When legendary songwriter Mac Davis died in 2020 at age 78, he left behind a trove of unfinished songs, pieces of lyrics, and hundreds of possible stories. Among them were nearly a dozen he started working on with New York City-based British singer-songwriter Coyle Girelli in 2014. Girelli revisited their demos from more than a decade earlier, and arranged and recorded each for Out of This Town.
Released on Sun Records, Out of This Town, also producedby Girelli, is as much a solo album for him as it is a testimony to the legacy of Davis’ songs, a catalog including Elvis Presley‘s late ‘60s hits “In the Ghetto,” “A Little Less Conversation,” and “Don’t Cry Daddy,” and more written for Dolly Parton, Kenny Rogers, and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.
Davis also released his own collection of albums, from his 1970 debut Song Painter and his 1972 No. 1 hit “Baby, Don’t Get Hooked on Me,” through his final album, Will Write Songs for Food, in 1994 and continued working well into the 2010s with Weezer on their Hurley track “Time Flies” from 2010, along with Bruno Mars’ “Young Girls,” and “Addicted to You” with late Swedish DJ and producer Avicii in 2013.
Shortly after Girelli and Davis first met in 2014, at the suggestion of their publisher Primary Wave and CEO Larry Mestel, they started piecing together songs at Davis’ home in Los Angeles.
“We wrote at his house in LA and in his music room, where he just had a bunch of acoustic guitars, and so we would just sit on the couch next to each other,” recalls Girelli.
At the time, Girelli, who fronts the indie bands the Chevin and Your Vegas and has written songs for BTS, Robin Schulz, Westlife, and more, was also working with Linda Perry, which, he says, took him back to the truer essence of songwriting.
“It was so fun working with Mac and Linda within that six-month period, because it just felt like it was me in the bottom of my bed with a guitar until the melody and some words came,” says Girelli. “I think I’d lost that a little bit, and it was given back. That’s the type of songwriter I certainly have been the last few years. It’s all about chasing that feeling you get when you first write something that you love.”
Together, the first song, they wrote together was “Already Gone,” and as they continued piecing more together. Girelli demoed each, providing a structural base for him to pick back up on what he worked on with Davis years later.
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“We had a solid version of everything, the melodies and the lyrics, all fixed,” recalls Girelli. “When we first got to the point where we had a record of songs, the original idea was that we were going to release it together as a Coyle Girelli and Mac Davis record.”
Initially, they wanted to release a collaborative album featuring duets, but the songs remained in limbo for several more years as they searched for a label. In the interim, Girelli moved ahead, releasing his solo debut, Love Kills, in 2018, two years before Davis died.
Left with the songs he worked on with Davis, Girelli didn’t know what to do with them at first and found the perfect home for them at Sun Records, which was purchased by Primary Wave in 2021.
“I didn’t want to put them out, and I didn’t want to throw them out,” says Girelli. “I wanted to wait for a partner that felt right, so when Sun Records presented itself, it was a no-brainer for me with music, not only with Elvis and Roy [Orbison], but so much of that was the influence on the sound and the songs.”
On Out of This Town, Girelli takes on the vocals, which Davis once likened to Orbison’s, from the opening title track and on through several duets, a first for the artist, with KT Tunstall on “Lost to the River,” and Jamie Wyatt on “Never Thought I’d See You Again.” Cassandra Lewis also takes Parton’s place on “Everyone But Me and You,” one of Davis’ earlier duets from 1994.
More additions came in from “Like Only A Woman Can,” “I’m on Fire,” and “Pretty,” along with “I Wanna Make Love,” which resurfaces at the end of the album on the closing “Mac’s Version,” featuring Davis’ vocals, pulled from one of his voice memos.
Now working on more musicals after co-composing songs for the French musical Robin des Bois and Les Trois Mousquetaires, for Girelli, Out of This Town marks a moment in time that may have been left undone had he not returned to what he once started with Davis. Working with Davis also gave him the “permission,” he says, to take on those songs.
“For me, as a songwriter, it was great to be able to be given the permission, as a Brit, to sing those songs,” shares Girelli. “I’d always grown up listening to Elvis and Roy and stuff like that, but as a Brit, I felt like, ‘Am I allowed to sing this kind of thing? Mac gave me permission and said ‘You should be singing this stuff. Your voice is built for these types of songs.’”
Within the album are several songs Davis suggested for Girelli’s croon, including “It Only Hurts When I’m Awake” (originally released by Davis in 1994), and “Mary in the Moonlight,” one of the songs tucked away in Davis’ “bag of songs.”
“Every time we were together, we wrote a song and and some were from Mac’s magic bag of songs,” says Girelli. “I wish I had more time to dive into his bag of songs, because he was always writing, every day, and had this bag of pieces of paper, and lyrics that we went through when we hit a brick wall. I remember being gobsmacked by the idea of this bag of songs.”
Girelli adds, “I wonder how many songwriters of Mac’s era have these bags of songs because they just write for the sake of writing and think no one wants to hear them … the amount of incredible songs that may be sitting in bags around the world.”
Photos: Shervin Lainez
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