Nick Krewen
Special to the Star
She may be from Texas, but don’t be surprised if country singer and songwriter Mickey Guyton ends up hanging a flag bearing the Maple Leaf outside her house: Canadians have been a paramount factor in her ground-breaking success.
“I looooovvvve Canadians – yes I do!” gushes Guyton, whose racially insightful anthem “Black Like Me” earned her pioneering stature as the first Black female to receive a Grammy nomination for Best Country Solo Performance.
“I have an affinity for Canadians, man. I really, really do. We just get each other.”
It’s easy to understand why Guyton is so enthusiastic for everything Canuck: there’s “Boys,” her current hit duet with Dean Brody on Canadian country radio – but more significantly, there’s Bridges, her breakout EP where all six songs are written either wholly or in part by Canadians.
There’s Grammy-and-Juno-winning-and-nominated tunesmiths like Gordie Sampson (Carrie Underwood’s “Jesus, Take The Wheel”) on “Heaven Down Here”; Steven Lee Olsen (Keith Urban’s “Blue Ain’t Your Color (sic)”) on “Salt” and Fraser Churchill on “Black Like Me.”
More noteworthy in a genre where “bro” country has been way too prominent for way too long: the core writers joining Guyton are women – GTA ex-pats Victoria Banks, Karen Kosowski and Emma Lee, who co-wrote the title track and the other impactful ballad that has been drawing a lot of attention lately, “What Are You Gonna Tell Her?”
The heartfelt plea regarding a daughter’s transition from innocence to reality was performed last fall by a pregnant Guyton on the ACM Awards – another first for a solo Black female artist.
There is one other remarkable aspect of Bridges – a good portion of it was produced by Kosowski, one of the few female producers that are making an impact in the stuffy, male-dominated atmosphere known as Music City.
“I love her,” says Guyton, 37, speaking from her Los Angeles home.
“Not only is she super, super talented, but she’s a woman – and I think it’s so important for a woman to get these opportunities.”
Guyton knows a thing or two about opportunity. In 2015, after scoring a Top 40 hit with “Better Than You Left Me,” she felt her career was on a backburner, giving her ample time to assess the situation and launch a creative makeover.
“I was just so off everybody’s radar at the time that it gave me the space to figure my sound out,” she explains. “I felt there was a lot of Mickey fatigue happening, so I wasn’t setting out to do anything crazy or spectacular with this music. It was fatigue of my own, of seeing how messed up this industry is
“And not only is this industry messed up for people of colour on the artistry side – and behind-the-scenes side – it’s messed up for women as well – white women specifically, since it’s the majority of white women in this industry. I’ve seen some of the most powerful women in Nashville be completely disregarded. I’ve seen it and it’s upsetting for me.
“At a certain point, it was, ‘what the hell is going on and how are people continuing to allow this?’ That’s where I kind of started.
“So I shifted my whole way of thinking and thought, ‘Look, if I never make it in this industry, ever, I’ll be damned if I’m going to sit here and watch this happen to people.’ I was tired of fighting for myself and so I started fighting for everybody else.
“Then in turn, I got a career out of it. It’s the weirdest thing,” she laughs.
One of the first decisions she made was to write and sing about her truth – and that’s where the Canadian trio of Banks, Kosowski and Emma-Lee came in.
“When I was approaching music differently, I set out that I really wanted to work with women, because who understands a woman’s perspective better than a woman?” says Guyton.
Victoria Banks remembers Guyton’s early days.
“Mickey and I have been working together right from the very beginning of her time in Nashville, in 2008,” says Banks, a Muskoka zoologist who found her professional heart more suited to music and songwriting.
“My publisher put me into a co-write with her and I was just blown away, right away, by her voice. Anytime you get to write with anybody who has an instrument like that, it’s like borrowing somebody’s vocal cords for a little while – it’s so inspiring.”
Banks, a 2010 Canadian Country Female Artist of the Year who penned the 2001 Top 20 Sara Evans hit “Saints & Angels,” and co-wrote the Johnny Reid hit “Dance With Me,” says she was working with Guyton regularly when the artist experienced some career frustrations.
“Her label had so much paralysis by analysis about what to do with her – they weren’t really releasing her material,” Banks remembers. “She was writing so many songs, trying to give them what they wanted, trying to strategize all these different ways of what song would break through for her on radio.
“Eventually, it got to the point where people just wouldn’t write with her. The songwriters in town were just getting frustrated working with her and not having anything to show for it.”
Banks was one of the few who stuck with Guyton.
“I believed in her. As time moved on, the frustrations that she was experienced really started to grow her songwriting. She’d come into our sessions with something really powerful to say.
