Behind the Song: Dustin Lynch's Riotous "Momma's House" – American Songwriter
by June 5, 2024
Dustin Lynch paints an image with his smoldering words in his hit single, “Momma’s House.” The angsty breakup track was penned by Rodney Clawson, Dylan Schneider, Justin Wilson, and Michael Lotten during a songwriter’s retreat in Nashville in 2018. Despite the subject matter of the song, the goal of writing it was not to get revenge on an ex but to tell a story that played like a movie in the listener’s head. “Momma’s House” was released as a single off Lynch’s 2020 album, Tullahoma, and cracked the Top 5 on the Billboard Country Airplay chart. Below, Schneider tells American Songwriter the story of how “Momma’s House” was written.
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“I wrote that in 2018. We were actually at a writers’ retreat here in Nashville and we had a bunch of guys come out. It was cool because I never got to write with Rodney Clawson who is one of the best and one of my favorites growing up that has written so many hits I love. He was in the room with us that day and Michael Lotten and Justin Wilson. The night before I had written with Michael and he played me the original track that we wrote the demo to. It was just awesome, it transitioned very well.
“So the next day we came in the morning. I walked in and Justin Wilson—he’s one of my favorite writers I get to work with, he’s just a ball of energy all times—and he gets right up in my face in the kitchen, He’s like, ‘Oh, man, do I have a song for you! ‘Momma’s House.’ And I’m like, ‘Are you talking about for that track that Lotten played me yesterday? How are we going to write a song called ‘Momma’s House’ to that? What are we going back to momma’s house?’ And then he told me the hook [Baby, I’d burn this whole town down / If it wasn’t for my momma’s house] and it was just cool.
“It was nothing really personal for any of us I don’t think, it was just a great idea. Sometimes, some of my favorite ways to write is not necessarily taking from my life, but just writing a song like you’re writing a script of a movie. That’s basically how we went into that song was let’s write the song as though we’re writing the script to the music video. You see every scene to the words that we’re saying. Then they put out a music video for it and it was just like that. It was awesome. I remember when Justin said that he’s like, ‘Let’s not even think about anything else other than just writing it like we’re writing a script for this idea of this song. Somebody saying, I’ll burn this whole town down because of this breakup and you broke my heart. There’s nothing here left for me.’ It ended up being really cool.
“Not every single song I’ve ever written has been because of something I went through. Sometimes it’s something that somebody close to me has went through, so you’re narrating a story through somebody else’s lens. I think about that a lot, ‘Let’s just write a song as though we were writing a script of a TV show or a movie or something. That’s great visually I feel like too lyrically with being able to play out every scene in your head when you’re listening to a song like that.”
Photo by Astrida Valigorsky/Getty Images
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