By Hannah Means Shannon
Cover photo by Bob Seaman
Texas-born Gary Nicholson is a lifelong professional songwriter, guitarist, and performer of his own work. Recently released album, Common Sense, arrived in late 2024. Nicholson’s stunning achievements as a multiple Grammy-winning songwriter include working with Willie Nelson, BB King, Ringo Starr, Fleetwood Mac, John Prine, and many more. He also performs his own Blues songwriting under the moniker of Whitey Johnson.
When it comes to his personal recordings, Nicholson has lately been moved to bring some humor and frankness to the difficulties facing America with a political divide that often drives wedges through the middle of families and towns. Each of the songs on Common Sense brings a particular truth to light, and with a compelling eye for the details of modern life, Nicholson never fails to bring his emotive messages home.
I spoke with Nicholson during his sojourn in Santa Fe, New Mexico, about his experiences taking the songs from Common Sense to live performance, how inspiration tends to strike him, and what some musical greats have in common which enables them to continue to be successful songwriters and performers throughout their careers.
Hannah Means-Shannon: I think it’s interesting that you’ve worked so much as a songwriter, but you still release your own music, and play live selectively.
Gary Nicholson: I’ve toured extensively. I’ve played guitar for Delbert McClinton. I’ve been on the road. It’s just a different way of life. I haven’t really been on the road for extended periods of time doing solo performances like so many of my friends. You talk to them, and they say, “I drive for a living.” [Laughs]
HMS: That’s so true!
GN: The gigs are an hour and a half, then the next day is spent driving. That’s just how it goes, and it’s their world. It’s like the saying, “Be careful what you wish for.” Actually, I have a song, “Be Careful What You Dream.” I see friends of mine playing shows at really great venues, and I want to be there playing those shows, but then I realize that I don’t have to go through all that misery. It’s a commitment!
HMS: Do you think that the traveling and touring that you’ve done in the past has influenced your perspective as a songwriter? Does it add to what you can write about?
GN: I think all of our experiences contribute to songwriting. Working with Delbert, I was producing his records, and we were writing songs for him, and I was traveling for him. It was kind of his thing. I was leaning into that. Whereas when I’m touring solo, by myself, or even with my band, it’s a different thing. Everything changes when you’re the front-guy, you know?
HMS: With the shows you’ve been doing since last autumn, is it exciting for you to be able to play your own new songs rather than the songs you’ve played so often in the past?
GN: Yes, it’s really great. I had a great response to all the songs on the Common Sense at The Blue Door venue in Oklahoma City. I’ve known the guy who runs it for a long time. There’s a sign outside the front that says, “Pro American, Anti-Trump.” It was called “The Blue Door” long before people started talking in terms of blue and red. I learned there’s a little pocket, a little community of people there. I played a variety of songs, and went through my history of songs recorded for various artists, but when I launched into my songs from Common Sense, I could hear it.
It was, “Hey, yeah!,” and the atmosphere changed. I realized that they were supportive of the social commentary kind of songs. It is rewarding to get a response to these songs and to feel like I’m giving an audience some music to go along with the crazy news, and to be reflective of what’s happening in our culture, since we don’t have any control over it.
There’s a song on the record, “Bob Dylan Whiskey,” and that’s what it’s kind of about. We don’t have Bob Dylan doing that anymore, so I’m just somebody who would like to write a song that I wish he would write instead of me. But the record previous to Common Sense was called The Great Divide, and that was the same kind of thing, during the first Trump era.
My creative life as an artist, as opposed to being a songwriter, has been kind of overtaken by politics. When I’m writing songs for myself as artist, since I’ve been happily married for 51 years and have four grown children, it’s not about writing love songs or that mode when I’m working in my own realm.
HMS: I’m interested in the relationship between the emotions and the intellectual side of songwriting. Your songs are clearly expressed, so I can see a lot of thinking and reflection, but there’s also a strong emotional component there which I think is driving you to write them. Could you tell me about how you decide to write songs and what you’ll be writing about?
GN: I think it’s intuitive, the way that it occurs. Maybe in the case of that song, “Common Sense,” it was my intention to try to bring some humor, at first. Then I realized that with everything I’m talking about, I’m trying to define common sense, and show how what’s happening in our country is oppositional to common sense so much of the time. There’s intent there. I know what I want to say, sometimes. It’s very intentional in this mode of songwriting. It’s aimed at something. But at this point in time, with what’s going on now, I’m kind of worn out from those kinds of songs. I’ve got plenty of them. I think I’m interested in writing songs that are more about mortality, or getting old, or other things, like things we can’t see.
HMS: You mean writing songs about human life, and the big ideas, that kind of thing?
GN: I guess, but without any sermonizing. Just observation, and hopefully, a glimpse of our inner lives. These songs on Common Sense are really rather mild-mannered and humorous. The intent, though it may not be possible, is to have people embrace the humor in the songs and see it as a way to come together and observe the culture and themselves. An example would be the song “We Don’t Talk About It.”
