Story Behind the Song: Matt Stell, ‘Everywhere But On’
"Everywhere But On," the title track of Matt Stell's 2019 EP, is a personal song for the singer and songwriter: He and co-writers Paul Sikes and Lance Miller dropped a number of personal details into the lyrics, which find the narrator unable to fully move on after a breakup.
For Stell, however, those details are connected to his journey to Nashville and making a go at his career, rather than heartache. Read on for the story behind "Everywhere But On," in Stell's own words.
I was writing over at my buddy Paul Sikes' house, who's one of my best friends here in town, a songwriter. And he and Lance Miller, another writer friend here in town, we got together, and Paul threw out this title of, "I've moved everywhere but on."
We didn't even look at other titles after that. Because that's typically, in Nashville, where a song [starts]: We'll start with the title, kind of like a thesis statement a little bit. And once he threw that title out, we were we were right on the chorus. We knew what we wanted the song to do, and we wrote it fairly quickly, and when we had it done, we thought, man we had something we really we were really proud of.
And so then, you know, the next step there is turning that song in [to the publishing company]. And even before that -- I'll back up a little bit -- writing that song, it's just a lot of a lot of personal things of my life in that song. You know, like, a lot of that second verse: When I say my mail's still going to my mama's house, I still have mail that gets sent there because I wasn't able to get my mail because I was on the road so long before I moved to Nashville ... So, those kind of things, and then they once I did finally move to Nashville, working any kind of secondary side hustles that I could to kind of keep things afloat -- you know, all that stuff's true. And, you know, I've traveled all over the all over the country playing music, so that song was really a really a personal one ...
All of those things are super personal there ... It's always fun to connect into your personal life with the character in the song.
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