Robby Klein
First, a lesson in being humbled: According to transcript time stamps, it was near the three-minute mark of our first interview that Shane McAnally dropped two numbers on me that, when combined, redefined what I thought was possible in the music industry. The numbers were 50 and one.
Granted, I was embarrassed I was unaware of this impressive detail — or, feat, I should say. We proud journalists typically scour the internet and peek under every virtual rock in search of nuggets of info to pose questions around. That random event in 7th grade theater class? Let’s hear about it.
Don’t get me wrong, I had done my fair share of research and was entering the interview with plenty of biographical information to throw him questions out the wazoo.
For instance, I read McAnally calls nearby Mineral Wells his hometown. I saw he’s won four Grammys as a country songwriter and started his own music publishing company, SMACKSongs, in 2012. I was surprised to see he co-hosted a primetime NBC songwriting reality show called “Songland.” It’s also not hard to uncover the detail that he co-wrote the music and lyrics for the Tony-winning Broadway musical, “Shucked.” I read his bio on Apple Music and several articles, most of which referenced the huge hits McAnally’s written for the likes of Reba McIntyre, Kenny Chesney, Morgan Wallen, Keith Urban, Kacey Musgraves, and more. And, yes, I knew some of those hits even topped the charts.
What I didn’t know was exactly how many McAnally-penned songs had reached such a summit.
Fifty.
That’s right, 50 No. 1 hits on the Billboard country charts.
But what caught me equally off-guard was the nonchalant way McAnally dropped this hearty bit of information.
“After 14 years of trying to do [the whole songwriting thing], I got my first song recorded, and that turned into a windfall,” he says. “It’s kind of crazy; I’ve had 50 No. 1s.”
“Fif … fifty?” I asked, so stunned by the number I assumed I misheard him.
“Yeah.”
“Shane, is that unheard of? Is that some sort of record?”
“Yeah, kind of.”
He could take the credit — the feat is as uncommon as a Fort Worthian who doesn’t have an opinion on brisket (in other words, two; there are two songwriters in the history of tracking the popularity of music who have 50-plus No. 1 hits, and McAnally is one of them) — but he doesn’t bite.
Instead, McAnally explains how the charts have altered over the past 15 years. He suggests he has an unfair advantage because of a change in the system and country playing nice as a collective, thus songs no longer stay at No. 1 for long. As he puts it, he just happened to hit when this shift occurred.
“Statistically, on paper, if you just use the numbers game, it would look like I’ve done more than [fill in blank with classic country artist],” McAnally says. “But it’s hard for me to say, ‘Oh, I’m the only one who’s done this,’ because there are the Kris Kristoffersons of the world who maybe had four No. 1s, but you can’t devalue someone’s catalog or their life’s work just because this strange number system started happening in the last 15 years.”
He’s also quick to point to his collaborators who help pen songs. In the prolific production facility that is Nashville country, it’s always a team effort, and McAnally has worked with countless A-list singers and songwriters to produce tunes that manage to rise above the cacophony of countless releases that go out at any given time.
But in the same breath, he admits he’s damn good at what he does. There’s a reason he has so many songs that stand out. And, yes, talent has a lot to do with it.
“I worked really hard at [songwriting], but it was also my gift,” he says. “It was what I was supposed to be doing. At a very early age, I knew how to mathematically do songs. I don’t know. I look back at some of the things that I wrote early on and that it didn’t make sense that I knew how to do it.”
This dichotomous combination of humility and confidence appear to be two of the main ingredients that make up McAnally’s personality and, when combined with his talent and perseverance, are reasons for his success.
I’ve admittedly never met McAnally in person. We had a couple of hour-long conversations over the phone, in which he’s as gracious and engaging as anyone, but his current Santa Barbara residency kept us from shaking hands and chatting over coffee or the like. So, rather than visual things like stature, hairlines, or mannerisms, my first impression was based solely on voice.
While he’s hopped a couple times between Nashville and California since his early 20s and has technically lived longer outside Texas than in Texas, his accent remains more Lone Star twang than Tennessee drawl. After all, once one gets west of Highway 360, the accent starts to thicken as the longitude increases. And given Mineral Wells is a one-hour drive west, we suspect McAnally will always carry his twang as a Texan tell.
