Kip Moore began writing songs as a teenager. While his first complete song, “The River,” was penned at 19, he says he had the songwriting bug long before he recognized it.
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“I was dissecting lyrics from a very young age and trying to think about the complexities, the metaphors, the plays off of words, and how they put the songs together,” he says, reminiscing of riding in his dad’s Silverado with his brothers while listening to Bob Seger records. “I was obsessed with Bob Dylan. Early on, I was freewriting in journals and all those kinds of things.”
Moore says his eighth-grade English teacher, Ms. Jones, suggested he think about a career in writing. Years later, at a party in college, someone heard a song he had written and told him he needed to move to Nashville.
“It’s always been an innate love inside of me,” Moore, who writes every morning, says of songwriting. “I have always been a very, very, very private person – to a fault sometimes. I can be really guarded. I’m open when I write, and it helps me to release a little bit of vulnerability sometimes. It helps me work things out of my own head.
“A lot of times, I’m a better version of myself when I write,” he continues. “The character in there is how I want to feel, how I want to be because I can be a little closed off sometimes.”
The characters featured throughout Moore’s fifth studio album Damn Love, out now, share a glimpse of the singer/songwriter. The poignant “The Guitar Slinger” details a musician who contemplates leaving music for good (I tried before to just walk away / But the music always makes me stay) while album closer “Micky’s Bar” sees Moore take on the persona of a retired baseball player.
Bobby had a dream playing for the Yankees
But two bad knees and he’s a junkyard car
“That’s about me,” Moore says of the song. “That’s a metaphor for what I see myself as. … Sometimes I get dark, and I get in my own head and I look at it like, ‘I ain’t nothin’ but a number, and the minute I’m not producing hits, income for people, whatever it is, I’ll be cast out.’
“I was in a dark headspace when I wrote ‘Micky’s Bar’ and I remember calling Dan [Couch]. I’d had a bunch of the first half of the song written and I was sitting at my kitchen counter after getting off a long European run … and just started writing that chorus. When I think about that line, that’s symbolic of how I feel a lot of times. A lot of that comes from when all of a sudden you’re not having that commercial success [and] you feel the pressure.”
Frequent collaborator Dan Couch, who wrote seven songs on Damn Love with Moore, says “Micky’s Bar” is reminiscent of Billy Joel’s “Piano Man.”
“It’s such a beautiful song,” Couch says of the track, which he co-wrote. “You’re looking at these characters. They’re all drawn to the neon. A bar is a great place. A bar is a really lonely place sometimes too.”
Moore says one of the lines Couch threw out on “Micky’s Bar” has stuck with him. Those deep blue eyes have me lost at sea.
“That’s what he’s so good at,” Moore praises. “He has a way of saying things [that is] so plain English but so unique. That line sticks out with me and that’s the fun of writing. Dan lit up when I said, she’s in a new used dress. You really paint a picture of this girl that’s trying to get fixed up for the night.”
The longtime friends and collaborators first saw success together with Moore’s 2011 single “Somethin’ ’Bout a Truck,” which also became the pair’s first No. 1 song. Since then, Couch has had a hand in writing several tracks on each of Moore’s five projects. On Damn Love, Couch teamed with Moore to pen “The Guitar Slinger,” “Kinda Bar,” “Some Things,” “Neon Blue,” “Another Night In Knoxville” and “Silver and Gold.”
Inspiration struck the pair for “Kinda Bar” while driving home from breakfast one morning. As Moore detailed his favorite beach location to Couch, the singer said, “They have the kind of bars you want to drink a beer in.” With that description in mind, Couch started to put the song together and hummed what would become the track’s chorus for the remainder of the drive.
“We got back to the house, and we wrote that thing fast,” Moore recalls. “The same thing with ‘Some Things.’ We were sitting outside in the sunshine in San Diego in 2021. We were writing and we both had a cup of coffee, and he was just like, ‘Man, I love being out here. Some things don’t ever get old.’ Then I started spitting out that chorus and then we sat right there [for] probably an hour and wrote that.
“I said, Smallmouth bass sitting on the end of my line, and then he said, Come on, buddy, jump just one more time,” Moore continues. “We both looked at each other and grinned. We understood what that is. That goes back to ‘Mr. Simple.’ It’s that simplicity of the beautiful things in life that don’t cost anything. I was in that place on the East Coast fishing the minute he said and that’s a line that really stuck with me as soon as he said that.”
Couch further describes “Some Things” as a “pure song.”
“I think it’s like something that George Strait might have said,” Couch says. “We actually referenced George Strait. King George comin’ through the radio. I think it’s just a picture of some of the simple things. All of those lines: dog waitin’ for me when I get back home.”
While Moore cherishes the simple things in life, he admits that he’s still trying to find a balance between work and life. This can be heard in the cinematic “The Guitar Slinger,” where he sings, I’m a simple man, but it’s complicated / When your soul’s on fire / And your heart feels faded / But I ain’t complaining. It’s a topic he’s written about before, as heard on “Guitar Man” from the 2017 album Slowheart.
“‘Guitar Man’ was more about what my life used to be where this one is about what my life is now,” he explains. “So, to me, those were two different [songs]. …You feel the demands of so many people and the expectations all the time and those things add up and it just weighs and weighs and weighs on you and then you haven’t watered any other gardens in your life.
“You neglect friendships, relationships, because I am so maniacal about making this [music] thing go, it’s been my only mistress. It’s been all-encompassing for me, and I haven’t been able to find that balance and I don’t know how to find that balance. So that’s where it becomes what that song is, where I’m like, ‘I want to run away but I love it so much I can’t.’”
I tried before to just walk away
But the music always makes me stay
Moore says he has found balance in moments, like when he’s surfing. While music at times has been a sacrifice, it’s not lost on him that he has his dream job.
“I love what I do so much,” he concludes. “I know that I’m one of the few people that really get to wake up and do what they love, but it does come with a price.”
(Photo Credit: Spidey Smith/Courtesy of The Green Room PR)
