A Conversation with David Nail – HuffPost 10.2.13

David Nail: Mike, how’s it going?

Mike Ragogna: David Nail, pretty good, man, how are you?

DN: I’m doing well. I haven’t been up too terribly long, I just had my morning cereal and I’m getting my wits about me.

MR: [laughs] Rumor has it that you’re somewhere near Bethlehem Steel.

DN: That’s what I hear. I was over listening to some of the guys talking about it as I was having breakfast, but I haven’t looked outside the window just yet. I’m about to head outside here in a minute and go for a walk, but I haven’t taken a look around. Rumor has it we’ve played here before, but I guess I’ll see in a bit.

MR: [laughs] Ah, life on the road. David, your latest single, “Whatever She’s Got,” is for a new album that’s coming out in 2014. Would you give us the skinny on the single, like how’d that one come to you creatively and what does it mean to you?

DN: Well, I think that first and foremost, it’s kind of sparked a bit of a new direction for my music. I’m just in a different place. Without going too terribly into all of the details, I’m kind of in a different place in my life and I think that allows me the opportunity to maybe look at recording some music that, in the past, I wouldn’t have really entertained, for no other reason than that I just wasn’t at that specific place in my life. I heard this song and I knew right away that there was something different about it, something special, and I felt that of all the songs I was recording, this was probably the most suitable for country radio at the time that I had ever come across. Naturally, that got me excited, and then came the game of, “Are we going to be able to record this before someone else does?” and it kind of became a race to do that. It set the tone for the entire record. It’s a lot more upbeat, it’s a lot more fun, a lot less heavy material. There are a couple of songs on there that are a little deeper, like some of the music that I’ve recorded in the past, but for the most part, it just kind of represents a change in my life right now. It’s just a lighter, more fun, more upbeat project.

MR: David, what are a couple things that happened to you that got you feeling the way you do these days, unlike the way you feeling in the past?

DN: I think the main thing is that in the past, I’ve felt like I had to make statements with records. They all had themes and they all had important aspects to them that I felt I needed to translate to people out there to gain credibility and to prove a point. They were always very, very personal to me and what I was going through at the time. With this record, just in the last twelve to fourteen months, I felt like in my life, I’ve kind of made some new things priorities and made some old things less of a priority. I think that put me in a more generally positive place. As a result of that, I feel like the music, just like it has in the past when maybe I was in a sadder place or a more negative place, the music kind of took that tone and the music has taken the tone of where I’m at now.

MR: Could constantly being on the road and doing all these shows and having that kind of energy be behind that? Do you think that changed your attitude a little?

DN: Well, last year, we worked harder than I had ever worked before. I tell people, and it was true then and it’s still true today, I never traveled as a child, so I’m always tremendously excited to get where we’re going even if it’s places that I’ve been several times just because I always feel like there’s so much more to wherever we’re going that I haven’t seen. But the actual traveling aspect of it really wore me down last year. I think for the first time in my life or in my career, it caused me to kind of take a step back and say, “Okay, if I’m going to continue doing this for a living, I’ve got to get my body healthier and maybe not live to the max,” which has always kind of been my philosophy. I’ve always said, “Hey, if this is the last day, you know I want to go out on top,” I want to go out doing as much as I possibly could to maximize a day. So I think that motto kind of caught up to me in some aspects. At the same time, playing all those shows and playing all that music, you get an idea of, “Okay, well this song is a great song, but maybe for whatever reason, it’s just not meant for a live show, it’s just not meant for a club setting or for an arena setting.” I think in the beginning, I took that personal. “Why is this song not translating?” But over time, I’ve figured out that some songs are meant to listen to in your car, some songs are meant to listen to in your house or on the radio or whatever, and then there are some songs that, in a lot of ways, are strictly for playing live. What I tried to do with this record is to compromise and try to find the best songs that I possibly could that I felt could do both.

MR: And of course, the material is obviously going to change as you’re changing. Do you feel like next year when your album’s released David Nail is going to surprise a lot of people with it?

