'A Beautiful Noise': How 5 Nashville women helped write a Grammy-nominated Song of the Year

In October of 2020, Brandi Carlile and Alicia Keys stepped onto a soundstage to film and record a brand-new duet. Their surroundings were striking: two grand pianos sat opposite one another at the center of an all-black room, flanked by rows of shimmering white lights.

But on a musical level, it couldn’t have been much simpler: Just two instruments and two singers, delivering a deep and urgent message ahead of the 2020 election.

“I have a voice,” Keys began over sparse piano chords.

“Started out as a whisper, turned into a scream/ Made a beautiful noise/ Shoulder to shoulder, marching in the street/ When you're all alone, it's a quiet breeze/ But when you band together, it's a choir of thunder and rain/ Now we have a choice/ 'Cause I have a voice.”

Their performance of “A Beautiful Noise” premiered that month on the CBS special “Every Vote Counts: A Celebration of Democracy.” Viewers may have only seen Carlile and Keys on that stage, but in the spirit of the song, there was a choir of brilliant women behind the scenes who had helped bring it to life.

“A Beautiful Noise,” nominated for Song of the Year at Sunday’s Grammy Awards, was the work of eight songwriters, including Keys and Carlile.

It began with five Nashville talents – Ruby Amanfu, Brandy Clark, Hillary Lindsey, Lori McKenna and Hailey Whitters – before heading west to its performers and songwriter/producer Linda Perry.

The song was originally conceived as part of a celebration of the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage, and was written remotely over several sessions. Being nominated for one of the Grammys’ biggest honors came as a surprise to many of its co-writers. While they’re looking forward to the ceremony (where some writers will be meeting in person for the first time), there’s also a sense that this is still just the beginning for “A Beautiful Noise.”

“I just have a really strong feeling it's going to go far,” Amanfu said. “There's a whole lot more life that this message has.”

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She may not be on its credits, but “A Beautiful Noise” wouldn’t exist without Ali Harnell.

In 2020, the president and Chief Strategy Officer of Live Nation Women had spent nearly a year planning a multi-city event to celebrate the centennial of the 19th amendment as well as the 55th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 – and to get out the vote for 2020.

The pandemic forced her to cancel those plans, but during a phone conversation, Harnell and Clark came up with an alternative: why not spread that planned message in a song?

Clark set up the initial co-writing session over Zoom with Lindsey, McKenna and Whitters. It was a winning combination, but not without its hurdles.

“It made me realize that in a lot of combinations I write (in), there's always a guy,” Clark recalled. “Doing it on Zoom was tough, and also getting women to want to do it, not quite understanding where it was going. Because I told everybody from the top, ‘This might be one of those things where 20 people end up (working on it).’”

Still, much of the song’s core was created in that first session, including its melody, verse/chorus structure and “I have a voice” refrain. From her parents’ house in Orange Beach, Ala., Lindsey put together the song’s first demo, recruiting her young niece to sing the second verse and chorus.

“It will shake your body to the core,” she said of the recording. “It was beautiful and brilliant, I thought, in its original form. But then it became even bigger.”

As the song began to take shape, protests for racial justice began around the country in response to the death of George Floyd. The moment dovetailed with a broadened vision for “A Beautiful Noise.”

“It wasn't just about suffrage, and it wasn't just about women using their voice and their vote,” Harnell said. “It was really standing up for social justice everywhere, on all fronts.”

In June, as protests reached their peak and national conversations on race swelled, the group reached out to Amanfu. It was an emotionally exhausting time for lifelong Nashvillian and Grammy-nominated songwriter, who was suddenly fielding an overwhelming number of requests to co-write songs about social justice and lend her perspective as a Black woman. “A Beautiful Noise” was the rare offer she took on.

“I believed the message,” she said. “I believed it was sincere, and I believed it was inclusive.”

Listening to the demo in her kitchen, she crafted the song’s third verse on her own.

“I will not let silence win,” she sang. “When I see all the pain our people are in, there's no other choice/ 'Cause I have a voice.”

“I'm not saying that my story is unique, but I definitely realized that there is a responsibility with the platform that I have,” Amanfu said. “If I'm going to (contribute to the song), it can't be too soft around the edges. It has to be direct. I have to make not just bold statements, but assertions of what we will and will not stand for.”

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Brandi Carlile: 'Our voices count'

Throughout the journey, another figure had been, in Harnell’s words, quietly “riding shotgun": Brandi Carlile. After Amanfu’s contribution, the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter became the song’s new steward. She connected with Perry and ultimately brought Keys onboard to perform it with her – which she called “an absolute dream and honor” in an email to the Tennessean.

“(The song) represents a group of incredible women from all different walks of life coming together with a universal message of hope and empowerment,” Carlile said. “It is an important reminder that we all have a voice and that our voices count.”

Though they’d already contributed their share, the Nashville songwriters say Harnell and Carlile kept them in the loop on every new version of the song as it continued to evolve. McKenna compared the process to seeing your kid go off to college.

“The song itself was supposed to represent women across the board as best it could,” she said.

And that's hard for four women to do. So it made sense that it kept evolving and going into these other worlds.”

There’s no separate studio recording of “A Beautiful Noise” – the version you’ll find on streaming services is the same live performance Carlile and Keys gave on TV. When it aired, the song’s writers saw it come to life along with the rest of the world. Harnell got to see it happen in person.

“Sitting there on the floor in front of those two pianos, watching them finally record it to be put into the world was like the birth of my child,” she says.

One year later

When the nominees for the 64th Grammys were announced last November, it had been more than a year since “A Beautiful Noise” had been released. Its nomination was a huge surprise to several of its writers – Clark, for example, noted her own nominations in the Americana categories well before realizing she was a first-time Song of the Year nominee. Seven of the eight women are previous Grammy nominees and winners, but Clark had the honor of calling Whitters about her first nomination. Whitters remembered being slightly alarmed by the call.

“I was like, 'Give me a minute, Brandy. I'm in a public place. I feel like you're about to drop some news on me, and I don't know if I'm gonna cry or laugh.’ She told me and yeah, I definitely screamed. It was just a complete surprise and huge honor. All of women on this (song) are women that I have mad respect for. To be able to even have my name on the same song as them, I feel like it's a win already.”

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There’s also a sense that the Grammys aren’t the most important race of 2022 for the forces behind “A Beautiful Noise.”

From its earliest sessions, Harnell and others imagined the song – in the spirit of its message – would be an ever-evolving work, finding new authors and performers from a variety of backgrounds. On YouTube, you can see it performed by artists on multiple continents, from Canada’s Universal Gospel Choir to a young student rehearsing it for her school’s talent show.

“We really are working to bring that movement to life,” Harnell says. “There’s stuff in the planning for this fall around the midterm elections, where we'll use the song as a platform to get the vote out, and get people registered. There's never been a more critical time to get in front of all of that.”

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: How 5 Nashville women helped write a Grammy-nominated Song of the Year