ASCAP celebrated the performing rights organization’s 105th birthday and gave attendees a preview of the upcoming I Create Music Expo on Wednesday night at Nashville’s Bluebird Café during a special In the Round featuring Jon Nite, Matt Jenkins, Cassadee Pope and six-time ASCAP Country Songwriter of the Year Ashley Gorley.
ASCAP senior creative director Mike Sistad welcomed the packed crowd and shared a little about the upcoming expo, slated for May 2-4 in Los Angeles. “Fourteen years ago, we launched our first ASCAP I Create Music Expo in Los Angeles,” he said. “We felt there was a need for a music conference dedicated to the art, craft and business of songwriting. Boy, were we right! From the get-go, the expo was a huge success. The first year, we had Tom Petty as our keynote, and we were off and running.”
Sistad informed the crowd it was ASCAP’s 105th birthday, which elicited cheers, and also let them know the evening’s songs and stories would give them a preview of the upcoming May event. “One of the signature sessions at the expo is our closing writers jam, writers in the round on a big stage in front of the entire conference. Each year, it is one of the most powerful and memorable experiences,” he said. “We are so thankful for the Bluebird to partner with us to bring you this inaugural ASCAP I Create Music Expo In the Round. We both love to celebrate and shine a light on great songwriters.”
And that’s exactly what the evening did. Nite kicked off the In the Round by performing the Keith Urban/Miranda Lambert hit “We Were Us” and sharing an anecdote about celebrating the chart-topper with co-writers Jimmy Robbins and Nicolle Galyon by getting tattoos with part of the lyric. Jenkins followed up by singing the Old Dominion hit “Song for Another Time,” which he co-wrote with the band.
“I’m in good company,” Pope beamed as she looked at Jenkins, Nite and Gorley before launching into her 2018 single “Take you Home.”
Veteran tunesmith Gorley has written 38 No. 1 hits. When it was time to deliver his first song of the round, he accompanied himself on keyboard with a soulful rendition of Jon Pardi’s hit “Dirt on My Boots” that Nite said made it sound like an entirely different song.
When it came back around to Nite, he said he was going to sing a song he wrote for “my little man.” Smiling at his wife in the audience, he relayed how she broke the news of her last pregnancy while they were in Seaside, Fla., for the 30A Songwriter’s Festival. Their son is now 5 and served as inspiration for the Lee Brice hit “Boy,” which Nite penned with Galyon, who was expecting a son at the time they wrote it.
As Nite finished the poignant song, Jenkins smiled and said, “I have four daughters, I can’t relate.” Jenkins then launched into his first successful cut, “Cop Car,” a song he wrote with Sam Hunt and Zach Crowell that was a hit for Urban and also recorded by Hunt on his Montevallo album.
For nearly two hours, the foursome regaled the audience with behind-the-scenes stories of how they penned some of country music’s biggest hits. After Gorley sang the Thomas Rhett hit “Marry Me,” Nite quipped, “He only has 37 more of those. He can go for four hours straight!”
Among the many highlights of the evening were Nite singing “Whatever She’s Got,” recorded by David Nail; Jenkins sharing the Dustin Lynch No. 1 “Where It’s At”; Gorley’s rendition of Luke Bryan’s hit “Play it Again”; and Pope performing her current single “If My Heart Had a Heart,” a song she says she wished she’d written that was penned by Hannah Ellis.
In the final round, Nite sang “Break Up in the End,” a Cole Swindell Grammy-nominated hit he co-wrote with Chase McGill and Jessie Jo Dillon. Jenkins served up the Florida Georgia Line hit “Confession.” Pope, who had been smiling all night and providing harmony on some of the other writers’ hits, finished the evening with “Wasted All These Tears,” her debut single following her season 3 win on The Voice.
Before getting the audience all misty-eyed with a closing performance of the Trace Adkins hit “You’re Gonna Miss This,” Gorley shared his feelings on the ASCAP I Create Music Expo. “I’ve got to speak a few times and it really is a legitimate thing. It would have been amazing to have had this back in the day,” he said of the education and encouragement it provides fledgling songwriters.
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This year, Nite will serve as a panelist at the I Create Music Expo for the first time. He says his reason for participating is twofold. “For me, going to LA, all the different genres converge, so it’s always exciting to me to hear what the other side, [songwriters in] pop music, R&B and rap, how they feel about songwriting and learning tricks that they use,” he told Billboard following the show.
Nite also sees it as an opportunity to pay back. “I was given so much by the people in my shoes 10 or 15 years ago,” he smiled. “I literally had a guy one day when I walked into a songwriting class and he made me feel like, for the first time, that I wasn’t crazy because I was so musically wired. I felt like I found my tribe and I knew what I needed to do just from one guy’s kind words, so I would love to somehow help the next generation.”