Lady A’s Hillary Scott knew what she wanted when she stepped into the virtual writing room with Dave Barnes, Brandon Paddock, Martin Johnson and Michelle Buzz in 2020 to pen “Like a Lady.” It was in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic that led to a global shutdown and altered life as we know it. Songwriters also adapted, navigating the new normal by turning Zoom sessions into writing rooms. One country hit that came out of the pandemic was Lady A’s, “Like a Lady.”
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Meaning Behind the Song
Buzz, a native of Houston, Texas, and graduate of Nashville’s prominent music business college Belmont University, and Johnson had their first Zoom writing session a week prior to the Lady A write where they quickly discovered they liked each other’s ideas and worked well together. Johnson already had a session with Scott on the books and looped Buzz in to join, the two bringing their newfound chemistry into the room with Scott, Barnes and Paddock.
“Hillary knew what she wanted to talk about,” Buzz tells American Songwriter. “She was like, ‘I want [a] girl power anthem.'” It was August 2020 and the Los Angeles-based Buzz had been cooped up in her apartment for months due to the ongoing quarantine and was in need of a mental escape. “I was like, I can imagine a fun time right now, I need to fantasize about a bar, let’s go,'” she laughs.
Buzz says that she and the other writers were “freestyling,” throwing out lyrics and ideas. Scott used Shania Twain as a reference point, leading the group to lean into confidence when writing. “We already knew it’s gonna have this strut, confident feeling like ‘I deserve the world tonight,'” Buzz describes. “When you’re already knowing where everyone’s at, sometimes little bits just fall out like that. So the [line], I feel like a lady, that feels fun.'”
[RELATED: The Lady A Interview: How The Trio Discovered ‘What A Song Can Do’]
At the time the song was written, Buzz had already done multiple Zoom writing sessions and was thriving in the virtual environment. “Everyone went on mute and just spewed their crazy ideas,” she explains of writing on Zoom. “[Songwriters] were free for once to not be like, ‘Maybe that’s not it,’ and everyone was able to be like, ‘Can I play this?’ You could hear the freedom, so the Lady A stuff was no different…It was a good day where we had fun.”
“Like a Lady” was released as the lead single off the trio’s 2021 album, What a Song Can Do. It peaked inside the Top 20 on both the Billboard Country Airplay and Hot Country Songs charts.
Photo: Dove Shore / Courtesy of GreenRoom PR