And McAnally readily acknowledges his ability to tap into the Texas mindset. While I was asked not to give away too many details, I can say he is working on a project where this skill will suit the task at hand. “I am a really proud Texan,” he says, “but I also have that wink of ‘it’s another planet.’”
This unnamed project will serve as the follow-up to “Shucked,” the 2023 Broadway musical in which McAnally co-wrote the music and lyrics with Brandy Clark, one of his frequent collaborators. Robert Horn provided the book. And this zany musical about, of all things, corn, will make its Fort Worth debut at Bass Performance Hall Tuesday, July 29, and will run through Aug. 3. Being only an hour away from Mineral Wells, it’s a hometown show for one of the production’s creative minds.
“I’m trying to [make it to the showing],” he says. “I haven’t been to any of the [traveling] shows except for Nashville, and my Memaw, who lives in Azle, is really wanting me to come in so I can go with her and her friend.” But juggling so many creative projects is no doubt time consuming and taxing.
Regardless, the show will give Fort Worthians an up-close and live view of McAnally’s talents with words and melodies. Then again, we have little doubt you’ve already witnessed his songwriting chops, even if you didn’t recognize it at the time. Fifty chart-topping country tunes don’t vanish or go unheard, especially in Fort Worth. Not only have you heard his music, you’ve likely sung along — loudly and off key.
Robby Klein
McAnally was sleeping on his sister’s couch in Nashville when he found out a song he’d co-written with J.T. Harding had made it to No. 1 on the Billboard country charts, Kenny Chesney’s “Somewhere With You.”
As McAnally puts it, it was many years of nothing — writing songs into the ether and battling drug and alcohol addiction and financial woes.
“He had lost his car, his home, his record deal,” McAnally’s mom, Margaret Terry, says. “But he never gave up. I mean, he was still singing and trying to make it. And I knew he was going to make it because he wasn’t giving up at 35.”
Despite not coming from a musical family or having any “pedigree” in the industry, there was always a sense that McAnally wasn’t just going to survive but soar. That, no matter how long it took, he’d eventually catch his break, get discovered by a country music bigwig, and the rest would be history.
“I always knew it was going to work out for him,” his younger sister and best friend, Tiffany Young, says. “I knew he was too talented, and, also, he wasn’t good at anything else. He needed this to work out for him because he was just so good at it, and that’s what fueled his fire.”
Yeah, McAnally was all-in on songwriting from the word … you know what? Forget the word “go.” He was likely all-in on songwriting since he could form his first words, whatever those might’ve been.
According to Margaret, McAnally would frequently visit his grandparents as a kid, where he started listening to country music at the age of 3. “He would listen for hours at a time,” she says. “Barbara Mandrell was his childhood idol and still is.”
He’d start writing songs when he was 6 and performing at 12. By the age of 15, McAnally was a featured performer at the Texans Theater in Branson, Missouri. And the following year, he’d perform at Johnny High’s Country Music Review here in Fort Worth.
“He could light up a room,” his sister, Tiffany, says about his early years in Mineral Wells. “He was an entertainer from the start, whether it was singing or making people laugh, or he could just walk into a room and command it.”
Despite all the signs pointing to a career in music, McAnally decided to give higher education a shot and attended UT in Austin for one year. And one year of living in the world of academia is all it would take for him to shut his textbooks, pack his guitar case, and head to Nashville. That is, if he ever had his textbooks open in the first place.
“I spent my whole year basically writing songs,” McAnally, who said he failed every class his second semester, says. “I had never had the freedom to just [do what I wanted], even though I was supposed to be in class. But I didn’t have a parent over me saying, ‘Go to school.’ So, I just sat in my dorm room and wrote songs.”
In Nashville, the capital of country, he’d snag a record deal, a couple of publishing deals, and released his debut solo album in 2000, the self-titled Shane McAnally. But, beyond one song that squeaked into the Top 40 on the country charts, nothing was moving the needle. “So, I moved to LA to try to make something happen,” he says, before he ended up back in Nashville.
Tiffany, who had attended Middle Tennessee State University, was also living in Nashville at the time. She’d offer up her couch and helped him get a job as a waiter where she worked. It was a gig. It paid. But McAnally was still penning songs.
