NASHVILLE 2023 SPECIAL: JORDAN DAVIS

The voice is earthy and warm, words slowly fall from his tongue. Friendly, believable even. There’s a reassuring tone to the most unlikely man to win the Country Music Association’s 2023 Song of the Year. Yet his values-affirming “Buy Dirt”—a #1 duet with friend Luke Bryan—took home the award.

Unlikely, because Jordan Davis only desired a publishing deal, not the spotlight or the fame. Having fallen in love with Jim Croce and James Taylor’s wordplay, voice and sense of rhythms—one gentle, the other propulsive yet each moving the listener deeper into the details and emotions of their songs—songwriting’s what he wanted.

The only way the Shreveport, La.-raised songwriter could get a publishing deal was to say he wanted to be an artist. Like a lot of kids dreaming of being a writer, he’d played around local bars with his guitar, picking up money while learning the craft of songs. While writing songs to get a “deal,” they could be pitched to others—and people would realize.

What could it hurt? But then there was a record deal with MCA Nashville; a double platinum #1 debut with “Singles You Up.” Home State delivered two more platinum hits: “Take It From Me” and the deeply personal #1 “Slow Dance in a Parking Lot.”

Davis was in play. Soft-spoken, tall, bearded, and even shy, he wasn’t the “look at me” type.

In a town built on self-promotion, there was much discussion about his almost Ferdinand the Bull approach. Davis didn’t care. He doubled down on who he was. He wrote with his friends, drew even more out of his own life—and created Bluebird Days, an album that interjected John Prine’s “Spanish Pipedream” into his award-winning, double platinum “Dirt.”

Like Don Williams, the crooning country giant who reassured listeners that his—and their -- loves, lives and aims were true—Davis moves beyond the happy-go-party good-time songs populating radio to a more grounded take on how life is lived in the flyover. With a title track inspired by sadness from his parents’ divorce, Davis introduces a kinder way of reflecting on disappointments without melting into a Hallmark movie.

The brisk “Tuscon Too Late” offers palpable reckoning for a guy who lost the girl, while the plangent “Midnight Crisis”—with a very aching Danielle Bradbery—lists all the easy fixes that aren’t gonna heal the wanting for someone you’ve lost. That sentiment is philosophically deployed in the go-down-easy “Money Isn’t Real” which weighs actual value against the cash-centric reality. Classic, simple, small-town, a potent reminder of what matters emerges from a world of consumerism on steroids.

That intrinsic reality fuels Davis’ writing and the believability of his delivery. Whether it’s the rhythm pushing “Next Thing You Know” that topples denial after denial, the life-affirming “What My World Spins Around,” or the recognition that, in spite of our flaws, “Sunday Saints” are good people with a little bit of moral stumble in their stride—Davis pulls listeners close, embracing the best of who we can be.

Down-to-earth may not seem exotic, yet Davis makes it the rarest of all things. He delivers songs listeners can believe in and moments inhabited by people who drive American cars, go to junior high school games and believe the woman they married really is the prettiest girl in the world. In a realm of faster, richer, harder—Jordan Davis is something simpler, enriched by being grateful for the life he has.