That primal songwriting scene in the parking lot serves as a reminder that new songs come, at least in part, from old songs. Standard country music templates like the heartbreak tale or the evocation of small-town life stood ready to hand when someone said something that suggested the germ of a song. Think of a song as an ancient technology for imposing form and meaning on experience, a device for filtering the chaotic noise of inner life and the world around us so it can be translated into meaningful signal. Or think of a song as a container into which you can pour a distilled feeling that others can then imbibe by playing or singing or listening to it.
The signature feeling in McAnally’s songs — even “I Drank Alone,” a story of love found — is a yearning, restless quality he described to me as “that sense of unrequited ‘almost’: it’s almost right, you’re almost there, but you can’t quite. …” Musgraves told me, “Shane and I always love finding the melancholy aspect inside of the greater feelings of happiness and love.” Or, as his friend and frequent songwriting collaborator Brandy Clark puts it, “He’s just a little bit addicted to heartbreak.” The unrequited almost running through McAnally’s songs makes an ideal fit with the cathartic blend of sadness and joy that comes factory-installed in country music, a hurt-obsessed genre rich in dark songs about love and jaunty songs about sorrow.
McAnally cites a past toxic romance as a continuing inspiration, but when we talked about his own experience, he kept coming back to his father, “a certain ultimate concept of a Texas man.” He went on: “He and his two brothers, they played football, there were stories about how wild they were. He was a badass, and they were small-town kings.” McAnally’s parents, high school sweethearts, had a volatile relationship. “It lasted 12 years, and they got divorced and remarried in the middle of it — very George Jones,” a reference to the towering marital melodrama between Jones and Tammy Wynette, owners of two of the greatest heartache-drenched voices of all time. Classic country music themes like hard work, prison (he recalls that his father served a four-year term that ended the marriage for good) and abandonment also figure in McAnally’s family story; a gingerly respectful cordiality now prevails between son and father. “I wanted to be like him,” he told me. “That was the great out-of-reach thing I aspired to, and, being gay, thinking of it as being a sissy, that kept me in the closet for a long time.” In our conversations McAnally pointed to Dolly Parton’s “Here You Come Again” and the Eddy Arnold-Ray Charles ballad of hopeless longing “You Don’t Know Me” as touchstone songs for him. Both are nominally about romance, but the feelings they express extend well beyond. “Continuing to reach out for someone who’s just not quite available,” McAnally said. “That’s my dad.”
McAnally wasn’t out yet when he sang and wrote his way from Mineral Wells to Nashville in the 1990s and took his shot at an onstage singing career. When stardom eluded him, he moved to Los Angeles for a few years, where he heard more than his share of last calls and wrote a lot of songs, some of which were picked up by well-known singers. In 2007, he returned to Nashville as a battle-tested songwriter, and he also came out as a gay man in an industry that had always insisted on the closet. Now, at 48, he’s two years sober and raising 10-year-old twins with his husband, Michael McAnally Baum, who is the president of SMACKSongs.
If these days McAnally is no longer regarded as a lone exception, you might credit his prominent example — Nashville’s mayor presided at his nuptials with Baum in 2017 — for helping embolden other gay men and women associated with country to come out, a growing list that includes T.J. Osborne of the Brothers Osborne, Lily Rose, Orville Peck, Lil Nas X, Brandi Carlile and Brandy Clark. But McAnally says: “I don’t think we’ve actually come that far in terms of major commercial figures. Baby steps are huge, but they’re baby steps.” He notes that most of the names on the out list are identified with Americana, pop or behind-the-scenes songwriting.
“I’m stuck in the habit of ‘what Nashville thinks,’” he says, by which he means that he measures progress in terms of onstage stars in the industry’s commercial mainstream. “T.J. is such an important part of the long-term story, because he’s trying to show his queerness and his allyship to any sort of queer person, but he’s half of a duo, and they’re not in competition with the Jason Aldeans and Luke Bryans of the world because they’re left of center. And Lily Rose seems totally authentic, and she’s getting close to a big hit, but she hasn’t had one yet. I do see that people are fighting for it, though, and that matters.”
At times he has felt that he had something extra to prove. “When gay songwriters come up to me and they’re like, ‘You inspire me,’ I say, ‘You just have to be better and outwork them,’” McAnally says. “I was like, ‘I can out-bro you, I can out-country you,’ which comes from this fear of being stereotyped. Like, ‘Well, he’s gay, so he probably can’t write songs that Luke Bryan or George Strait would want to sing.’”