Before McAnally’s first No. 1, he co-wrote “Last Call,” which appeared on Lee Ann Womack’s 2008 album Call Me Crazy. The song did well, peaking at No. 14.
“He loved Lee Ann,” Tiffany says. “She was one of his favorites, so that was a huge deal. I don’t remember what number it went up to, but that was, like, ‘Okay, we’ve got some traction.’”
He’d follow this up with songs for Luke Bryan and Kenny Chesney, and the rest is, indeed, history.
“I remember the first time he played me [his first No. 1] song [‘Somewhere With You’],” Tiffany recalls. “[My brother and I] were in a parking lot and would always play songs. He had an iPod, and he would bring it home, and we would listen to mixes. And when he played me that song, I had full-blown chill bumps on my arms. I said, ‘Well, this is it. This is a huge hit.’”
Tiffany confirms that her chill bumps have been historically accurate in predicting No. 1 songs, which started occurring at a rapid pace.
“It was 14 years of nothing,” McAnally says, “and then it just sort of retroactively started to happen.”
According to Tiffany, “Shortly after [‘Somewhere With You’], he had another No. 1 hit. And then another one. And then another.”
In 2012, McAnally started his own publishing company, SMACKSongs, which now has 28 songwriters and offers management and artist development. As the company was just getting off the ground, McAnally hired Tiffany. “It was always kind of our dream to work together,” she says. “They hired me, and I don’t really think they quite were to the point that they needed me full time, but they made it work … probably a little sooner than they thought they would.”
There are few country artists — at least those in the upper echelons of stardom — who have yet to work with McAnally. And, it’s not necessarily just because he’s a walking, talking hit factory.
“He’s a great songwriter,” Tiffany says. “But, really, what I’m most proud of is the way that he treats people. When people are working with him, he will make them feel like they’re the most important thing. He has this way of making people feel good, and he believes in people. If he’s going to work with you, it’s because he believes in your talent and who you are as a person.”
Getty Images
Receiving the Grammy for Best Country Album with Kacey Musgraves, whose debut 'Same Trailer Different Park,' McNally co-produced.
Circa 2013: Just a couple years after his first No. 1, every other song on the country station seemingly has Shane McAnally as one of its writers. Many of these hit songs were co-written by Brandy Clark, a singer-songwriter who’d released an independent album, 12 Stories, that happened to catch the ear of Robert Horn, who had been tasked with writing a musical adaptation of the TV variety show, “Hee Haw.”
For those who don’t know, “Hee Haw,” a show whose heyday occurred in the 70s, is an amalgamation of a country fair, a dad joke convention, and a fever dream stuck inside a hay bale. Somehow the show lasted 25 years (you can still watch reruns on RFD-TV), and the Grand Ole Opry, who owned the rights, wanted to do a musical based on the characters from the show. So, Horn was tasked with creating a narrative out of variety show characters, and he wanted Clark and McAnally to pen the music and lyrics.
After five years of creating, recreating, writing, rewriting, and hiring a revolving door of producers, they finally opened the musical “Moonshine” in Dallas. While the “Hee Haw” title had gone, McAnally says the musical was still based on the show’s characters. Despite a successful run in the city to the east, the performances did not result in an invitation to Broadway, or even off-Broadway, or even off-off-Broadway.
Two years later, what seemed like a creative swing for the fences that quickly fizzled would reignite thanks to some six-degrees-of-separation Broadway contacts. A producer would get his hands on a script, sing it with praises, and pick it up for Broadway.
“The producer rights, at that point, had expired,” McAnally says. “So, we had to rewrite most of it.” The collective efforts of Horn, Clark, and McAnally resulted in “Shucked,” a high-concept musical whose concept is … corn.
Yes, corn.
The story follows Maizy (get it?), appearing as the sole plucky resident of a small community who leaves county lines in search of help when the town’s corn starts mysteriously dying. I was fortunate enough to catch a performance when the show came through Dallas in late 2024. And, without giving too much away, those who plan on seeing it are in for a real treat.
