer Rodney Clawson, squeezed in too. “It’s an ache,” she says, her eyes glassing over with tears that she doesn’t try to wipe away. “Is it dark that I am so fiercely committed to giving to myself?”
Most people have known Galyon, up until now, as a person fiercely committed to giving to everybody else. Songs she’s co-written have been cut by Kelsea Ballerini, Dierks Bentley, Camila Cabello, Miranda Lambert and many more, yielding nine Number One singles for other artists. Three years ago, she launched Songs & Daughters, an imprint of Big Loud Records, to support and develop women like Hailey Whitters and Tiera. Save for an appearance on The Voice, she’s mostly remained in the background publicly, the kind of Nashville powerhouse beloved and revered on Music Row but anonymous to a world that doesn’t read album credits. For the most part, she liked it that way.
“It’s OK to change your mind at 38 and say, ‘Actually, I’ve decided I’m going to do this next,’” she says. “I think there are a lot of songwriters who quietly want to do this. There is something so binary about this thinking, that you are a songwriter or an artist. It doesn’t feel like love to think about it that way.”
Nashville’s seen more and more songwriters of late – particularly women – release albums under their own name, to transformative results. Natalie Hemby’s first LP, Puxico, came in 2017 in her late thirties. Nicollete Hayford – a.k.a Pillbox Patti – put out Florida last week after a decade of crafting for others on Music Row. These albums have often let the artists exercise muscles that aren’t welcomed by the mainstream: not dependent on radio trends or easy hooks, and explicitly, almost painstakingly personal.
But that’s also what makes them work. Galyon wrote Firstborn in 2021, after deciding the year prior that she would finally give herself the space and permission to tell her own stories, sung in her own voice. She and her family had moved back to Kansas during the pandemic, and it was on a drive from the airport in Wichita to her hometown of Sterling that song titles began popping into her head, all under one singular purpose — this was going to be an album for her kids, to explain her own history in all its complexity. How she had a different father than her siblings (and, not unrelated, why she’s the only tall one in the family), or the challenges of being a working mother, and the mistakes she made with lovers and friends along the way. How she stopped dying her hair and decided not to get Botox. How hard it is to miss tucking your kids in at night, even if the place you are is the stuff of someone else’s dreams. How, one day, you’re supposed to let your kids go into the arms of another, and how that idea hurts like hell. It was, as she puts it, designed “for an audience of two.”
Don’t get her wrong, the kids have been listening. They like to bop along in the car, happy to hear mom’s voice, but they haven’t been asking questions yet. “They still haven’t asked what ‘virginity’ is,” Galyon laughs, referencing a line in “Winner.” “Or when my daughter is singing ‘Consequences,’ does she wonder who that is about?” But it’s not her kids the album is really resonating with — it’s other women, her friends in their thirties and beyond. It’s other mothers. It’s people who aren’t used to seeing this less “glamorous” part of life turned into song. The most requested item at her listening sessions, when she screened a film she made to go along with the album, was tissues. “I had a really close friend say that she sat her husband down and was just like, ‘I want you to listen to this, because I feel like you are going to see me differently,” Galyon says. “I’m realizing how much other people needed to see themselves this way.”
“Self Care,” built around Galyon’s signature play on words, is at the core of that discovery. “I could go to the doctor and get needles in my face so whenever I smile my forehead stays in place,” she sings, ending with the perfect flip on a notorious hashtag kind of phrase: “I can’t make my self care.” Galyon stopped bleaching her hair after she realized her daughter’s was a similar dusty sort of blonde, and the song is less about rejecting plastic surgery and more about figuring out a version of beauty that feels comfortable and personal, and unprescribed by “some man in an office somewhere who knows nothing about what it means to be beautiful at 38.”
It is also deeply about the balance of being a mother and yourself at the same time. The album’s closer, “Death Bed,” lays out the struggle in plain, heartbreaking terms: “just know that it killed me not tucking you in,” she sings. “What’s so confusing about being a working mom is that, some days, bravery is looking them in the eye and saying, ‘Dad’s going to put you to bed tonight,’” she says. “But I started a company that is about giving more platform and room for female voices and I’m not there to tuck my own daughter in? Did I even hear her own story today?” Her eyes well up again. “This is confusing to the very last second.”
Galyon already has ideas for a second solo record, but she’s also been spending time back where she first got comfortable in Nashville 20 years ago: in the writing room, working on songs for others. She was worried that things were going to feel empty or a little hollow after so much time seriously cataloguing her own pain, joy, and confessions, but spinning up a song just for the sake of it came easier than she thought. “Turns out, there’s just a part of me that likes to write a song just to write a song,” she says. “Not everything in life has to be the most profound thing you’ve ever done. If you try to write [CMA] ‘Song of the Year’ every day, you’re never going to, because you are going to wear yourself out emotionally and mentally. Have fun, give less of a shit.”
Though the CMA Awards ultimately didn’t end up seeing it this way, she’d hoped that an unusual pick would be up for Song of the Year this time: Walker Hayes’ “Fancy Like.” “It’s like our current ‘Achy Breaky Heart,’” she says. “Clearly something in humanity likes that song! Why can’t that be up for Song of the Year, if it brings people joy, and brought people together? That’s powerful and profound to me, that people could smile and dance and have fun again.”
Part of that disconnect, she thinks, comes from a lack of understanding – and desire to understand – what life really looks like in small town rural America. Sterling, Kansas, with a population of around 2,000, is at the core of Firstborn, so much so that Galyon returned to host an album release party there, inviting locals to come out, set up chairs, jump on some big white bounce houses, and view the film she made there. True to small town life, the evening also included a winner presentation for the local high school girl’s basketball team.
“I think there are a lot of people who don’t know anything about rural America, or a country lifestyle,” Galyon, who has written plenty of hometown songs, including the Ballerini and Kenny Chesney duet “Half of My Hometown,” says. “My experience in a small town wasn’t dumb. It was charming, heartfelt, sophisticated. I’m fiercely committed to stand up for the rural America I know. There’s a lot of closemindedness everywhere, but when I go to my hometown I feel nothing but love.”
Though she and her family still spend ample time in Sterling, homebase is here, in Nashville, in a beautiful place overlooking the hills decked out in the neutral tones she seemed to gravitate to. (Maybe it helps to keep things beige when your life is anything but.) Galyon was hesitant at first, about such a lavish house, but decided that guilt was the sort of thing only women carry. She earned this, after all.
“Too much and not enough are the same thing sometimes,” she says as Clawson walks through the front door, toting a guitar on his back. Their kids, 7 and 9, will be home from school soon enough. “That fear of being too much, too extra, too big for my britches is what kept me from making a record. It’s giving yourself permission to not need to improve anymore. There’s a point where you go, all due respect, I’m always going to be a little bit fucked-up. So let’s just get cozy with that.”
“And I started a company that’s about giving more platform and room for female voices, but I’m not there to tuck my own daughter in at night. Did I even hear her own story today?”
