Ashley Hylbert
Tucked away in a quiet booth at Green Hills’ tony RH Café, Nicolle Galyon is sipping a glass of champagne. Her eyes light up when she talks about her family (and her career); she laughs easily; and she holds court comfortably.
As the tall blonde leans back in her seat, she looks every bit the superstar. But Galyon has made a career of working behind the scenes. The 2019 BMI Songwriter of the Year has penned hit after hit for others, including Dan + Shay’s monster crossover single “Tequila,” Miranda Lambert’s ACM and CMA Award-winning “Automatic,” and Camila Cabello’s Billboard Top 20 hit “Consequences.” As of last summer she can also add record exec to her résumé, thanks to her female-focused record label, Songs & Daughters, founded in partnership with Big Loud Records. It’s an ironic twist for a Belmont alum who moved here to be a record exec, but found her true calling in songwriting.
“I told everyone in my hometown, ‘I’m moving to Nashville because I want to manage artists or work at a record label,’” Galyon says. “I kind of did the opposite of what a lot of people here do. They come to perform and then they end up working behind the scenes. I had never really been out in front. I wanted to be behind the scenes.”
Galyon grew up in the small town of Sterling, Kansas, where she played classical piano and sang in the choir. But she never took center stage.
“I was always the girl behind the girl—the girls that were the singers and went to contests or sang in church,” she says. “I was always the accompanist because I was the piano player.”
Ashley Hylbert
Galyon was also the editor of her school yearbook and spent summers working for the local newspaper. But despite a lifelong love of writing, the self-proclaimed country music superfan who grew up worshipping the genre and its stars with her mom explains that she never thought about writing country music.
“It’s almost laughable now in hindsight,” she says. “I grew up knowing who these songwriters were but I didn’t realize what songwriting was—what it really looked like—until I got here. And then I was like, ‘Wait. I think I’m a songwriter.’”
From there, Galyon spent years honing her craft and learning how to be part of a team. In her early days, she wrote alone, which scored her a publishing deal. But often, writing in Nashville means collaborating.
“I had to kind of learn on the fly how to just be a chameleon, being thrown in the room,” she says of early cowriting sessions. “It didn’t just take a couple writes. It took years for me to learn and I think I’m still learning every day.”
Galyon compares that leap of faith to her new venture with Songs & Daughters.
“In the beginning [as a songwriter], it was a lot of learning to be brave enough to say a lot of really bad ideas in front of people. It was very vulnerable and very scary,” she says.
“That’s where I am now. Starting a baby company, I’m in rooms I’ve never been in before and having to use that same muscle of being brave enough to say an idea, not knowing if everyone in the room is going to laugh at me. I’ve never so much worked at a record label, let alone run one. I’m in a really fun, scary, vulnerable, empowering, all those things season, where I’m learning, but I’m also leading at the same time. I think finding the balance between those is where I’m at right now.”
Ashley Hylbert
But why start a label now? Galyon says that wasn’t something she’d planned. In fact, it was born out of an offhand joke Galyon made at an artist showcase.
“I was invited to see a girl named Madison Kozak play, and I was blown away by her. She was so good live. I was like, ‘She is the whole package.’ I was looking around the room going, ‘She’s going to get a record deal at any moment,’” Galyon says.
“When I introduced myself, I was really just making a backhanded joke at how good the show was. I said, ‘I’m Nicolle Galyon. Good to meet you. I just started a record label in my car on the way over here,’ just kind of being a smart aleck. Seth [England, Big Loud partner] had never heard me say something like that.”
The seed had been planted.
“About a month later, Seth and I were at dinner and he said, ‘Why don’t we start a record label?’” she recalls. “He said, ‘I think you should be the label.’ “I remember sitting there at Kayne Prime and I was so excited I started hugging myself. I’d said I wanted to work for a label, but I’d never thought I’d start one. Once I said it I couldn’t unhear it.”
Proving that there’s an element of truth behind every joke, Galyon made the move to label founder. And in the process, she made her pre-college dreams come true.
“I joke that songwriting was my Plan B because Plan A was to work at a label or something,” she says. “I thought that was the full circle. Now that I have a label, I’m like, ‘Wow. Maybe you did really know at a young age what you were supposed to be doing.’”
For Galyon, the label was more than a career move. It was a chance to continue a decades-long passion: supporting female artists. The song is the art, and the women with whom she works are the daughters.
Ashley Hylbert
“My vision for Songs & Daughters is, yes, it’s a label but it’s more than that. It’s a development house. I want it to be an incubation space for people that develop and to be nurtured musically but also emotionally and mentally,” she says.
“How can you nurture the product and also the person at the same time? It just seems like songs and daughters metaphorically have a lot in common. As a writer we always talk about our songs as our babies. That’s kind of where the name came from. Songs and daughters are both born. Songs and daughters are both timeless. Songs and daughters are both all of these things.”
As a mother of two (with husband, fellow songwriter Rodney Clawson), Galyon has plenty of practice nurturing. Son Ford is four, and daughter Charlie is six. When Galyon won her BMI Songwriter of the Year Award in October, Charlie was in the crowd to see her mother take the stage.
“I think, in big moments, I always tend to zoom in. When I zoom in on that night, I remember seeing certain people’s faces and I remember just looking at my husband holding my daughter. It was a gratitude explosion,” she says.
“That award was something that, to be honest, I was always too afraid to even put on my list of something that I would want to accomplish because it just felt too big. If I told myself that I wanted to get that and then I didn’t, I didn’t want that to steal my joy from everything that I did have. So I never would let myself think about it. When I found out I won [six weeks before the ceremony] I just laid on my floor and screamed. I didn’t see it coming.”
As for bringing Charlie (and Ford) to events like that one, Galyon says it’s important for her kids to see her work in person so they understand why she does it.
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“I want them to see me love what I’m doing,” she says. “Early on in motherhood, I remember there was a day that it switched or me. I quit telling my kids, ‘I’m sorry. I have to go to work.’It turned into, ‘I really want to go do this because I love what I’m doing.’ I want them to know that I’m taking responsibility for my happiness and for my dreams and just being authentically me.”
She points to the idea that if kids are to grow into great adults, the grownups around them better be a great advertisement for adulthood.
“I don’t take my daughter to the BMI Awards because I want her to think that she has to start a record label some day, I just want her to know that she doesn’t have to answer to anybody else about what she wants to be.”
Galyon also surrounds herself with a tribe of successful, fabulous women, all of whom inspire her to keep championing female creatives.
“There’s some special sauce in Nashville right now. There is a creative burst of women really supporting each other—women supporting women, it’s such a tired phrase, but it’s real,” she says.
“So many of my friends are being brave and starting companies. Even in my little writing community it looks so different. When I was in college and trying to get a publishing deal, I didn’t feel like there were a lot of examples of female songwriters who were having success and also having families. No one was saying it out loud but what I heard was maybe you can’t have both at the same time. Now, 15 years later, all the women that are having success have families.”
Galyon gets emotional thinking about the reaction she elicits from young female writers. Her eyes shine with unshed joyful tears as she recalls their words.
“I have girls from Belmont walk up to me and say, ‘I want to be just like you. I want to be a songwriter and be a mom.’ They’re not just saying they want success. They’re not just saying they want a family. They’re saying they want both. That’s the biggest compliment."
Songs and daughters, indeed.