Timing is a funny thing. A couple of years, before Elvie Shane had a record deal and before he was getting any attention in Nashville, he co-wrote a song that went viral.
“It blew up on Facebook and we were like oh man, we’ve got a viral video, this is awesome!” he recalls. “We were thinking, this is going to be our moment, and then suddenly Facebook took it down. We had no idea why, we couldn’t figure it out. It had like 6-million views and was growing by a hundred thousand views an hour when they removed it. So, we just chalked it up to our 15 minutes of fame.”
The song was “My Boy,” his new, No. 1 hit on country radio. It’s a touching, emotional tribute to the love he has for his stepson. It struck a chord with people who heard it then, and its resonating with country fans listening to it now.
During the years since the song first hit Facebook, a lot has since changed for Shane. The one-time struggling singer, songwriter, and musician from Kentucky, now has a record deal, a hit song, he opened a few shows for Miranda Lambert, he’s been touring with Brooks & Dunne, he just released his new album, and several months ago he celebrated the birth of his baby daughter.
“It’s funny,” he says, “I joke with my team sometimes and tell ‘em I’m retiring after this because I don’t know how it could get any better.” He laughs, then goes on to add, “It’s been a really incredible year. We’ve been so blessed.”
The song may have taken a while to make it to the country charts, but it’s responsible for launching his career, and getting him a record deal.
It’s symbolic, too, in another way. It helps tell a little bit of his story, and how his life began changing - all for the better - little more than a decade ago.
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Shane met his wife, Mandi, when he was attending Western University in Bowling Green, Kentucky. She was a single mother with a five-year old son, and he fell in love with both of them. Back then, he was playing music and “partying too much.” When he met Mandi he stopped the music and the partying, to commit to building a better life for his new family.
He would return to music later. And when he did, he starting he started going to Nashville to write songs.
It was during a songwriting session five years ago now, that he and fellow songwriters Russell Sutton, Nick Columbia, and Lee Starr, started working on the song that would change his life.
“Somebody had sent me a post on Facebook the night before,” Shane recalls, “that said, ‘I don’t have a stepson, I have a son that was born before I met him.’ And that post really kind of got my attention.”
The songwriters started talking about the post. Shane remembers Columbia looking at him and saying tell me about your son.
“And I said, ‘Dude, he’s my boy.’ And Nick was like, let’s just write that. Then, somebody else said, he ain’t got my smile, it don’t bother me a bit. And somebody else was like, he’s got somebody else’s eyes I’m seeing myself in. And we were like, oh crap. And so, we ended up writing this song.”
Shane first discovered his love of music while growing up in Caneyville, Kentucky. He had some very specific musical influences.
“One of my very first influences was Steve Earle and John Fogarty. Particularly Steve Earle’s Guitar Town record from 86, and John Fogarty’s Blue Moon Swamp solo record from 97. And then, I was at church every Sunday, every Wednesday night, and every third Saturday night of the month right beside my mom, singing out of hymnals.”
He’d sing with his mother in church Sunday mornings, then listen to Steve Earle, John Fogarty, and others, while helping his dad work on the car Sunday afternoons.
“My dad was a truck driver, too, so I spent a lot of time on the road, listening to music riding around with him.”
The year he turned 12, Shane hauled hay and did a bunch of other odd jobs to save the money to buy his first guitar. His great-grandmother taught him how to play it.
“She was 82 years old, and I would go over to her house on Saturdays and mow her yard. She’d make me grilled cheese sandwiches, macaroni & cheese, and lemonade, and give me a guitar lesson. She gave me Roger Miller’s Greatest Hits, and taught me E, A, and B, on guitar. She told me I could learn just about any Roger Miller song with those three chords.”
He put her advice to good use and went on to teach himself to master the instrument.
As he celebrates the release of his debut album, Shane says the 15 tracks cover his life’s journey, so far.
“I probably wrote over 200 songs writing this record,” he explains. “And I didn’t know what I was writing other than I was just trying to go in the room and be honest every day.”
When it came time to choose, he looked closely at the lyrics to find the songs that made him feel nostalgic, as if he was reading his memoirs. For example, the album starts with a song called “I Will Run” which has a line that says “these days it’s who I’m running to, not what I’m running from.” Shane says it sets the tone for everything.
“When I wrote that song, initially, it was for my wife, but sometimes the songs change their meaning and it became so much more. It became my wife, my home, my family, my art, and everything I’m trying to do with my life right now.”
Other songs, he says, cover the years spend trying to figure things out.
“Songs like “Sundays in the South,” Love, Cold Beer, Cheap Smoke,” “County Roads,” and “Sundress” all point back to the years of learning. How to love for the first time, how to fight, you’re learning how to screw up, and you’re learning how to make those screw ups right. I love writing about those years because they’re so important to who we become.”
Then, there are the songs that cover the start of his life with his wife, Mandi, which, of course, includes “My Boy.”
And there’s a song called “Heartbreaks & Headaches” inspired by his brother.
“I love those ‘she’s gone’ songs. And I wrote it about him, and with him actually, because he and his girlfriend, who was his high-school sweetheart, had split up for like the 57th time.”
Backslider wraps up with a song called “Miles” that Shane says is one of the most personal of all.
“There were some things going on in my family and I started writing it as a tribute to my dad. Then, it became a way to call my dad out on his bullsh*t with me and my little brother, and then it turned into a song of me realizing I’m definitely my father’s son, and I have a lot of the same struggle. Being out on the road now (as an artist) has a lot of parallel lines with what he was doing as a truckdriver. It was a very therapeutic song to write.”
The album is the culmination of a lot of hard work, and Shane is grateful to his producer, engineer, and the songwriters who dedicated so much time and energy to bring it all together. He says he’s very proud of the end result.
“We put a lot of heart and soul in this, and I was so lucky to have the cast that was part of this record. I’m excited to get it out there and I can’t wait for people to hear it.”
