When the Country Radio Seminar encouraged stations to step outside accepted norms during a March 19 panel — “The Disruptors: What if YOU Took a Risk?” — Bonneville/Denver director of operations Brian Michel challenged attendees to play Corey Kent’s “Empty Words.”
Kent’s collaboration with Koe Wetzel, “Rocky Mountain Low,” was still new to the top 20 on Billboard’s Country Airplay, and RCA wasn’t working “Empty Words” as a single. That didn’t matter; Michel heard a hit, and the song defied Kent’s own expectations, giving him two concurrent releases.
“We had Denver, Nashville, Dallas — like, big, big markets — adding it before we asked them to add it,” Kent remembers. “We didn’t anticipate it being a radio single, and some of the biggest markets in country music were playing it.”
Programmers weren’t the only ones who responded. Concert-goers reacted with intensity.
“It just became an accidental sing-along,” Kent says. “I mean, people are screaming this song. I never, in my wildest dreams, imagined people would want to hear this much soul in a country record, you know. But the people love it.”
“Empty Words” provided the final word when he co-wrote it on Jan. 21, 2025. It was the last day of a four-day songwriting retreat in which Kent had hosted six writers at La Rosa Ranch, a family property that allowed him to work close enough to home that he could spend time with his kids every night. For most of the trip, the writers split into groups of three, and Kent would drift between the two trios as they wrote different songs. But when two of his guests had to leave a day early, Kent spent the last day writing in one room with all four remaining composers: Joybeth Taylor (“Choosin’ Texas,” “Weren’t for the Wind”), Matt Roy (“Done,” “Wait Til You Have Kids”), Lydia Vaughan (“Don’t Tell on Me,” “Bar None”) and writer-producer Austin Goodloe (“I Can’t Love You Anymore,” “Rocky Mountain Low”).
They wrote “Motorbike” in the morning, then tried to generate one more song before dinner. There’s some disagreement about where the “Empty Words” title came from — four of the five were mentioned as the potential source. Goodloe then brought up a track on a lark. He’d created it with a handful of instruments prior to the retreat with a verse in a minor key, shifting into a brighter, major-key chorus.
“I basically had a session by myself for a song that didn’t exist,” he says, “but I knew that the vibe felt great.”
Kent had previously written a song with “empty bed” imagery that never quite jelled, but that paired well with “Empty Words.” Once they fit them together to form the hook — “I’m in this empty bed/ ‘Cause she’s over empty words” — they started building the verses.
“Anytime you have a great hook, we know what to do with the song,” Taylor says. “Sometimes when you’re searching, it just takes a minute, and you land on something, but with that one, I kind of feel like we all knew where to go with it.” Kent introduced a first line that emphasizes the guy’s isolation: He talks to the walls about his loss, and the walls talk back — not exactly a sign of stability.
“It was like the twist of the knife,” Kent says. “The knife was already in. This was just the twist of, ‘Oh, this guy’s lost his mind because of this girl.’” More specifically, as the end of the opening verse makes clear, he’s lost it because he realizes he pushed her away, telling so many false stories that now “even the truth sounds like a lie.”
As the song moved into the chorus, it didn’t just shift from minor key to major — the phrasing also changed from a fluid, conversational approach to a steady, persistent flow.
“If you do something, you messed up, you just go, ‘Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid,’” Goodloe notes. “It’s the same cadence over and over again. This is, you know, a more artistic version of that, like, ‘I will not talk in class, I will not talk in class, I will not talk in class,’ all these things that are rhythmic.”
One phrase in that cadence is the not-quite-right “half-heart apologies,” eschewing the proper “half-hearted” to maintain the cadence. “I guess my English teacher growing up would probably be upset with me,” Roy concedes, “but that’s fine.”
As dinnertime arrived, Vaughan started making a meal for her compadres, though she continued to participate in the writing process from the other room. “The kitchen’s right there,” Taylor says, “so she’s yelling from the kitchen, ‘What about this?’ We’re like, ‘Yes!’”
Roy offered the opening line of the second verse: a plea to “Mr. Webster” to come up with new words to help him out. (For some younger listeners, Webster is their first realization that previous generations relied on a physical dictionary). Paired with the walls from the first verse, it marks the second time in the song in which the guy talks to inanimate objects in his house.
Kent made a slight rhythmic change in verse two, asking Goodloe to use a punchy approach under a “sweet nothings” phrase, emphasizing another aspect of the character’s mistakes.
“[It’s] this ‘Bennie and the Jets’ thing, where I just want hard stops and I want people’s heads to bob during this section,” Kent reasons. As they reached the end of the text, they reiterated the protagonist’s long line of lies, underscoring his responsibility for his own torment.
“It took us a second to get that ‘howl’ line coming out of the second verse: ‘Been crying wolf so long/ She don’t want to hear me howl,’ which is my favorite line of the whole song,” Roy says. “It’s cool that it kind of matches his [brand].”
Roy sang the demo, allowing Kent to leave and see his kids, and Goodloe touched it up later, though he only needed about 40 minutes, he estimates, to do the bulk of the work, including a simple, restrained instrumental.
“That was just a first-pass guitar solo,” Goodloe says. “[It’s] almost like it’s a lyric, since there is no bridge — lets me just see what I have to say from the guitar.”
Kent sang the final vocal in Goodloe’s third-floor studio at Combustion Music’s office in a converted house on Nashville’s Music Row. Kent thought they were mostly done, though Goodloe felt as if they needed to have a studio band redo the parts he’d created. But he was rebuffed when he brought the song out during a session.
“[Drummer] Aaron Sterling goes, ‘Well, I’m not gonna play on that,’” Kent remembers. “Keep in mind, this is after I’ve been basically pleading with Goodloe [that] ‘You nailed it. It doesn’t need to be fixed.’ Aaron Sterling goes, ‘Those drums are perfect. Why would I go play it if you already did it?’”
Kent is in mild shock over the results. “Rocky Mountain Low” is No. 4 on the July 18 issue of Country Airplay, and “Empty Words” is rising at No. 45. He never expected he would be working two singles at the same time.
“Being one of, I think, five or six acts in all of country music with two songs on the radio at the same time,” he muses. “It’s like, ‘Which one of these doesn’t have seven busses?’”
That makes “Empty Words” full of surprises.
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