RVSHVD on Finding His Old-School Roots in ‘Small Town Talk’

His hometown — Willacoochee, Ga. — sounds a whole lot like “Chattahoochee,” so it’s not entirely surprising that indie artist RVSHVD’s current single, “Small Town Talk,” employs many of the same values that inhabit an Alan Jackson song.

The red brick church, the tire marks he left on Main Street, his first broken heart and his grandmother’s grave marker all provide this relatable sense of RVSHVD’s upbringing, which is quite similar to the childhood that many country fans experience across America. In a very real way, “Small Town Talk” exists mostly because RVSHVD doesn’t tend to talk that easily about what he’s doing or where he’s from. He just kind of lives it.

“My dad will sit there and tell me the same story,” he notes, drawing an obvious contrast. “Even random people in the grocery store, if there’s somebody standing there, he’ll walk up — he don’t even know the guy — and he’s like, ‘This meat’s high, ain’t it?’ He don’t even know the guy! My mom, she ain’t going to say more than three words. That must be where I get it from.”

RVSHVD’s reserved nature was on full display in April 2021 when he took part in a writing retreat specifically designed to generate songs that fit him at The Penthouse, the home base for his manager, Jonnie Forster, located near the Beverly Center in Los Angeles. Four or five different rooms were set up with at least one “track guy” and one topliner, with each of those rooms aiming for a song in the morning and another in the evening across two or three days. It all started with a get-acquainted session, where RVSHVD shared a little about his personal history, his goals, his tastes and his philosophy. Still, the introduction wasn’t all that detailed.

“I think I remember Jonnie making some jokes about, you know, ‘Good luck trying to get a lot out of him, because he’s usually a man of few words,’ ” says singer-songwriter Josh Logan.

That’s apparently pretty accurate — it’s similar to the understanding that singer-songwriter Willie Jones, who shares Forster as a manager, has of him. “RVSHVD is like that,” Jones says, “simple, low-key, real chill, laid-back, really grounded and really thoughtful.”

Logan, Jones and Jason Afable all ended up in a room together that first morning, and as they sought a direction to write for RVSHVD, they fixated on that “man of few words” description. They batted around some ideas, then found themselves wondering what more they could learn about RVSHVD if, as an old adage suggests, the walls could talk. That became its own train of thought, and as they started chasing down what that could mean, Forster popped into the room for a bit. They told him where they were headed, and somehow the phrase “Small Town Talk” showed itself.

“Jonnie was a big part of that title,” says Logan. “I don’t remember if someone just threw out the title, or he really kind of got us going or encouraged us down that road.”

But it was enough to work from. Afable developed a bittersweet, arpeggiated chord progression on electric guitar, and they began building a hook that flipped the gossipy implication of “small-town talk” into a confident portrait of a man’s roots speaking for his character. The opening lines — “The way I was raised up/I don’t really say a lot” — came directly from the day’s conversation and set up the storyline that followed.

The phrasing in that verse was conversational, leaning into a fluid, hip-hop vibe near the end of the stanza, then lifted into a chorus melody that emphasized repeated three-beat phrases: “small-town talk,” “grade school walls,” “right from wrong,” for starters. The chorus’ images and its melodic components were classically country, forming a contrast with the flowy, hip-hop lead-in. It hinted at an artistic range that also showed itself in the span from the verse’s lower melodies to the chorus’ higher notes.

“A lot of singers got maybe one sweet spot,” Logan notes. “But for RVSHVD, I feel like his low tone is so rich and deep, and I just love that tone. But then also he has that upper range that just soars. So when he hits that, it just makes our job easier  because we can really utilize a different range, and we have [fewer] rules.”

The second verse painted an image of a broken-hearted young man who narrowly escaped tragedy, recounting an 18-year-old who drank a fifth of his dad’s Jack Daniel’s after his girlfriend broke his heart, jumped into his dad’s Cadillac and left tire marks on the road. The story wasn’t exactly RVSHVD’s — he changed the road to Main Street, his first overindulgence in alcohol was actually with Wild Irish Rose, and the tire marks he left were from playing with the gear shift in his mom’s car around age 10. But the narrative still hit close to home.

“When I first recorded the demo for it, I was getting choked up, and my wife, Angel, she was there with me,” remembers RVSHVD. “I’m tearing up, and I keep looking at her over in the chair, trying to make sure she don’t see me.”

The initial demo relied on the electric guitar part and drum with some other programmed parts thrown in. Afable produced several versions of it, though they had a hard time getting it right. RVSHVD, at some point, seemed to lose faith in it, so Forster suggested that Jones cut it. The song, he sensed, was too good to let go. Jones agreed on the song quality, though the opening lines didn’t really suit him.

“I talk a lot,” Jones says with a laugh.

He changed the street name and substituted Shreveport for Georgia to personalize it, but it never felt quite right.

“It was cool, but I felt like I was lying,” he admits. “Then he came back around, RVSHVD, like, ‘I want to do a version.’ I was like, ‘Do it and do it well.’ They changed the production, and I was like, ‘Whoa, that’s what I like to hear.’ ”

For that last go-around, Afable reached out to a multigenre Los Angeles production team, Dream Addix (aka singer-songwriters Michael Ferrucci and Chris Valenzuela, both of whom participated in the original retreat at The Penthouse), and they were able to meld just enough classic country pieces, such as fiddle and baritone guitars, to capture the song’s small-town essence and still feel contemporary. RVSHVD recut the vocals, and — since he had lived with “Small Town Talk” long enough —he had a different physical reaction to the song.

“It wasn’t tears no more,” he says, “but it was still chills on that.”

RVSHVD shot a video to “Small Town Talk” in his hometown, performing on the same football field where he used to play bass drum in the marching band and receiving a key to the city. The video and the song itself, released Nov. 3, shine a light on the same sort of small-town ethics at the center of country’s lexicon. RVSHVD knows it firsthand, and he expects the rest of his first album will create an even fuller picture of that heritage.

“Hopefully,” he says, “it’ll come out next year.”