On the Threshold

Singer-songwriter JOSH KELLEY steps up his game with a new love, a new album on his own label and new skills.

When singer-songwriter Josh Kelley called me, he quickly apologized for his tardiness. He had been working on a song, and time had completely escaped him. Apparently, this kind of time lapse happens quite often when he sits in front of the old Wurlitzer Spinet piano in his Nashville home and studio.

"Every time I put my hands on it, something happens," said Kelley, adding that the song he was working on was inspired by his fiancée, Katherine Heigl, of Grey's Anatomy. Their relationship blossomed after the two met on the video shoot for his song, "Only You." Heigl quickly became his muse. "After I finished my second record, I told myself that I wasn't going to write another song," he said. "I met a new girl, and then all of a sudden, all the inspiration that I thought I had lost was completely reenergized." The result is his latest album, Just Say the Word, released on Kelley's own Threshold Records.

Before departing on his tour with Gin Blossoms and Shawn Mullins, Kelley took some time to chat with us about writing songs with his brother, being found by James Brown and how the game of golf helped him start his own record label.

What is your songwriting process like?
Usually, I'm just playing the guitar until I find a grouping of chords that make me feel whatever I'm feeling, whether I'm feeling sad or happy or motivated. I always end up finding chords that parallel the feeling I have. Once I do that I actually just start singing jargon - just random words that start to form an idea. Like for "Amazing," the first words out of my mouth were "Baby, you're amazing."

Sometimes since I travel all the time now, I'll actually write lyrics on the plane. And when I go home, I will just start playing chords and see if I can get the lyrics to fall in place. But there's no right or wrong method to writing a song. I think most of the great writers wrote for themselves. My mom always said just to write songs that people could relate to.

Do you remember the first song you ever wrote?
Yeah I do. It's really funny, too. I was like 14 or 15. These songs that I wrote with my little brother got us a record deal offer with Atlantic. James Brown found us when we were kids - he's from Augusta, too. He found us and offered us a record deal with Atlantic, but my dad wouldn't sign the papers.

But the first song I ever wrote was called "10 Years In the Bottle." [Laughs] It was so stupid that it was called that as if I had been an alcoholic since I was 4. That's not really what it meant though. The lyrics are actually really cool. I was just telling a friend about this the other day. It's about how there are certain times in your life when it's so healthy that you don't know too much. When I first started playing songs, they were coming out from every angle. When you first start to write, you let the words kind of tell you how you feel. Once you just get better at it, it's easy to fall into the trap of a template that you've already created subconsciously. You start to use it all the time, whereas when I was a kid, I had no outline. I just wrote songs that gave me a little physical reaction. I've just now started to figure out how to balance that, and kind of get back to it - balance knowing that you do need structure in songwriting. For a really great song, it does need some structure. It needs to be cohesive with the pattern you want to create. But also, I want to get back to how songwriting was really innocent.

I went through a period when the label wanted me to write a hit song. I kind of was so freaked out about writing another hit song that I forgot to write songs that just make me happy. I got really lucky because it forced me to write with other writers, which made me a much better writer. I swear I probably wrote with 100 different writers. Now they're all my good friends and I learned a lot from them. It actually really upped my writing skills.

You also worked with your brother Charles Kelley on Just Say the Word. What was it like working with him?
It's great. Charles is in that fresh-perspective point in his career that I was in during the beginning of mine. I can feed off of that energy, but then also provide him with my structure and my knowledge of more years in the business and more years in writing. We wrote a song called "Just Say the Word," which is the title track of the new album. I think it's the best song I've ever written.

You're now signing your brother's band, Lady Antebellum, to your own label, Threshold Records. When did you decide to start your own label, and how did you get out of your contract with Hollywood?
When I created the second album called Almost Honest, what the label thought I was supposed to represent is not what I thought I was supposed to represent. We just kind of collided, and the record just didn't see the justice it deserved. I couldn't sit around and let it happen again, so I had to figure out a way to get out of the deal.

Honestly, I love Hollywood Records. Those people are all my best friends, but we both understood that this partnership wasn't working right because we didn't share the same vision. But the game of golf got me out of the deal because I played golf with a lot of people at that label. When you play golf, you'll never have somebody's attention more one-on-one than you do in golf for four hours. It was more than business. It was like I was their son. The gentlemanly-like approach to the game of golf is the reason why I was let off the label without too many strings being attached to the rest of my career. They really want to see me succeed.

Do you find that running a label and being a songwriter/artist at the same time is difficult?
It makes it better. Now I understand the inner workings of the business. It helps me so much. First of all, it gives me a lot of creative, killer stuff to write about but it gives me creative control over the direction of my product and my art. Starting this label made me totally understand the mistakes I've made in the past and how to fix them.

Your music has been placed in a lot of films. You had a duet with Melissa Etheridge on the Brother Bear 2 soundtrack and contributed music to other soundtracks like John Tucker Must Die and My Super Ex-Girlfriend. It seems like a lot of songwriters are banking on these opportunities these days.
Yeah, I'm actually working on scoring a feature film right now. I can't tell you what the feature is called because they won't let me, but I'm doing an original score for a feature movie that will be coming out within the next year and a half. It's gonna be kind of like the Magnolia soundtrack. I think I'm gonna be doing some stuff with Grey's Anatomy too. TV is the new radio to me. It's how you can get your name out there.

— Jin Moon


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