HMS: I think, when I hear this album, it’s never been more relevant, but at the same time, the world has changed again since you wrote it. Things are so extreme now. The song “We Don’t Talk About It” really resonates with my own life, and my family’s life.
GN: There’s also “There’s No Them,” and whether people can relate to that, as a way to conclude the record. On the previous album, there was a song called “God Help America,” that Ruthie Foster sang with me, as a duet. Maybe I can start singing that song more often now.
HMS: You’ve also done an astonishing amount of songwriting with major artists. If you’re working as a songwriter with someone who you admire, how do you write something that sounds like them enough to work for them? Presumably, they are also looking for an outside perspective from you.
GN: That’s it to a great extent. I was a staff writer at Sony Music Publishing for 15 years, and there the goal was to write a hit for Country artists. But being the blues nerd kind of guy that I was, I was infusing the country music that I was writing with a lot of R&B influence, and taking advantage of the proximity to Muscle Shoals and Memphis. For a while, I got to feeling that if someone came to me for co-writes, they were expecting to get a bluesy thing out of it, and I’m glad to be that guy. With songs, it’s all about the idea anyway though, and you can’t control that. If the idea is not a funky, bluesy, groovy thing, it won’t work.
HMS: Is songwriting something that you would ever stop doing, or is it too ingrained in you now?
GN: I’ve been really privileged to have a life writing songs. Writing songs is what I love the most. I love to play music live, and that can be a transcendent kind of thing to play with other musicians and communicate that way. But really, it’s all about the songwriting for me. At this point, it’s like a habit type of thing. I’m going to write a song somehow, accidentally, even if I’m not intending to. It’s kind of part of my make up. I think that comes from being a staff writer for a number of years, and now it’s just the leftover effect of doing it all the time. Then there’s the little thrill of creativity. I guess you could call it an addiction! It’s a compulsion of some sort.
HMS: It’s seems like once the switch was flipped on, you’ve stayed in that mode your whole life.
GN: Yes, and it’s not really something to brag about, it’s just the way it is. I could probably apply myself to doing other things.
HMS: Is songwriting something that you do every day, or every week?
GN: It just happens, and when it comes along, it’s a pleasing curiosity. Wherever the wellspring of creativity flows from, if a little tributary comes your way, you think, “Oh, wow, there’s that again!” Then you indulge in the doing of it, since that’s really where the joy is, to act like you’re creating something. You’re God for a minute. I think that’s what makes people want to do this kind of thing. In all the arts, they are trying to connect to their higher nature somehow really, and show it to others. I guess that’s what art is about.
HMS: That’s a really great way of putting it. Even when it’s something hard to put into words, the experience of it is often described to me as sort of like a signal that songwriters are trying to pick up on.
GN: Yes, they are adjusting their antenna. That book, Songwriters on Songwriting, by Paul Zollo, is really great, because he always asks the question, “Where Do You Think The Songs Come From.” It’s usually a subconscious, unconscious, super-conscious thing. It’s hard to explain. With all this recent deep dive into Bob Dylan, because of the film, A Complete Unknown, I recently saw an exhibit of all the film stuff in Tulsa at a fantastic Bob Dylan museum, where there’s also a Woody Guthrie museum.
I watched an interview with Bob from a long time ago where he said that there was a time where he could write those songs, but he can’t write those songs anymore. He was saying that he doesn’t know how it happened. He quotes a line, and looks at it objectively, saying, “Wow! Who’s ever going to write a line like that?”
HMS: What’s hard for us to see now is how weird Bob Dylan’s work in the 60’s was. We now see things as normal that he made normal, like his lyrics, and the way he presented himself. These days, he’s still writing a lot, but he’s more of a storyteller now.
GN: It’s what he always intended to be, I think. He is the artist that he’s always wanted to be, and all the other stuff which came around, that proclaimed him as some kind of Folk hero, or prophet, is just something that happened. I have all these pals who have played with him, and they say that he knows everything about everything about old music. He’s a hard-core folkie who knows a million songs. He’s so into it.
And I got to be buddies with Leon Russell, who had been around Bob some, and they were able to just hang out together, and go fishing, and stuff like that.
HMS: I’m tempted to say that if an artist has gotten to the point where they feel they can be the real version of themselves, that’s the best outcome.
GN: It’s got to be, because he stays on the road constantly. He’s got to be loving it. He’s getting to do what he wants to do. I played guitar with Guy Clark for three years when I first moved to Nashville, and Guy was also one of those guys who could look at his work, and agree that it was amazing. I think this is how all these super-heroes of music are able to do this and get some distance from it. It’s the ones who can’t do it who go crazy.
HMS: Some people see it as a necessary divide between the writer/performer aspect of their lives, and then what you might call their everyday lives as a person. I appreciate what you’re saying, that there’s not a sharp divide between those two, but you just leave your ego out of it.
GN: You’re just striving to be your own authentic self, and the self-realization that maybe the songs help along. You use them as a tool for your own development.
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