The temperature was in the 70s, and Taylor Austin Dye’s head was in the ‘90s.
On June 12 last year – the Thursday after Nashville’s CMA Fest – Dye had a job to do. She was set for an 11:00 a.m. writing appointment at the Brentwood home studio of songwriter Dan Agee. She’d just bought a used convertible, and she decided to put the CD player to work.
“I was listening to a Shania Twain album on the way to the write, you know – top down, it was a great day,” Dye recalls. “I went in there, and they said, ‘What are you feeling today? What’s going on?’ I was like, ‘Man, I’ve been listening to this Shania Twain record on repeat, and I would love to write something like that.’”
Well, not exactly like that. Dye wanted to inject a little Nickelback influence – “heavy drums, heavy guitar licks,” she explains – and as soon as she spoke those two references, Agee laid into a bristling, ascendant guitar riff. Songwriter Nick Wayne, the day’s third contributor, put in his own two cents when Dye mentioned a pro-female relationship story.
“Nick was like, ‘Well, what if you don’t need a man for that?’,” she recalls. “I was like, ‘That’s perfect. Let’s do that.’ And then we wrote it in about an hour.”
A feisty, powerful singer from Hazard, Ky., Dye is the first female signed to the country division of Jay DeMarcus’ Red Street label. “Don’t Need a Man for That” – eventually released as “Man for That” – would emerge as her first radio single for the company, showcasing her grit as well as her vocal power.
“Taylor’s a rough broad, you know what I mean?” says Lex Music Group founder Lex Lipsitz, her manager-producer. “She’ll throw down with you, but she’s also a woman, and she’s very girly, too. She loves makeup and loves getting dressed up and fashion and things like that. But she’ll also knock your front tooth out – you know what I mean? – if you piss her off.”
“Man for That” captured that determination and self-sufficiency, and unfolded much like the breezy convertible ride that got her to the appointment: top down. They knew what the hook would be at the finish. line and started from the opening note.
“The way I look at top-down writing, it’s so much easier for me to just get that [natural growth] of the song,.. almost like we’re live performing it for the first time,” Wayne says. “We actually don’t even know what’s about to happen.”
Here’s what did happen: Agee quickly pulled a track together around a stomping, four-on-the-floor bass, while Dye and Wayne developed a first-verse series of short “You don’t need to…” phrases – don’t need to “bait my hook,” “mow my grass,” “open my door.” The conclusion to the verse, “I don’t need a man for that,” set up the chorus, though that was challenging for a second. They wanted the melody to soar, and to change up from the shorter phrases in the opening frame.
“I remember Nick saying, ‘Taylor, just sing. Let’s not worry about lyric right now – just start singing, let’s see what happens,’” Agee recalls. “So, a lot of those long phrases are just what she’s saying in the moment. And Nick had his phone on record going, ‘Yes, that one.’ ‘Yes, that one.’ ‘Maybe not that one.’”
In the process, they pulled off a subtle, classic Twain move, modulating from a C blues scale to the key of E-flat. “The chorus, it modulates throughout the whole thing, which is such a ‘90s thing to do,” Dye notes. “I’m all for. it.”
That modulated chorus provided a temporary challenge in their top-down adventure. “I remember going around in circles about how we were going to get back, because it’s kind of in a differe.nt key from the first [verse], hence the Shania thing,” Agee says. “We really had to [change] the way th.ose last couple of lines landed to make it get back to the original riff and not feel out of left field.”
Lyrically, those phrases included a setup line that created a mild Nashville twist, capturing both Dye’s vulnerability and her swagger: “If you break my heart I’ll get you back/Baby, I don’t need a man for that.”
The second verse reversed the opening stanza’s point of view. Instead of “You don’t need to…” phrases, it rolled through “I can…” positives. The singer can “light my own smoke,” “make my own cash” and “take out my own trash.”
“Is the second verse going to kill a song or not?” Wayne asks rhetorically. “That’s a great topic that songwriters talk about, and it can be overthought. And so, it’s nice to just do the same thing but have the perspective change. We literally did the exact same thing. It’s just the person changed.”
After the second chorus, they modulated once more, shifting from E-flat to C major, slightly brightening the sound for a guitar solo.
“We played around for quite a while with it having another key change at the end, almost like Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You,’ with a bigger lift at the end for another chorus,” Agee says. “After quite a bit of that, we started to go, ‘Okay, we pushed it too far.’”
Agee’s wife was out of town, so with the house to himself, he stayed up through most of the night building out a full-production demo. Lipsitz and Red Street were ecstatic about “Don’t Need a Man for That” (as the demo was labeled), and they held the instrumental tracking session on Oct. 16 at Southern Comfort, the basement studio at Lipsitz’s Brentwood home, formerly owned by Waylon Jennings and Jessi Colter. Lipsitz played frequently in that studio with Shooter Jennings in the ‘90s as members of the hard rock band Stargunn.
“We always joke that the ghost of Waylon is watching us,” Dye quips.
They followed the demo’s outline, but amped up the sound, particularly in the opening verse, where Agee’s production was percussion-less. After some experimenting, drummer Miles McPherson ended up playing sticks on the rim, reminiscent of ZZ Top’s “La Grange,” in that section. “Miles is so great,” Dye says. “I would put him in my pocket and take him everywhere with me if I could.”
Dye encouraged guitarist Nathan Keeterle to find a tone that was “a little dirtier, a little grungier,” and he ended up stacking a biting, white Gibson SG with a thick ES-335. Lipsitz also boosted the sound a decibel or two on the chorus – not enough to notice, but enough to make it feel brighter.
When Dye recorded her final vocals, she knocked out a glass of bourbon, then powered her way through it. Lipsitz coaxed her to re-sing a few sections to make her Hazard-bred enunciations discernible. “I’m not trying to tame her accent, but otherwise you don’t know what she’s saying,” he observes. “That’s how country she is.”
Dye installed “Man for That” as her show opener, and Red Street released it to country radio via PlayMPE on March 2, setting March 30 as the official add date. It introduces her as an empowered voice with serious bravado.
“That song is a good pointer to who I am as an artist,” she says. “It’s very fun, it’s energetic, it’s rocking. I think that encapsulates who I am.”
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