A pandemic may have brought much of the music industry to a halt, but it hasn’t stopped Shane McAnally from going to work. In Nashville studios this summer, the songwriter-producer and his collaborators have been wearing masks and keeping their distance in isolation booths. They have even started workshopping ideas over Zoom -- which McAnally admits has taken some getting used to. “One thing I do love about it is that it’s very efficient,” says the 45-year-old, who also juggles a publishing company (he’s founder/CEO of SMACKSongs), a record label (he’s co-president of Monument Records) and a mentor role on NBC’s Songland. “We’ll see how many of those songs have the same personality that things do when you’re in the room with someone.”
With three Grammy Awards and 32 No. 1 singles on Country Airplay alone for such acts as Kenny Chesney, Luke Bryan, Old Dominion and Thomas Rhett, it’s safe to say McAnally has high standards. Yet that volume of hits is only one element of a legacy that has earned him Billboard’s 2020 Trailblazer honor. As one of the few out songwriters working in country music, he is often approached by other LGBTQ people who say they didn’t know they could make it in Nashville until they saw McAnally thrive. (His response: “I didn’t know you could, either!”) He’s especially proud of championing voices like Kacey Musgraves and Sam Hunt, whose collaborations with McAnally -- including, respectively, “Follow Your Arrow” and “Body Like a Back Road” -- challenged conventional wisdom about what a country hit could be. Despite their recent successes, those artists were hardly safe bets early on in their careers. “When someone said ‘Kacey’s too country’ or ‘Sam is too pop,’ these were things that made me want to do it more,” says McAnally. “I know the magic of when someone doesn’t fit.”
For a long time, the Texas native didn’t think he fit in Nashville, either. He had a brief stint as an artist, releasing an album on Curb Records in 2000, but lost his label and publishing deals shortly after. He then moved to Los Angeles, where he spent about seven years wrestling with his identity and bitterly wondering if he would ever make it in the industry. Two things changed his attitude: He fully came out after meeting his now-husband, Michael McAnally Baum, with whom he has two kids, in 2007. (Baum is president of SMACKSongs.) He also gave up on waiting for his big break. “I finally had this epiphany of ‘I’m doing music because it’s the only thing that consumes me. I’m not doing it to make money,’ ” he says. “When that happened, that’s when I started making money.” In 2008, he landed his first big cut as a songwriter: Lee Ann Womack’s “Last Call.”