Exclusive: Cole Swindell On Success, Creative Depth, And Sophomore Album

Cole Swindell’s self-titled debut album earned the singer-songwriter considerable early career success, including four No. 1 singles, “Let Me See Ya Girl,” “Hope You Get Lonely Tonight,” “Ain’t Worth The Whiskey” and “Chillin’ It.” The debut project was certified platinum by the RIAA and Swindell’s music has amassed more than 250 million streams, with 4.2 million tracks sold. He took home the Academy of Country Music’s New Artist of the Year trophy in 2015.

This year, Swindell is eager to build on those early stats with his forthcoming sophomore project, You Should Be Here, which releases May 6 on Warner Bros./Warner Music Nashville. The album’s title track and debut single—an intensely personal song that focuses the loss of Swindell’s father in 2013–has already become Swindell’s fifth consecutive No. 1 song.

“It was a title that [songwriter] Ashley Gorley had,” Swindell recalls about writing “You Should Be Here.” “We were up in Foxboro [Massachusetts], playing at Gillette Stadium [as part of Luke Bryan’s That’s My Kind of Night Tour]. Ashley had texted a picture to his daughter of us at the stadium and said, ‘You should be here.’

“I immediately said, ‘Please let me write that with you.’ Because all I could think about was my dad and I hadn’t written about it yet. We wanted it to be where it wasn’t just about me. A lot of other people have obviously been through that. And through things way worse than what I’ve been through. I had chills on my arms the entire time we were writing that. That doesn’t happen at every writing appointment and I don’t think it can be like that, because it was something so personal to me. It didn’t take that long to write, but it was emotional. I knew if it was hitting me like that, that it would hit other people that have been through the same thing. It’s my favorite song I’ve ever written.”

“You Should Be Here” became a quality benchmark as Swindell co-wrote and searched for songs to round out the album. Seven Swindell co-writes made the final project.

“It seems like it takes a while for an artist to release a song that makes a statement like that, maybe not even on a second album. But for me, writing as much as I do, and having so much success off the last album, I had to go somewhere that I hadn’t been. Nothing made more sense to me than [writing about] the most tragic thing I’ve ever been through.”

MusicRow‘s Troy Stephenson presents Cole Swindell with two MusicRow Challenge Coins for co-writing FGL’s “This Is How We Roll” and Luke Bryan’s “Roller Coaster.”

Swindell namechecks tracks like “Broke Down” and “Remember Boys” from the upcoming project that live up to the standard.

“It’s got just an older, classical, gut string guitar and it doesn’t sound like anything I’ve done before,” he says of “Remember Boys.” “Sometimes the production can get in the way of a message that is powerful. With ‘Remember Boys’ I want people to hear every word of that song, and it’s just a stripped-down thing. Just the message of it, it’s where I am personally and in my career.”

One of the highlights on the album, a collaboration with Dierks Bentley titled “Flatliner,” is already receiving plenty of buzz.

“It’s so crazy,” says Swindell. “I wrote that with him in mind four years ago. I wrote it with Jaron Boyer and Matt Bronleewe. It sounded like something Dierks would record. So we recorded it like Dierks would. I sang the demo like Dierks…”

Bentley eventually heard the song, but it took a while for the two to record the track. “He texted me and said, ‘This is a smash,’ and I suggested we should record it together. We would joke about it when we would see each other, but you never know if it will happen. But he was serious about it and we made it happen. He’s a great guy. Just knowing how much his music influenced me, especially his first album, and every album. I’ve got every one of them. For me, Dierks is one of my favorites.”

“I was thankful I wrote ‘You Should Be Here,’ but I had to have 11 other great songs, and there are some subjects I didn’t touch on with the first album,” Swindell sums. “I think they are all great songs. I want to be a guy people will remember for a long time. If you listen to this album, you have a better idea of who I am.”