Allen Shamblin

All right, I'm gonna cut it, and then it becomes a huge hit for them, and then the songwriters are still kind of in the background.

So I'm picking, as my number one song, two artists that are artists by the fact that they are songwriters at the highest level, and one of 'em was one of the only people that met with me when I went to Nashville on that very first tr- trip, the ex-football player Mike Reid, and his writing partner Allen Shamblin.

And it's not only a song that they wrote for Bonnie Raitt, and it took them months to write.

I mean, they had a weekly writing thing and they kept on...

Then, surprise, Robert Hazard.

Oh my God, he wrote Girls Could Have Fun for Cyndi Lauper.

And number one, I Can't Make You Love Me, the greatest song ever written, by Mike Reid and Allen Shamblin.

All right, my top five.

It was indeed.

Allen Shamblin.

Tom Douglas.

Oh, yeah.

OK, so, Tom, you then had these big hits with Tim McGraw on Grown Men Don't Cry, on Lady A's I Run to You.

And then in 2010, you and co-writer Alan Shamblin took home all those top songwriter awards that I just mentioned with the monster and timeless song that Carrie mentioned at the opening of the show, The House That Built Me.

Wow.

And that one, the ACM, the CMA, the first, it's always the first ever song of the decade that the ACMs gave in 2019.

And like Carrie was saying, the imagery in that song, the lyrics, the melody.

So a lot of folks wonder, like, how long does it take to write a song that hits all those check marks and wins all those awards? How long was that particular song in its creative process?

Well, it's Alan Shamblin, my brilliant co-writer.

It was his idea.