Brad Clawson

Brad Clawson writes country songs in Nashville. He wrote the one that made his career while parking cars at a hotel.

The SALTYmf GOAT Podcast caught Clawson at the Fernandina Beach songwriters festival, the second year the show has covered it, and recorded with him between rounds. He grew up in a small town in West Texas and moved to Tennessee because his father, also a songwriter, was living in Nashville at the time. Brad Banyas opened by admitting the show knows nothing about songwriting and mostly wanted to understand how a song gets from a room to the radio. Clawson's answer was that there is no one way, and that every writer he knows has a different story.

Clawson played drums in the school band because his town made everybody do two years of it, and picked up guitar as a college freshman because a drum kit would not fit in a dorm. He did not major in music. He sat through one music business class in a room of 200 people, worked out that about five thousand students were taking it, and switched to parks and recreation management with a plan to be a park ranger or a game warden. His roommate at Middle Tennessee State was Mitchell Tenpenny, who had to turn in a song every week for class, so the two of them wrote them together. Clawson then played guitar behind Tenpenny for six or seven years before he had his own legs under him as a writer.

He was valeting cars at the Omni in downtown Nashville when he wrote Up Down. He was also valeting when he parked a car belonging to Michael Martin, then running ASCAP, who told him to call sometime and drove off before Clawson could say he did not have the number. Two weeks later Martin found him somewhere else and opened with, you haven't called me yet. Clawson went to his office once a month for six months, playing everything he had, before Martin asked for a CD of his five best songs, made ten copies and handed them around. One call came back. Up Down sat on hold with Blake Shelton and then Jason Aldean, both of whom found it a little too rednecky, and took about two years from writing to release.

Clawson never wanted to be the front man. He likes hearing his own songs come out of somebody else's car speakers with nobody in the parking lot knowing he is standing there. Kenny Chesney cut one of his songs and had a single with it in 2020, and Clawson did not actually meet him until about a month before this interview, six years later. What he got at the time was a direct message: thanks for letting me have this song.