“A lot of country artists, as a songwriter, are very self-limiting by what they believe radio will play,” Banks continues. “Mickey threw her hands up at that and said, ‘I don’t care – I’m just going to say what I need to say – and whatever happens, happens.’”
Banks introduced Karen Kosowski, who started out as a singer-songwriter in Winnipeg before moving to Toronto and honing her craft as a recording engineer and producer.
Guyton and Kosowski, who has worked with Brett Kissel, Tim Hicks and others, bonded immediately.
“Karen had just done a demo for one of the songs we had written and after I heard the first song, I said, ‘Wait a minute? I sound like that when I’m singing?’” Guyton recalls.
“She just got my vocal.
“We started writing so much and when it was time to start cutting some of these records, Karen was just the one (as producer). I just started fighting for her to be part of this.”
Emma-Lee is Kosowski’s best friend. They had worked together for over a decade and around 2016 both decided to relocate to Nashville.
“I was having luck with people who were cutting my songs who were in the country world,” explains Emma-Lee, who has released three albums and is also a renowned music photographer. “It was an unplanned thing for me being that I came from a way more pop background. But I like real songs and Nashville still wants to write those kinds of songs.
“I had come down to Nashville in 2016 for three months and I’d invited Karen to come down and hang for three weeks, and I think that time is when it sort of started solidifying for both of us in our minds that this made sense – in terms of the next logical step in what we were doing.”
For Kosowski, Nashville “felt like the right fit.”
“I think I just lucked out,” she explains. “ A few years ago, I got a call from Victoria Banks’ publisher at Rare Spark. He said he wanted to set me up on a writing date with Victoria and Mickey. I think it was my first year here and I was still back and forth to Toronto a lot. I remember I changed my flight so I could come back and do it because I was a big fan of Mickey.”
The first time Guyton, Banks, Kosowski and Emma-Lee sat in a room together, magic occurred.
“The first song all four of us wrote together was ‘What Are You Going To Tell Her?’,” Banks recalls. “When you find a combination like that that’s magical, you just kind of go with it and see where it takes you.”
The Guyton association has paid dividends for both Kosowski and Emma-Lee, as both recently signed Sony ATV Music publishing deals.
“If you have to write with people and you prove you’re a hard worker and you have something to offer, people give you a chance,” says Kosowski. “ I feel like I’ve just kind of got my head down here and Mickey and I are working on a bunch more stuff. I’m doing a lot of writing and the publishing deal has introduced me to more artists, more writers and taken some of the business stuff off my plate so I can focus more on the creative.”
Emma-Lee is also grateful to be included in the writing clique.
“It’s such an honour to be part of a project that feels so meaningful and it’s really easy to write songs with an artist when you feel inspired by the story that they want to tell,” she notes. “I just signed my first publishing deal about two months ago and I know ‘What Are You Going To Tell Her?’ played a big part in me getting that deal. It’s been a bit of a calling card.”
Mickey Guyton is happy for their success, but even happier that they’re all moving forward together.
“Karen Kosowski, Emma-Lee, Victoria Banks – they are the hardcore writing team for me and I’m so proud. I love that they’re women and that they’re Canadians,” Guyton says.
The trio aren’t the only Canadian women crushing it on Music Row: For the past three weeks, “Champagne Night,” recorded by Lady A, has been the No. 1 song on Billboard’s Top Country Radio Airplay chart, co-written by Canadians Madeline Merlo – who recently signed U.S. record deal – and veteran Patricia Conroy (Niagara Falls, ON native Dave Thomson also chimed in).
Of course, Grand Prairie’s, AB Tenille Townes grabbed a couple of CMA Awards recently; Toronto’s Jessica Mitchell landed a cut on a Trisha Yearwood album in 1999 and Uxbridge, ON’s Robyn Ottolini just signed a record deal with Warner Nashville and Randy Bachman discovery Lindsay Ell from Calgary won praise for her recently released Heart Theory album.
“There’s a strong Canadian contingent down here,” says Victoria Banks. “We all tend to find each other and work together. “ It’s kind of cool – plus, we celebrate our holidays very loudly,” she laughs.
As for Mickey Guyton, she’s hoping that the success of “Black Like Me” and “What Are You Going To Tell Her?” is a wake-up call for the U.S. country music industry and will result in welcoming more women of colour into the fold as artists, creators and executives.
“Hopefully, this will trigger a movement,” says Guyton. “Some Black girls that have never sung country music are reaching out to me on a daily basis.
“All Black women really want is just a little bit of acknowledgment. We don’t even want a lot of it – just acknowledge that we’re here and see us. And I feel like so many of them feel a little bit seen now. And that’s really cool.”
“Hopefully this will put country music on notice that they’ll need to rise up and be better for women, period.”