C.J. Solar has slowly but steadily built a reputation as one of Nashville’s top singer-songwriters. At age 33, he’s perhaps best known for co-writing Morgan Wallen’s 2017 No. 1 “Up Down,” Jameson Rodgers’ “Some Girls,” and has written tracks for Jason Aldean and Justin Moore, and has also toured with legends Lynyrd Skynyrd and Hank Williams Jr. As an artist, he’s earned “New Artist You Need to Know” recognition from Rolling Stone.
But on The Songwriter Connection Podcast, Solar, whose new album Black Label Blues is set for release on Nov. 6, makes it clear none of it happened by accident. The key to his success is by continuing to put in the work.
“My last [days] of being at Belmont, I went, I’m going to try to write every day,” Solar tells host Dave Lenahan. “And my songwriting definitely made leaps and bounds.”
Turning Songwriting Into Two-A-Days
Once he signed his first publishing deal with Sea Gayle Music, co-owned by Brad Paisley, he doubled down.
“I was doing a lot of two-a-days,” he says. “I was writing five times a week, so I was probably writing six to eight songs per week those first couple years, really just trying to get better, constantly.”
Since then Solar has treated the songwriting workload as his own type of training camp.
“I remember Ralph Murphy had a quote: Don’t even play me something if you haven’t written 100 songs yet,” Solar says. “If you’re on number 20, you’re gonna laugh at number 20… at least write 100 songs before you start thinking you got something.”
With that advice, Solar admits to working extra hard early on, yet if he was being honest with himself, he wasn’t yet at the level of the writers he admired—and he was brutally honest about it.
“I could compare the songs that I was writing… and go, I can tell that my songs are not that,” he says. “I just knew that they weren’t that level.”
That self-awareness became a form of mental training. He leaned into hard feedback from NSAI (Nashville Songwriters Association International), where pros would mark up his work.
“They’d give you a frickin’ essay on why your songs suck,” he says, laughing. “But there was always some good feedback.”
Using Mentors to Play the Long Game
Mentorship kept him from getting discouraged. New Orleans songwriter Jim McCormick, one of Solar’s early champions, helped him understand the long game.
“I remember him saying, ‘Man, I can tell that you know that your songs aren’t there and that they’re gonna get there,’” Solar recalls. “He’s like, ‘You gotta limit your expectations, especially when you’re a noob.’”
His mindset of accepting where you’re at musically and trusting the process through good and bad is what carried the singer into the kind of pressure moments that would crush less-prepared artists. Take his debut at the Grand Ole Opry, for example.
“It was unbelievable,” he says. “I really don’t get nervous at shows, but I will say that I was pretty nervous for that one. That was the moment I’d really been looking forward to ever since I moved to town.”
By then, though, he had written hundreds of songs and spent years on stages big and small. The stress felt intense, but familiar.
“I’d been building up to that without even realizing it,” he suggests between the lines. All those co-writes, all those “bad” early songs, all the critiques—each one was a quiet rehearsal for when the spotlight finally hit.
Even his breakout hit “Up Down” came out of that same steady grind. Solar and co-writers Michael Hardy and Brad Clawson had the core of the song for about a year before it finally clicked.
“We wrote a verse and a chorus and kind of got stuck,” Solar says. “For what it was… it’s really verse and redo, which was frowned upon at that time,” he laughs. “But they cut it and just made it sound… man, I remember hearing it and going, ‘I don’t know what a smash is, but this feels like it.’”
The Formula Hasn’t Changed
Now, as Solar rolls out new music like his Black Label Blues project and keeps up a steady touring schedule, the formula hasn’t changed much from his Belmont days: Write a lot. Be honest. Take the hits—on the charts and in the critiques. Then show up again tomorrow.
“I knew my songs weren’t there,” Solar says. “I just knew they were going to get there if I kept writing.”