NICOLLE GALYON
FIRSTBORN

Award-winning singer, songwriter and producer Nicolle Galyon has penned nine No. 1 songs, including Miranda Lambert's "Automatic" and Dan + Shay's "Tequila." She's won the Academy of Country Music's coveted Song of the Year twice. She was named BMI Songwriter of the Year in 2019, earned a Triple Play Award for having three No. 1 songs in one year and produced RaeLynn's critically acclaimed, chart-topping album, Wild Horse, as one of the only female producers in country music. She partnered with Big Loud to create the female-focused record label Songs & Daughters. But her resume isn't what she wanted to convey with her long-awaited debut album, firstborn.

A raw, gripping, authentically transparent and utterly dazzling eleven-song audiobiography, firstborn is Nicolle’s life story and lived experiences in song form. After twenty years in Nashville, it was only after Nicolle relocated back to her hometown of Sterling, KS (pop: 2,248) during the pandemic that inspiration for the project fully struck her.

"The main catalyst was, 'What would I want my kids to know about me?'" Nicolle says. "How would I want them to know me as a mother, woman, and creator if it all ended tomorrow? I had the concept and I just knew I wanted to write the album chronologically as if I was writing my memoir to my kids," she says. "I wanted to do it now in real-time."

Being a writer, Nicolle started the process by noting concept words that she first called chapters and then turned into a tracklist. She jotted down phrases including winner, sunflower, tendencies, death bed, boy crazy, self care and others. Nicolle knew the experience of living in her hometown, dropping her kids off at her old school and jogging by her first house every day triggered emotions that helped her remember her identity outside of Nicolle Galyon, songwriter. She stared at the list daily and thought about her fellow songwriters with whom she would feel safe to write such personal songs. She scrawled their last names at the end of each title as if the songs were already complete. Then she called and asked if they would write with her.

"I did it very backward because usually you just get a date with random writers and hope that something happens in the room," she says. "I went about it like completely opposite."

Nicolle and her co-writers Jimmy Robbins, Sasha Sloan, Shane McAnally and Josh Osborne, wrote four songs for the album in the first two trips she made from Sterling to Nashville to write. She calls the songs her "tentpoles" and says they gave her confidence she could complete the project.

She wanted to start firstborn with "winner.," a word with double meaning as it is the name of the tiny South Dakota town where she was born and points to her roots as a child, her need to overachieve and the competitive nature of her life and career in Nashville. "I had to start with 'winner.' because I had recently put together that I was born in this tiny town of the same name. And my name, Nicolle, means victorious. I was like, 'That's so ironic.'"

When she added she is a classic firstborn and felt like she was an overachiever from the beginning, she knew she had a winning idea. "That's the arc of the record to me," she says. "You come out feeling like you have something to prove to yourself and others. And then by the end of the story, you don't have anything to prove to anyone because you just allow yourself to be. I think there's so much power in what we call things."

She says "winner." is the thesis for the album and tells listeners everything she intends to say in the next 10 songs.

She ended the list with "death bed.," a song for working mothers about the guilt that accompanies a career – and for her kids about how regardless of her accolades, they're her proudest accomplishments.

She had a few ideas in the middle – including "sunflower.” – which became an unguarded ode to her height and how it made her feel like an outcast as a child. "tendencies." leans into the fact that she doesn't know her biological father. She sings, "I've never been an alcoholic, but I've got tendencies." A lover of wine, Nicolle doesn't know if that's inherited or a habit.

With those four songs in place, Nicolle felt like she could shift her focus to what she wanted to say topically.

"I realized that it wasn't so much about writing songs from there," she says. "It was more about what I wanted to talk about in life and to communicate to my kids? What are my values?"

She went back and checked her list. She wanted a song about age ("younger woman.") and a song about gender ("boy crazy."), so her kids would know where she stood on the weighty topics.

Nicolle rounded out firstborn with two songs she had previously written that were recorded by other artists. She wrote "boy." before the birth of her son Ford, and Lee Brice recorded it. Pop star Camilla Cabello recorded her song "consequences.," but she wanted both for firstborn. She always intended to include them on her album.

"When I play those two songs out as a writer and co-writer, they're probably the most impactful version of me at a piano. I've just always known in my gut that there was a part of those songs that were uniquely me."

She returned to Sterling to shoot some promotional footage for firstborn and the process went so well that she and her team turned the videos into an intimate compelling visual and sonic panoramic that translates the album into a film set in the locations that inspired the songs. Nicolle didn't start the album-making process with her eye on commercial success. She wanted firstborn to be her legacy as a mom and a woman. Now that it's finished, she realizes the project is larger than her and hopes it inspires people to do what she did – take the leap.

"I'm doing this so that I have no regrets, so there's nothing left on the table from me and my family and that I can be a good leader to my children," she says. "If you have a gut instinct that you need to do something or create something or make something, don't talk yourself out of it."

For more information, please contact Asha Goodman, Catherine Snead 615.320.7753 or Carla Sacks 212.741.1000 at Sacks & Co.