DN: I do, but I don’t think that people are going to listen to it and go, “Holy crap, what in the world happened to the guy?” When they hear I’ve made changes in my life, a lot of people ask, “What’s different?” I say, “That’s the glorious thing about making a record.” At least the records that I’ve made in the past and interviews I’ve done or when I’m up on stage, I’ve always been an open book, I’ve never tried to shy away from the music I’ve made or what I was going through at the time. The glorious thing about that, and maybe not glorious all the time, is that people know who you are, they know where you’re at, they know what you’re singing about. They can feel that. So I think it’ll be the same way with this. Instead of having to harp and say, “Well this is why I recorded this, this is why it sounds like this,” I think people will listen and go, “Hey, he’s at a different place in his life.” That’s the great thing about making records. You’ve got eleven songs to kind of explain where you’re at and I think it’ll be evident. But at the same time, I don’t think that it’s going to offend our old listeners and I think it’ll only help us with new ones.

MR: Nice. Hey David, do you ever occasionally get flashbacks to that 2011 World Series “God Bless America” that you sang?

DN: You know, that was one of those moments like I referenced earlier, those “Holy Crap!” moments, where you’re like, “If it all ends today, what a glorious way to go out.” I’ve been fortunate enough through music to get to form a lot of relationships in sports. It’s very ironic that those two have paralleled themselves because I have such a love for sports and have watched them so fanatically over the years, so I found it very ironic that stopping the sports dream personally for myself and pursuing music has allowed me all these opportunities to pursue the sports dream right alongside it. That was kind of the pinnacle so far of my experiences, getting to stand out on a field that I’ve watched so many games at for a team that was my favorite childhood team and still my favorite and having formed some relationships in that organization. It was just a special moment and one of those moments that people ask me about all the time and my reaction never changes. As cliché as it sounds, it’s a dream come true.

MR: Beautiful. So between the nineteenth of September and November twenty-second, you will have played twenty-seven tour dates. How do you stay awake?

DN: It’s difficult. The best part about it is we did this last year where we tried to go places. One of the most satisfactory aspects of my career so far is going into cities like Boston and Chicago–who, when you think about country music, you don’t think of them–places like Burmingham and just random cities where I really had no direct connection but over time, we built this relationship with those places and have really grown from a hundred, two hundred people to selling out small clubs whenever we go. Last year, when it came to the decision of, “Do you go on a big tour with somebody and play twenty-five minutes or do you do your own thing and really try to sell yourself like you have in some of these huge markets?” that was really what we decided to try and do. If you give us an hour and a half on stage, the odds of us playing something or doing something that you dig are a lot better than if we only had twenty-five or thirty minutes to do it. It’s nerve-wracking because you’re going into a lot of places that you’ve never played before, but just in the few places that we’ve played for the second time and seeing that crowd grow… Obviously, it helps when you’ve got a song on the radio. But I’ve always said that hopefully, the goal for us is those moments when you don’t have a song on the radio, you have to go out there and make a living and play shows and still have people show up. That’s what we’ve tried to do and it’s a beautiful thing. For the majority of the shows you referenced, we’re going out West. That’s one of my favorite parts of the country out there. It goes back to the little kid in me that never traveled. There’s something very romantic about getting on a bus and just going out to play music. You never know who’s going to show up, if anybody’s going to show up. But you know, regardless, you’ve got to go out there and do the best of your ability. We’ve been very, very lucky that people have gravitated to what we do live and I think that in a lot of ways, it’s different than some live shows. We don’t try to do any tricks or gimmicks or anything, we just try to go out there and make it first and foremost about the music and take people on a journey. I think that the first song is equally as important as the tenth song is equally important as the sixteenth or seventeenth song. They all serve a purpose and they all mesh together. If we had this conversation at the end of that run, my answer may completely change. But right now, we’re extremely excited about it and like I said, the little California, Washington, Oregon, places like that were so foreign to me growing up that I basically just thought they were something you talked about in geography class. I didn’t think anybody actually went out there. Now that I’ve had the opportunity to go out to such a beautiful country, I tell people every night it never gets old, the fact that you come out there on stage every night and there’s a few hundred strangers that have come out to hear you do your thing. It’s a special feeling.

MR: Beautiful. David, what advice do you have for new artists?

DN: Get your college degree first and foremost, it’ll alleviate a lot of stress from you when things aren’t going good. That’s the biggest regret that I have, and I think the biggest thing for me is that I sang for hours and hours and hours in an empty apartment and I think that in doing that, I was kind of able to nurture the art of singing. There’s a certain romantic thing about just singing for yourself and trying to entertain yourself and impress yourself. You’re your only listener, so you’re critiquing yourself sometimes to the upmost, I guess, unnecessary degree. I think too often, people get out there too early and they start performing when they’re not really ready and people start to critique them and they haven’t really even found themselves to even be critiqued yet. I think it’s good to really find out who your voice is and what you want to say before you go out there and let people start picking you apart.

