America’s presidential election found the country at a peak in anxiety, angry on one side about immigrants and fearful on the other of a descent into dictatorship.
In the midst of that tension, Drew Baldridge – on the heels of his first top 5 single, “She’s Somebody’s Daughter” – targeted Nov. 4, Election Day Eve, as the add date for his new single, a litany of disasters and a celebration of resilience titled “Tough People.”
“What I love about this song is that it’s honest and it’s real,” Baldridge says. “It’s what our world’s going through. It’s what we’re all feeling.”
And, it suggests, we can all get through whatever crisis emerges – a tornado, cancer, a school shooting or a war.
“Don’t give up. don’t stop loving people, don’t stop helping people out,” he says. “What you’re going through, you’re gonna come out better because of it. I think that’s the message that we want to share.”
Baldridge was in a “David versus Goliath” mindset, he remembers, when he wrote it. He was about to self-release “She’s Somebody’s Daughter” to radio via PlayMPE on July 25, 2023.
The day before, he met up with fellow indie artist Adam Sanders and songwriter Jordan Walker (“When It Rains It Pours”) in writing room 2 at Sony Music Publishing Nashville. Sanders had heard, on Joe Rogan’s podcast, a version of “The Cycle of Man,” an assessment of generational changes from author G. Michael Hopf’s Those Who Remain: “Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.”
Sanders held on to the hook, “Hard times make tough people,” until he could write with Baldridge, who wasn’t afraid of difficult topics. Both of them were thinking about their own careers as they worked on it, inserting some optimism into the hard times. “It’s just always a fight and a struggle,” Sanders says, “but hey, if you keep going, you can achieve your dreams no matter what. That’s where that came from.”
Walker turned the “hard times” hook into “tough times make tough people” and started playing guitar in a drop-D tuning, ideal for power chords. “It’s emotional, it’s deep,” Walker says. “As soon as you hit that first note, it just hits you.”
The first image accomplishes the same thing. A Midwest town endures a tornado that leaves only a Baptist church and a baseball field standing. The tough people, of course, rebuild it, as they would after a flood or a hurricane. “In my little town, one year, the whole roof of the cafeteria got ripped off, and a couple farmers lost their barns,” Southern Illinois native Baldridge recalls. “The next morning, I woke up and I went out there, and my dad and other farmers – everybody was coming together to help fix stuff. And that just has really stuck with me.”
A four-year-old girl battling cancer in Memphis – presumably at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital – follows the tornado in the text. “You want to talk about three guys in a room crying – Drew’s got a little boy and I’ve got two little girls,” Walker says. “We all got choked up, and that was probably, honestly, the hardest part of the song to write.”
Not that the rest of it was rainbows and unicorns. The final vignette reveals a soldier who returns home in a flag-covered casket, and another recognizes a police officer putting his life on the line at a school shooting. Nashville’s Covenant School incident had occurred just four months prior, scarring the entire community, and it was a natural subject. They debated including that particular tragedy, and decided to go for it.
“It’s one of the biggest problems in this country – it needs to be talked about,” Walker says. “I’ve got two little girls that are in daycare, and luckily, there’s a cop that sits in the parking lot every day, so that deters anyone from wanting to do anything ignorant. But I can’t imagine when these girls get in high school, middle school, just kind of dropping them off and praying you see them at four o’clock.”
All of those hard times, though, were offset by the chorus, beginning with a melodic lift. After a couple lines of lyrics that border on victimhood, it turns to self-determination – a series of “keep on fighting” mantras leading to the feel-good conclusion: “Hard work pays off, good beats evil/ And tough times make tough people.”
They cut a demo, though in retrospect, they missed the creative mark. “I just don’t think that we captured the right emotion,” Sanders says. “It just kind of felt a little stale. We turned the song in to our publishers, and I don’t think anybody said anything.”
But when Baldridge presented a handful of songs to producer Nick Schwarz, he knew “Tough People” had to be part of the next round of recording. “The school shooting line is what made me go ‘Holy moly,’” Schwarz recalls. “It’s so real.”
They recorded it in mid-December at the Sony Tree Studios, focused on making it sound tougher than the demo. A tremolo guitar helped establish some tension. “I’m a sucker for tremolo and slap back – I just love those two sounds,” Schwarz says. “So I asked for tremolo, and they were like, ‘Nick and his tremolo’ and laughed.”
But the recording took an unexpected turn. Sanders got a standing ovation when he performed an acoustic version of “Tough People” at the Franklin Theater. Based on that performance, Walker made a new acoustic demo, and it was so good that he played it on Dec. 29 for Luke Combs, who wanted to cut it. A few weeks later, Lainey Wilson heard it while visiting Baldridge, and she called Combs to ask if she could record it with him. They made their recording on Jan. 25. Combs re-wrote a couple lines in verse two, but he kept the school shooting in the piece.
“One of the responding officers [at Covenant] is the canine officer for Metro Nashville,” Walker says. “He actually lives on Luke’s property and trains dogs out there. So Luke was like, ‘If anything, that line is staying. He goes, ‘That guy’s a buddy of mine, and I think nobody talks about that.”
But when Baldridge partnered with BBR Music Group/BMG to market the follow-up to “She’s Somebody’s Daughter,” the label insisted “Tough People” was his best option as an artist. Baldridge told Combs he thought he should take it back, and Combs agreed. And when the writers wanted to give Combs a songwriter credit for contributing a couple lines, he insisted on taking only 10% ownership, instead of 25%.
Schwarz subsequently worked more on the recording, cutting new parts and moving a lot of the existing instrumental support around to heighten the song’s drama and better emulate the acoustic demo’s spirit. Baldridge tried to match the story’s intensity in his final vocal. When he heard the results later, he went back in to re-cut the vocal on the second chorus and make that part more forceful ahead of the guitar solo. “I can’t sing the word ‘tough’ weak,” he reasons.
Stoney Creek released “Tough People” through PlayMPE on Oct. 25. While the hard times in “Tough People” might play into the issues of the day, Baldridge hopes he can remain neutral on the song’s controversies but still inspire people to be their best selves.
“I don’t want to have to do political interviews or anything,” he says. “This is where we’re at. Take it how you want to take it, and hopefully some good can come out of it.”
