Hillary Scott didn’t set out to write a song by herself. As a member of Lady A, Scott was embroiled in work for the trio’s next project as she and her husband, Chris Tyrrell, led a busy life as parents of four daughters.
It was while rocking her littlest one to sleep that Scott began, almost without meaning realizing, singing a melody.
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“My entire journey through motherhood, I’ve always sung hymns, and I’ll sing different little songs, and then sometimes I’ll make up really silly songs,” Scott exclusively told American Songwriter. “This one, I just started singing a melody to her. I was just trying to get her calmed down and ready for bed.”
During the next few nights, Scott started assigning words to the melody.
“It was just this really beautiful, really spiritual experience with Selah, my daughter, and I,” she said. “As the words were coming, I started getting choked up with each line. It was almost like when I would get choked up and not be able to complete the line, I knew that it was the correct one, because I knew that meant my heart was telling me something. Like, ‘Oh, that’s something I need to surrender to God.’”
The lyrics essentially “fell out” during Scott’s “sacred” experience, but the emotions behind those words were anything but easy to unravel.
“I struggled with getting to sleep, and still do some nights,” Scott said. “All my children will be asleep peacefully, and I’ll just be laying there with my eyes open, worrying about all of these things that may or may not happen that are just stealing my sleep.”
The “anxiety and worry” that travels hand-in-hand with motherhood set Scott off on “a real deep journey of faith and surrender.”
“I’m human. I fail, I try my best. I have to trust that God will do the rest,” Scott said of what she tells herself during those wakeful nights. “A lot of that starts from a place of, ‘I surrender them to You because, as hard as it is for me to fathom, I know He loves them more than I ever could, because he loves me that way. He loves all of us that way.’”
Hillary Scott on Why She Decided to Release “Mama’s Lullaby”
Once the song, titled “Mama’s Lullaby,” was finished, Scott didn’t intend to do anything with it. However, that all changed when she played it for her husband, who called it “beautiful.”
Scott’s kids were also fans of her work. In fact, whenever Selah watches the song’s accompanying visualizer, Scott said, “She’ll stop whatever she’s doing and just look up at the screen. You can tell these melodies and these words have soaked into her little being.”
Her older children likewise gave the tune their stamp of approval.
“I sang it for them, and they go, ‘Mom, you need to record that. That’s beautiful,’ which was so sweet,” she said. “It’s a song that came to me while rocking Selah, but it’s really a declaration over all my girls.”
With her family’s support, Scott felt an ever-growing “tug on my heart” to record the song. She initially did so while putting Selah to sleep, and shared the resulting video on social media.
“That was the sweetest, just unexpected surprise of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of moms across all social platforms that I shared it, saying how much this met them where they were,” Scott marveled. “The part that was so amazing was, it wasn’t just mamas with babies. It was mamas with kids they were dropping off at college. It was mamas that their kids were 39 and 41. They still prayed this prayer because they worry about their kid.”
“This song is just from such a deep and vulnerable place,” she added, “so for that to be shared and then received with thousands of ‘Me too,’ I can barely form words to the depth of what that means to me in my heart.”
Inside the Recording Process of Hillary Scott’s First Solo-Written Song
Followers begged Scott to record the song for real. So, less than one month after the melody came to her, she was in the studio laying down the track.
“There was just an urgency to it,” Scott explained. “There are a lot of mamas that struggle with worrying about their children… especially right now with [how] the world can feel so heavy, and then you add your own personal struggles on top of that. For myself, I needed a way to surrender to be able to go to sleep at night. To see that other moms are in the same place, [helps you not] feel alone.”
As Scott sang the vocals and her husband pulled double duty on guitar and production, they aptly did so with Selah in tow.
“When we recorded it, we couldn’t find a babysitter, which was hilarious, and kind of perfect looking back,” she said. “We took Selah with us, and I put her in the baby carrier. I was wearing her in the singing booth while I was singing a scratch vocal and Chris was playing guitar in another room. And then we swap where he’s got Selah, so I can sing.”
Eventually the studio session ran into Selah’s nap time, and she ended up falling asleep as her parents worked.
“I had her asleep with the little sound machine in the lobby of the studio. I went in and sang one more vocal, top to bottom of the song, and that is the vocal that we kept,” Scott said. “The precious full circle is, I needed my baby to get to sleep so I could sing the vocal.”
What’s Next for Hillary Scott
Now, with this process under her belt, Scott feels more ready than ever to pursue more solo writes, likely of the lullaby variety.
“It’s something I’ve been really curious about if I’d ever pursue. For it to happen this way is just such a sweet, unexpected gift, to be honest,” she said. “… I have two other melodies that have kind of started coming to me. I’m just really open to that being the way that it happens right now, and potentially, maybe a collection of songs that are more lullaby-like, because that’s just where my heart is leaning… We’ll see if there’s more in there. I hope so.”
One thing that there will definitely be more of is Lady A. The trio, which Scott is in alongside Charles Kelley and Dave Haywood, is hard at work on their next project. The forthcoming LP has been eagerly anticipated by fans, as Lady A’s last non-holiday album was released in 2021.
“It’s been quite a few years since our last record, so we’ve lived a lot of life,” Scott said. “… That was the point of waiting so long. We want to live, and raise our kids, and make memories together, and keep things moving, but really let some life go by before we create in this way.”
Now, though, that process is fully underway.
“It’s still very much in the creation process of it. It’s almost hard for me to go into too much detail, but we are giving ourselves the gift of time,” Scott said. “We are singing songs that we absolutely love. That process of honing in on the songs that we’ve recorded has been incredible. We only want to record what we absolutely love.”
“It feels exciting to be able to tell the fans, ‘When you hear this record, this is such a picture of inside of our creative hearts,’” she continued. “… We’re feeling that momentum, because we’ve been working and we’re getting further along in the process. We are excited. The fans have been so patient and so kind to wait.”
Photos by Annie Loughead
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