MR: Of course, when you told new artists to make sure to have a college education, you forgot to tell them to go pledge Pi Kappa Alpha.

DN: [laughs] You know, I’ve never been a guy for peer pressure, so I say hey, if you want to go to a fraternity… I met some of my best friends of my entire lifetime in that fraternity. People always say, “Do you have to buy your friends?” and I says “Hey, if I had to pay a little bit of money to get two or three of my best life-long friends that I’ve kept in touch with since the moment I left, then by golly, it was worth it.” It was a great couple of years of my life. It taught me some bad habits, it taught me some good habits. It was great.

MR: By the way, I’ve always wanted to commend you for recording Adele’s “Someone Like You.” I thought that was a really bold move.

DN: I appreciate it. There have been some moments where I thought it was a stupid move, it was such a moment in time where it just happened so fast there was really not a whole lot of thought put into it. But you do this for a living, you become jaded and you lose track of the fan in you that loves music and spends so much time listening to other music because you’re so focused on your own career. That was a song that stopped me in my tracks and just blew me away. It kind of re-energized me to hopefully do what she does, which is take a lyric and just make you feel it. You can feel what she’s saying, you can feel what she went through when she wrote it and when she was singing it and every time it speaks to you. We kind of did it spur of the moment. I tell people all the time it was the easiest song in the world to sing from the standpoint of just finding that raw emotion, but technically it’s the most difficult song that I’ve ever sung and that’s what makes her, in my opinion, the greatest singer male or female that we have out there right now.

MR: I think you’re right about Adele, she just touches people in ways that I don’t think many artists can.

DN: Yeah, the thing about her is so many people think, “Oh, that song’s really high, that must be why it’s difficult.” I tell people all the time, the most difficult thing about singing is when you’re in your regular register and you have to convey that emotion without the ability of going high. Everybody assumes, “Oh, when they really dig and they’re singing really loud, that’s when they’re really trying to prove a point.” She has an uncanny ability to convey that emotion throughout that entire song from the lowest point to the highest point.

MR: Yeah. So how much fun was making your latest video with Chris Hicky?

DN: You know, he makes it really, really easy, which is something I tell people all the time. I’m a singer, not an actor. I’m not model. It’s a very unnatural thing to go out there, but he makes it very easy and a lot of fun. This particular one, I told him, “I want to work as little as possible, so I’ll sing the song with my band ten or twelve times and let you record that, and then after that, I want you to let these two beautiful people show us the rest.” That’s what the video was and it’s the most fun one I’ve ever made. I find it ironic that it was the easiest one.

MR: What do we need to know about this David Nail guy’s immediate future other than the tour and the new album?

DN: Just know that he’s more excited than he’s ever been to unveil his new music. This project was more fun than I’ve ever had in Nashville and I’ve been here now fourteen years and been fortunate enough to have always had a foot in the door and be in the process of making music or selling music or trying to sell myself. I hate to use the term “buzz” but there’s just this feeling around the project that, quite frankly, I’ve never really felt around anything I’ve ever done. I think it goes back to the feeling that people know that there’s something different about me personally, and I think that people kind of feed off that energy. To quote Tom Petty, “The waiting is the hardest part.” You’ve got to wait for people to hear it. You can’t play every song live and it’s killing me because I want to play every day. I want the band to learn new songs and I want to play new songs, and then I realize, “Hey, before you know it, you’re going to be playing that entire record three or four months before it ever comes out.”

MR: And who knew way back when you titled your album I’m About To Come Alive that you’d be doing it over and over again?

DN: Exactly! When we chose that, it had such a couple of different meanings and I thought it was so brilliant. “Oh, that’s great, this is my first record, I’m about to come alive, I’ll be alive after this.” You’re right. It’s been four years and I’m still trying to come alive.

MR: You’re more alive than ever, sir. I really wish you luck on the new single, the tour, and your new album next year.

DN: I appreciate so much you taking the time this morning. It’s been a pleasure to talk to you.

MR: You got it. All the best with everything, David.

DN: All right, thank you, you too.

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne