"What Are You Gonna Tell Her?" is a song written and recorded by American country music artist Mickey Guyton, which was released on March 6, 2020, as the first single from her third EPBridges and was subsequently included on her debut album Remember Her Name.
Guyton was inspired to write the song when she met a young woman who had just arrived in Nashville with the intention to pursue a career in country music. She asked Guyton what she had to look forward to about following her dream and Guyton realized that she didn't have a single good thing to tell her. Additionally, while attending a Grammy party in L.A., Guyton remembers looking over at a table of female artists and wondering what they had to go through to achieve success in the male-dominated music industry. Of these two events, Guyton explained that “I remember thinking to myself, ‘We don’t own ourselves’. We are the change in these people's pocketbooks, and we are sacrificing everything for this.”
Following the Grammys, Guyton flew back to Nashville for a songwriting session with Canadian artists Victoria Banks, Emma-Lee and Karen Kosowski. The four women started sharing stories of the difficulties they've experienced as women in both the music industry and the wider world which eventually resulted in the writing of "What Are You Gonna Tell Her?" Of the song, Banks stated that “I remember thinking ‘Oh man, radio is never going to play that.’ Then I was like, ‘I don’t care, because it’s more important to say it.” After completing the song, Guyton considered whether this was the end of her career in country music as she did not believe a song so raw would be accepted and, after ten years in Nashville, she still struggled to understand what the genre wanted her to be.
Speaking on the song, Guyton explained “I was trying so hard to fit into the stereotype of what country music is, that I forgot why I fell in love with country music. We’ve been in this period where it’s all about having a good time and drinking and girls. It’s so heavily male-dominated that I don’t hear myself, and I don’t see myself within it anymore. Country music is three chords and the truth. So I wrote my truth.”[1]
Content
Lyrically, the song is a ballad about gender discrimination, criticizing the injustices brought upon young women, people of color and children with big dreams. The chorus asks four simple yet devastating questions: "What are you gonna tell her when she’s wrong?/Will you just shrug and say it’s been that way all along?/What are you gonna tell her when she figures out/That all this time you built her up just so the world can let her down? What are you gonna tell her".[2]
Live performances
Guyton performed the song at the Country Radio Seminar in February 2020, where she received a standing ovation. Reviewers called the song "powerful and "transcendent", with Guyton's co-writer Victoria Banks tweeting “I'm still shaking. We wrote this three weeks ago from the gut. Today I watched [Guyton] bring the Ryman full of radio execs to their feet with it. God bless her for being brave enough. It was like she reached up and grabbed a giant elephant that we know is in the room, then pulled it down and showed it to everyone.”[3]
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
