Russell Dickerson on Digging Deeper Into the ‘Bones’ of His Love Song History: ‘I’m Betting Everything on This Song’

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When Randy Travis emerged as a game-changing country icon nearly 40 years ago, he won over the audience by mixing songs of infinite love — including “Forever and Ever, Amen,” “Deeper Than the Holler” and “I Won’t Need You Anymore (Always and Forever)” — with songs that address mortality, such as “Three Wooden Crosses,” “He Walked on Water” and “Before You Kill Us All.” And he blended both love and finality with the pledge of “’til death do us part” in “Forever Together.” 

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Russell Dickerson has adhered primarily to the first half of that equation during his career, embracing long and lasting love in his singles “Yours,” “Every Little Thing” and “Home Sweet.” But with his latest release, “Bones,” he manages to combine both grown-up Travis themes: commitment and the end of life.

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“Bones,” he says, is “like ‘Yours’ with a mortgage payment.”

Dickerson suggested “Bones” during his last writing session of 2023, held around Thanksgiving at a wood-paneled studio on his Tennessee property. Co-writers Parker Welling (“Blue Tacoma,” “What’s Your Country Song”), Chase McGill (“Chevrolet,” “Next Thing You Know”) and Chris LaCorte (“23,” “Wind Up Missin’ You”) were down the road with it before anyone mentioned that Maren Morris already had a significant recent hit titled “The Bones.” No one was particularly concerned.

“I felt like we were pretty good,” McGill reflects. “They’re just completely different songs.”

Dickerson started strumming through a guitar progression, and LaCorte came up with a gritty riff that created a rough-cut musical tone for the work. On the lyrical side, they wanted to find different ways to incorporate the title throughout the song, so they developed a list of phrases that contained the word “bones,” including “shaking right down to my bones” and “flesh and bones.”

And as Dickerson kept singing a chorus setup line, “I’ll love ya ’til I’m six feet down in the ground,” they played with numerous payoff lines until McGill finally found the winner: “And the gold on my finger’s wrapped around/ Nothin’ but bones.”

“That was just kind of the — no pun intended — nail in the coffin,” Dickerson deadpans. “It’s like, ‘Holy cow, this is a song here.’”

The melody for that chorus started at an anthemic level and maintained power through the bulk of the stanza until it reached its conclusion with calm serenity. As a result, that chorus sonically mirrors the story of the relationship it covers: intense at the start and steady over time until death brings it to a close. “We didn’t intentionally do that, but I think there’s a feeling about that song that we kind of just followed,” Welling suggests. “I think that’s why it all matches up.”

Welling has been friends with Dickerson and his wife, Kailey, since all of them attended Belmont University, and she spun specific descriptors about Kailey and the couple’s relationship for the opening moments. That verse ended with the singer “shaking right down to my bones” as he proposes. The second verse finds him putting the woman on a figurative pedestal, comparing her to an angel while grading himself as “just flesh and bones.”

“It’s like, ‘Thank you for choosing me,’” Dickerson says.

They inserted new lyrics in the final chorus to drive the point of “Bones” home, folding part of a wedding vow into a line LaCorte suggested about carving a pledge into his tombstone, a word the group changed to “headstone.” The image emerged earlier in the writing process, but they saved the drama of that visual for the song’s closing moments.

“We thought the headstone line in ‘Bones’ would have been a lot to have at the halfway point of [an earlier] chorus and then land on the ‘gold on my finger wrapped around nothing but bones,’ ” Welling says. “That’s just a lot of, like, casket.”

It was stark, but no more so than the deathly stories in Travis’ songs, George Jones’ “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” Vern Gosdin’s “Chiseled in Stone” or The Carter Family’s “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” “What I love about country is you can go there,” McGill says. “You can say that.”

LaCorte produced most of the demo that day, creating the intro by layering two different acoustic guitars, one playing a pulsing figure and the other building melodic tension with the foundational minor-key riff. It was a little raw, as LaCorte recorded the part in an uncomfortable position. “It was recorded so haphazardly,” he says. “I had an SM7 microphone, but it was just lying on a table, and I was trying to scoot up next to it to play this thing.”

Dickerson rerecorded the demo vocals within a few weeks to ensure he had a version that showcased well for his team, and he recorded the final version in the spring. Producer Josh Kerr (Maddie & Tae, For King & Country) asked LaCorte to co-produce with him and Dickerson, and insisted that they use LaCorte’s imperfect acoustic guitar parts from the demo. The session came together so quickly that the night before, they were uncertain where that would happen. Ultimately, they booked Peter Frampton’s Studio Phenix for a 6 p.m. date with drummer Evan Hutchings, bassist Tony Lucido, keyboardist Alex Wright and guitarist Nathan Keeterle. After one pass that featured some syncopation, Dickerson asked the band to play the rhythms straight, like an elephant stomping through the jungle. It needed to sound simple and determined, even if it was compiled from different sources.

“A lot of the track is Chris and the bones of the demo — pun intended — and then some other layers,” Kerr says. “I added some drum programming in the second verse and some new synth layers, so it’s a true hodgepodge of things going on in this song.”

Several elements provided a ghostly effect, including a windy sound in the opening section. “That’s my old Moog Model D synthesizer, and it has this one mode on it that’s just called ‘Noise,’ ” LaCorte says. “Sometimes it just adds kind of a cool texture in the background, [but] it’s more felt than heard.”

LaCorte’s Dobro solo from the demo stayed in the master, though Kerr had him double it with electric guitar to create a quasi-slide tonality. Dickerson purposely sang parts of “Bones” a little off-kilter. The phrasing in the opening verse is intentionally awkward, and in the final chorus, he sings two lead vocals for a brief period that lend their own haunting quality, as the voices engage in a short-term battle.

“It’s gritty, it’s crisp, there’s a lot of depth and dynamic to it,” Kerr says of Dickerson’s performance. “That’s something that we really made a point of doing in this song.” Kailey was so enamored with “Bones” that she stayed out late one night just driving and listening to the cut. “If she digs it,” Dickerson says, “then that’s a good sign.”

But not everyone at Triple Tigers thought it should be a single. Several alternative titles were thrown around, though Dickerson held out for “Bones.” The label released it to country radio via PlayMPE on July 15.

“It’s a little jarring at first,” he concedes, “but once you really settle into the song, that kind of fades away. I had to fight for this song to be the single, but I’m betting everything on this song.”