David Nail is an interviewerâs dream. Ask him a question, stand back and listen to him go. It doesnât matter if heâs on the red carpet at the ACM Awards, rounding the bases at the CMA Music Fest Celebrity Softball Game or sitting in an interview room on NCDâs campus, David holds nothing back. To put it in boxing parlance, he pulls no punches.
The first thing he wants people to know is that heâs a happy dude nowadays. After battling depression for more than a decade, the 37-year old country crooner finally sought help in the form of therapy a few years ago. In addition, his wife, Catherine, gave birth to twins in December 2015, a seminal moment for the first-time parents after they battled infertility and went through the demanding process of in vitro fertilization.
âI was pretty much chronically depressed for about a decade,â says David. âNow I go to counseling and take quite a bit of medicine, but itâs night and day, man. I had a bunch of stuff pent up for a lot of years and didnât really know exactly why or what it was, but just being able to talk to somebody consistently who has a background in helping peopleâitâs remarkable.â
The catalyst for seeking help came from Catherine, who David married in 2009.
âI hit a little rough stretch four or five years ago, and [Catherine] dug her feet into the sand and said, âWeâre going to figure this out one way or another and Iâm going to be here for you through thick and thin, and it was just kinda like the song âFighterââI thought I knew everything about you, but I never knew I had a fighter.â
âFighterâ is the title track of Davidâs new album, which drops today (July 15). The 11-song recordâof which David wrote or co-wrote seven tracksâis his most vulnerable offering to date: âI Wonât Let You Goâ highlights his struggle with depression; âHomeâ explores the love/hate relationship on his hometown; âOld Manâs Symphonyâ is about his influential father; âBabiesâ is aboutâyou guessed itâhis twins.
But the spark for the album pretty much started with âFighter.â
âRight after Christmas [2014], we went in and wrote two songs, one called âFighterâ [Troy Verges and Scooter Carusoe] and one called âHomeâ [Barry Dean and Lori McKenna], that fired me up pretty good and recharged my batteries overnight,â says David. âAnd so I went to my producerâs office, Frank Liddell, and said, âHey, I know we are nowhere close to making an album, but can we go in and record three or four things just for fun?â He said, âAbsolutely,â and scheduled the dates. We found a few more songs, including âNightâs on Fire,â the first single, and âGood Tonightâ that Brothers Osborne wrote. So we had four or five really strong songs, and once the label found out what we were doing, they were in the mindset where they thought it was kinda pointless to go into the studio unless we were going to record an album. They asked me if I had enough material to make an album, and I said, âSure,â but I was talking out of my rear. However, by the end of the recording session, I could have made two or three records. I had 20 or 30 songs on hold that were all really strong, with four or five that I wrote that didnât make the record. So it was definitely spur of the moment, but once it started, it snowballed out of control to the point where we were recording and mixing and overdubbing and doing vocals. February, March and April [2015] are just a blur.â
Fighter Track Listing
- âGood at Tonightâ feat. Brothers Osborne
(TJ Osborne, John Osborne, Troy Verges, Barry Dean) - âNightâs on Fireâ
(Jonathan Singleton, Deric Ruttan) - âEase Your Painâ
(Chris Stapleton, Lee Thomas Miller, Jesse Frasure) - âHomeâ feat. Lori McKenna
(David Nail, Barry Dean, Lori McKenna) - âLie With Meâ
(Abe Stoklasa, Marc Beeson) - âI Wonât Let You Goâ feat. Vince Gill
(David Nail) - âFighterâ
(David Nail, Scooter Carusoe, Troy Verges) - âBabiesâ
(David Nail, Scooter Carusoe, Lee Thomas Miller) - âGot Me Goneâ
(David Nail, Dave Barnes, Jonathan Singleton) - âChampagne Promiseâ feat. Logan Brill
(David Nail, Lee Thomas Miller) - âOld Manâs Symphonyâ feat. Bear and Bo Rinehart
(David Nail)
After the dust settled, David had himself a finished record about a year ago this time . . . and then December rolled around and his twins were born. Fatherhood gave him a new perspectiveâboth personally and professionally. David decided to switch some things up on the already âfinishedâ album. He recorded four new songsââBabies,â âOld Manâs Symphony,â âEase Your Painâ and âLie With Meââwhich changed the projectâs tone from his âlove-making record,â as he called it at the time, to the âpersonalâ project of today.
The finished album is brimming with Davidâs emotionally charged vocals and crisp songwriting, while also featuring a stellar supporting cast, including Brothers Osborne on âGood at Tonight,â Vince Gill on âI Wonât Let You Go,â Lori McKenna on âHome,â Logan Brill on âChampagne Promiseâ and Bear and Bo Rinehart on âOld Manâs Symphony,â as well as the Chris Stapleton co-written song âEase Your Pain.â
âI feel like Iâve told the main aspects of my career, and my life, up to this point,â David says. âSo I really think whatever we do in the future, weâll be able to start just completely fresh. Itâll be a new story, a new part of my life.â
In other words, heâs won this fight. Itâs time to start training for the next one.
photos courtesy UMG