Though the musical takes place in the fictional Cobb County, USA [somewhere north of south and south of north], I didn’t think it a stretch to wonder if anything in the musical paralleled Shane’s life in Mineral Wells — whether there was anything biographical in the story or lyrics. So, I asked his sister and mother whether they saw flashes of his upbringing in the show.
After a minute of thought, they both responded, “No.”
And it's true, I can't find any evidence that McAnally had a childhood affinity for corn. That said, I do find some parallels between Shane and Maizy, the brave black sheep of Cobb County whose up-and-down adventure provides a lesson for the community.
McAnally grew up in a single-parent household, with his mother, Margaret, taking care of him and his sister, who’s nine years McAnally’s junior.
“I mean, we were just a very typical Texas family, except it was just my mom,” McAnally says. “But that wasn’t atypical either. I mean, there’s a lot of single moms raising kids.”
Residing in Mineral Wells, Margaret worked at a boutique clothing store with McAnally’s grandmother, which was one of four or five jobs she had at all times.
“With Shane being nine years older [than Tiffany], when he got into high school, she was still in elementary school, and he was able to help me a lot,” Margaret says. “He knew he had to pitch in.”
Mineral Wells, a town of just over 15,000 residents an hour west of Fort Worth, might be best known for its historic landmark: an abandoned and reportedly haunted hotel. Opening mere days after the stock market crash of 1929 and shuttering 35 years later, Hotel Baker's 14 empty stories remains Mineral Wells' tallest structure — water towers notwithstanding. It's no stretch to declare this pale-bricked relic of the Roaring Twenties the town's most striking distinction from other communities scattered across the Texas plains. And the majority of Mineral Wells natives are undeniably small-town Texan through and through. They will offer you sweet tea before asking your name, survive on healthy doses of Blue Bell and brisket, and are highly suspicious of anyone who drives a Prius.
While he expresses love for Mineral Wells, for McAnally, one of his deeper struggles was feeling unable to live openly and authentically in his home town.
Soon after he left home for college, he would come out as gay to his mom and sister.
“I was a gay kid who felt very outside [in Mineral Wells],” McAnally says. “Really, I just wanted to be cool and found myself chasing that true Texas thing. I had this idea of what it meant to be a man or a Texan or a rancher or a football player. And all of those things are still a part of me, but I can see now that they aren’t natural to me. But I understand. I was brought up in a place where that’s what was important, and I don’t have any ill feelings.”
Speaking to his mom and sister about the moment McAnally came out, their responses to the revelation were understandably different from one another, but both emphasized they love and accept McAnally for who he is.
“I am just so proud that he was able to be honest about who he was,” Tiffany says. “And I think a lot of his success could not have come until he did that.”
Margaret admits it took her a little while longer.
“I mean, I didn’t understand,” she says. “But it all worked out, and I couldn’t be prouder of Shane and his husband, Michael. I love them both so much.” Margaret’s fears also concerned potential negative reactions among her neighbors in Mineral Wells.
“How is everybody else going to take this? I knew I was okay with it, but what is my best friend going to say?”
“So, what was the reaction?” I ask.
“Everybody said, ‘It’s going to be fine. Shane is Shane. We’re not going to love him any less.’”
And within the country music industry, where McAnally’s open about his sexual orientation, he’s clearly a hit songwriter before anything else, which is exactly how he prefers it.
“I mean, I wasn’t just gay, I was also the biggest songwriter in Nashville,” McAnally says. “And it’s been interesting because those are two things that seem like they shouldn’t go together. But I was able to establish myself as a songwriter first, which is what I always wanted. Being gay is just a part of who I am, but I don’t want it to be the lead.”
McAnally now lives in Santa Barbara with his husband, Michael, and their 12-year-old twins, Dash and Dylan. And he has more projects — songs, musicals, comedy shows — in the works than one can possibly keep track. Perhaps it’s the result of forever chasing the thrill of his biggest career accomplishment: the opening night of “Shucked” on Broadway.
“It felt like all 50 of those No. 1s happening at one time,” McAnally says. “It was unbelievable. I mean, I say it’s the best and worst thing that ever happened to me because it’s a high that I will chase probably until it either happens again or I die.”
Our money’s on the former.
Interested in seeing Shane McAnally's "Shucked"? You can purchase tickets at the Bass Performance Hall website here.
