Rob Ragosta

Rob Ragosta is a Nashville songwriter whose first cut was with Jelly Roll.

Brad Banyas heard him play the night before at the songwriters festival in Fernandina Beach and pulled him in for Salty's Live Music the next day. Ragosta had shared that stage with writers who can throw a dart and hit a Tim McGraw single, and his read on his own place there was that he got lucky and it was nice to be invited. Brad's read was different, and he said so on tape. He called it: this guy is going to be an icon.

Ragosta was the youngest of five loud Italian kids on Long Island, playing competitive sports where everything was camaraderie, and the guitar was how he got time alone. He got his first one at eight and was writing songs by about twelve. He taught his older brother to play. His brother started a band, he started a band, and both of them worked Long Island and then up and down the East Coast in the punk and hardcore world of the Warped Tour. What pulled him toward country was the craft. He went back to the bands he grew up on and decided the songs did not hold up, and that nothing beats a well-written country song. He is signed at Reservoir, writes inside a tight group of eight or ten people, and says that once you see a magic trick up close and find out how it is done, you cannot stop doing it.

At 25 and 26 he was working construction, breaking his body, with nothing left for music by the time he got home. A friend from the pop punk years, Jordan Schmidt, who had moved to Nashville and become a writer and producer with cuts by Kane Brown and Blake Shelton, told him there was a better way. Ragosta went. The town took him in immediately, and he did not understand who he was sitting in rooms with, so he burned the first two or three years. He worked at a bar in Nashville called The Fox for about a year and a half while he wrote. Radio money takes roughly a year to reach the writer. Doing his taxes last year he looked at the balance in his account from just before the publishing deal. Two hundred and eighty three dollars, and he had made it the week before at the bar.

He almost did not move there at all, over what he believes and what the caricature of country music does with it. What changed his mind was Kacey Musgraves and Maren Morris, and deciding that whatever their songs were on the radio, what they stood for was punk. He is still in a band with his brother, who is signed to a Nashville publisher and lives on Long Island with his wife and kids, near the fifty relatives who crammed into their aunt's house at Easter. Ragosta is the one who went farthest away.