Singled Out: Grace Womack's Yellow Cowboy Hat

Keavin Wiggins | 08-13-2021

Grace Womack just released her "Yellow Cowboy Hat" EP this week and to celebrate we have asked her to tell us about the title track. Here is the story:

Putting together the title track of this EP was quite the roller coaster from beginning to end. My freshman year of college, my friends and I went out to a karaoke bar in downtown Nashville called Lonnie's, and for some unknown reason we all decided to wear these colored cowboy hats from Party City. It was my first real "college experience," and we took so many pictures in our hats, having fun and dancing around the bar. It still really sticks out in my memory as one of the first times I felt like I had it all figured out. (Spoiler, I didn't. See "Oblivion.")

The next morning, I remember coming up with this little hook on my drive home that would eventually become the beginning of this song's chorus. The next time I was with those friends. I sang it a capella, accompanying myself only by hitting the countertop we were sitting at in their Grandview Drive home. We all laughed about it and nothing really came of it for a while.

Once I really got into the writing process for the EP, I realized I really liked the song title "Yellow Cowboy Hat,'' and wanted to keep working on it. I have a habit of coming up with my best musical ideas on long car rides and now have about 30 voice memos that have titled themselves "I-65" or "US-290 W" (don't songwrite and drive, kids), so that's where the song as it is now really came to be. I was listening to Sammy Rae, as usual, and thought to myself how badly I wanted to write a fun, upbeat, funky saxophone song, so I did! It lived inside my little musical brain for a little bit before we started producing it, wanting to leave the complicated instrumentation for near the end of the EP recording process. Once we finally got to it, I was over the moon to finally hear it out loud, and it was even better than I could've imagined it. The funky bassline and the saxophone on this track really made it everything it was supposed to be and I still dance to it all alone in my car from time to time when I'm just needing a little funky pick me up.

Oh, and I'll let you in on a little secret. This mysterious hunk of a man who the song is about is a bit of an embellishment to the whole night out, which, in reality, I spent with my new college friends (none of them love interests) and not kissing some random man across the room. I'm sure I'm not the first 18-year-old freshman girl who dreamed about a tall, handsome man locking eyes with her from yards away (see every Disney channel original movie ever made), but that night, if I recall correctly, the crowd at Lonnie's was made up of Vanderbilt frat boys in beat up New Balances, not a sea of the men of my dreams.

Hearing is believing. Now that you know the story behind the song, listen and watch for yourself below and learn more about the EP here