When new artist Max McNown flies into his falsetto voice in the middle of his first radio release, “Better Me for You (Brown Eyes),” he conveys a sense of strength through vulnerability, as if he’s been doing it for years. But sounds, like looks, can be deceiving. McNown had never written a song that mined that part of his register before, and it forced him to woodshed when it connected quickly with his fan base.
“’Better Me for You’ is probably the greatest problem child of any of my songs I’ve ever written,” McNown says. “I mean, it was written so early in my career. I had never taken vocal lessons before – I still have only taken a couple – but when it was written, I couldn’t even sing that song all the way through without messing up.”
Not that that mattered in the song’s creation. McNown rode with it as the melody gravitated naturally in that falsetto direction when he wrote “Better Me For You” with Ava Suppelsa, Trent Dabbs and producer-writer Jamie Kenney last May. McNown’s willingness to take on the discomfort moved the song forward.
“That was the moment that got me really excited,” Dabbs remembers.
“Better Me for You” was personal for McNown when they crafted it. He was living in Oregon at the time and had started a long-distance relationship that was still fairly new. His co-writers asked him about his life to get the creative juices flowing at the start of the appointment, and as he spoke of his girlfriend in glowing, almost reverent tones, they launched into a bright midtempo groove on acoustic guitars. McNown pulled out a short phrase with a descending melody – “I didn’t know you’d have brown eyes” – that he’d already written about her. It became the opening line of the chorus; it also ends up being the only physical description of the woman that appears in the entire song. The rest of the text frames her as strong, spiritually-grounded and “deeper than a coal mine.”
“He’s not a superficial guy,” Kenney notes. “He’s a deep soul, and he’s a kind, caring and thoughtful person. So I think we always end up writing those kind of songs. And I think it’s not an accident that we don’t end up leaning on trite euphemisms.”
Click here to read the full article!
