Jordan Davis on How His Terrific ‘Tucson Too Late’ Turns on a Two-Lane Twist 

It’s an understated song with loads of longing and alchemical alliteration.

“Tucson Too Late” takes Jordan Davis out of the general pockets he has explored in previous singles. Contrasting with experienced ballads “Buy Dirt” and “Next Thing You Know” on one side, rock-edged productions “What My World Spins Around” and “Singles You Up” on the other, “Tucson” rides a midtempo pace with traditional country roots.

“This is the type of song that I grew up on,” Jordan says. “This feels like I could have picked this song up and put it in the playlist that my dad was listening to whenever I was falling in love with country music, whether it’s ‘Watermelon Crawl’ or ‘Holes in the Floor of Heaven,’ ‘Check Yes or No.’ And maybe it is the nostalgic kind of sound that makes the song a little extra special.”

It doesn’t hurt that “Tucson” is the product of a friends-and-family foursome: Davis, Jacob Davis, Josh Jenkins and Matt Jenkins, the group that penned “Buy Dirt.” It definitely helps that the melody makes effective use of musical tension, hitting the kinds of notes that make listeners lean forward in their seats, edging toward resolution. That happens, in fact, three times in the last line of the chorus.

“There’s an ache to that s–t,” says Josh.

Josh had the original title, “Tulane Too Late,” which — by referencing a New Orleans university — tugged on the Davis brothers’ Louisiana roots. He brought it up during a 2022 writing session that Jordan had to miss. In its first incarnation, the title linked Tulane and two-lane highways, though the school’s real-world location is in the center of a start-and-stop urban grid. The three writers toyed with other possible locales that suggested wide-open terrain and landed on Tucson.

“That title feels classic,” Matt says. “When you say ‘Tucson,’ it just fits the story of getting somewhere too late, the girl’s already gone. Nothing feels more lonely and sad than a lonely cactus out in the desert, a tumbleweed rolling across the road.”

The three writers played a bit with the idea but didn’t commit to any specific direction. Jacob called Jordan later and relayed the “Tucson Too Late” title, firing up his brother’s songwriting instincts.

That came in handy when the other three joined Jordan on tour a few weeks later, on July 16, 2022, to write on the bus outside the Magic Springs Water & Theme Park in Hot Springs, Ark. They had no new ideas that day, so Jordan asked about “Tucson.” The city name triggered thoughts of classic country tunes “Marina Del Rey” and “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” and Jordan specifically suggested they capture the tone of “Miami, My Amy,” a Keith Whitley single that also benefits from blatant wordplay.
Josh slid into a slightly unusual progression, strumming a two minor chord to kick off the chorus on a then-new guitar.

“It’s a really crappy nylon that I bought for like 150 bucks at Guitar Center,” he recalls. “It doesn’t stay in tune, but it was the first time I took it out on a bus run, and I think there was some spirit to this gut-string that paired with the vibe and the chords and the hook. This sounds hippie-dippie, but it was like it was inviting us to explore some of those chords.”

After inserting a lonesome, descending guitar line into the stanza, Josh came back to the two minor, and they logged the chorus’ last two lines of lyrics, emphasizing the three unresolved notes in the melody on the way to the hook. They reverse-engineered the chorus’ words from there, the guy “racing through the desert” to stop his woman from leaving on a jet plane, realizing the whole way that he would not make it.

Why doesn’t he just call her? “I wanted to answer that in the video,” says Jordan. “We have him run over his cellphone.”

Backing up to the song’s beginning, Josh fashioned a five-note lead-in — similar to the guitar in Rodney Crowell’s desperate “Ashes by Now” — then gave the verse a different version of the chorus’ descending motif, this one akin to Danny O’Keefe’s desolate “Good Time Charlie’s Got the Blues.” In the song’s opening two lines, the protagonist pondered whether the relationship had simply been a mirage.

“I can’t remember who said it — that wasn’t me,” Josh notes. “But it was such a cool way to play on the desert, Tucson — the lonely aesthetic — in a fresh way.”

They moved to the three minor — another out-of-the-norm chord — for the pre-chorus, and it sounded so good that they repeated that pre-chorus in the second verse, shortening the verse to reach it earlier. They returned to the three minor one more time in the bridge, dropping a reference to Merle Haggard’s “Silver Wings” during that stanza.

“The 16-year-old me that would be listening to George Strait sing ‘Marina Del Rey’ or ‘Galveston,’ or one of these songs that would have some of those chords, would be proud,” says Matt.

The four writers made a guitar/vocal work tape over the sound of the air-conditioning and the bus door — “I think somebody was making coffee during the second verse,” Jordan says — then passed that rudimentary recording to producer Paul DiGiovanni (Dustin Lynch, Travis Denning). It was, in turn, the reference tape during a Nov. 7 tracking session at Nashville’s Sound Stage for the studio band: guitarists Derek Wells and Ilya Toshinskiy, drummer Nir Z, keyboardist Alex Wright and bassist Jimmie Lee Sloas.

DiGiovanni gave them plenty of leeway to capture a less-is-more, classic country vibe. Nir Z played on the rim almost all the way until the second chorus before he squarely hit the snare drum. (DiGiovanni would later give the first-verse drum a slightly trashy sound with a “rim crunch” effect.) Wells threaded a baritone guitar part that recalls “Wichita Lineman”-era Glen Campbell in the track and heightened the tension with judicious swells over the key three minor chord in both pre-choruses.

“He’s doing this little fake steel thing,” notes DiGiovanni. “It’s just like a volume pedal on a clean electric guitar with some reverb.”

To differentiate the bridge’s three minor from the pre-choruses, they dropped the quasi-steel; instead, harmony singer Trey Keller piled up 13 background vocal tracks in that passage, staggering them across several entry points. “I didn’t really have a super plan for that,” DiGiovanni concedes. “That was just part of what we had, and we rolled with it.”

“Tucson” and “Damn Good Time,” the leadoff track for Bluebird Days, were both recorded the same day after the rest of the album was completed. Jordan envisioned “Tucson” as the second single, though “Next Thing You Know” supplanted it, based on heavy streaming. MCA Nashville finally released “Tucson” to country radio on Aug. 7 via PlayMPE.

“I was pushing myself as an artist and as a writer to do something that maybe a fan would listen to and be like, ‘Hmm, I wouldn’t see him put a song out like that,’ ” says Jordan. “I love the song, I love the cut of it. Let’s see how it shakes out.”