Josh Turner- Whirlwind (AUDIO)
INTERVIEWER: “It’s got that barn burner feel and I love the production on it, but where, where did that come from when you guys wrote that?”
TURNER: “So for me, anytime I write a song, um, especially by myself, but even a lot of times when I’ve, when I’m co-writing with somebody, you know, it always comes from a title. The title always comes first with me, uh, predominantly anyway. Uh, and so Whirlwind was a title that I had written down and I knew kind of what I wanted to write, but then when I sat down with Mark, it’s so funny, you know, we were talking about the evolution of this record and how it starts out one way and ends up another.
“I wrote this song, I don’t even know, it was like 2015, something like that. I mean it’s an older song and I had wanted to cut this, I don’t even know, like probably, you know, seven years ago, something like that, but it just never happened. But the first time that I had played it for Kenny, he had kind of come up with a different chord progression on one or two of the lines in the chorus, which kind of gave it a little bit of a lift. And at the end of every verse and chorus, I would always kind of go down, but he wanted me to go up. And so it was just kind of messing with my head and then it just kind of got swept under the rug for a lot of years as I was making a lot of passion projects and everything. And so this record comes along and I bring it back up and we really felt like it kind of had that potential of like, if you remember the fiddle intro on Kenny Chesney, ‘She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy.”
“We were trying to find like that signature musical lick that you know, that could really make this song kind of come to life. And so we had Stuart Duncan come in and just play around with it on the fiddle. And he, I think he did a great job, but as far as writing this song, Mark Normore and I have written more songs than I can count. And this was one of those songs that is classic Josh Turner and Mark Normore cleverness. There’s a lot of funny lines in this song. It even starts off with one where it says, “I was out standing in my field”. And then in the chorus, it’s like, I remember Kenny’s first reaction to it. He was like, oh my gosh, he’s like, this rhyme’s been here forever and you’re the first one to discover it. Where it’s like, you know, it’s like “I’m in a whirlwind, she’s a mighty strong girlfriend”. And so it just, it goes from there and it’s just, it uses all these metaphors of like, you know, a tornado just kind of ripping through a, a neighborhood or whatever and just leaving a path of destruction. But it just kind of talks about how strong this girl’s love is.”
Interviewer: “Yeah, it’s a fun one. And you mentioned earlier, I mean, do you think part of the reason that it came back around right now is just because of the whirlwind that your life has been the last couple of years?”
Turner: “Well, that and, you know, I’ve always believed in this song. You know, there’s a lot of songs that, you know, I’ve believed in over the years that didn’t make it on a record, but that doesn’t, you know, keep me from believing in those songs. There’s still probably a lot of songs that I’ve written in years past that will probably end up on a future record. I don’t know. Just kind of depends on what kind of vibe the record is, you know, becoming. And so, but yeah, I think it, you know, as far as my life and everything, it’s definitely been a whirlwind, but I’m still here to… It’s like George Jones, I live to tell it all.”
