Coyle Girelli
Coyle Girelli looks back on his extraordinary songwriting partnership and friendship with Mac Davis, sharing memories, creative lessons, rare recordings, and the emotional story behind the deluxe edition of Out of This Town.
1. Coyle, your songwriting partnership with Mac Davis began back in 2013 through spontaneous late-night sessions involving coffee, guitars, and yellow legal pads. Can you take us back to your very first meeting? What was it about your musical connection that made you want to keep writing together?
When I was first connected with Mac, I really didn’t know what to expect. On paper, we came from completely different worlds. Mac was from Lubbock, Texas, and I’m from Otley in West Yorkshire. We were from different generations, had grown up in different countries and had taken very different paths through music. But as soon as we sat down with guitars in our hands, there was an immediate connection.
Within an hour or so of meeting, we had written our first song together – “Already Gone” which appears on the album. I think at heart, we were both small-town guys who had worked hard and tried to work smart to get where we had in life. We also shared an almost spiritual admiration for music, words and the mysterious way a song can bring those things together.
There was no ego in the room. We were both there to follow the song wherever it wanted to go.
2. You and Mac came from different generations and musical backgrounds, yet you developed both a creative partnership and a friendship. What was the most valuable lesson Mac taught you about songwriting, and is there a particular piece of advice from him that still influences your work today?
I consider myself a different songwriter before and after meeting Mac. Before we worked together, I had always been a very instinctive writer – I’d essentially written songs because my band The Chevin needed songs to be a band – so I didn’t overthink or analyze them too deeply. I like being in that flow state. Working with Mac not only enhanced my confidence in that instinct, but also taught me how to combine it with real discipline and craft.
He showed me that inspiration might give you the heart of a song, but you still have a responsibility to make every line and word earn its place in the story. He had an incredible understanding of how ordinary language could carry a huge amount of emotion. He was a master of song craft. A song painter as he often referred to it.
3. Out of This Town was originally released in 2025, and the deluxe edition now reveals even more material from those sessions. What inspired you to revisit these recordings more than a decade later, and did rediscovering them change the way you remembered that period of your life?
Revisiting the recordings made me realize that there was still so much of the story to explore and reveal in these songs and from these sessions. I wanted to complete the picture and pull back the curtain on its creation. The voice memos, our conversations about lyrics and the special recordings from Sun Studio reveal the journey behind them. I wanted the deluxe edition to take listeners behind the curtain and allow them to experience something closer to what it was actually like to be in those rooms with us.
Listening again after more than a decade was incredibly emotional. Memory tends to reduce a period of your life to a few defining images, but these recordings brought back all the smaller details – the sound of Mac’s voice, the laughter, the coffee, the pauses while we searched for the right word. The admiration and the pure enjoyment of working together. They reminded me how spontaneous, alive and truly special those sessions were.
4. One of the most remarkable additions to the deluxe edition is a rare recording of Mac Davis himself singing “I Wanna Make Love.” What was your emotional reaction when you heard that recording again, and what does sharing his voice with listeners mean to you personally?
We had always intended for Mac to sing on this record as well and I’m so happy that we could bring him into it with this amazing performance like we did. The original performance came from a voice memo he had sent to me – we would bounce ideas back and forth with voice memos. Using AudioShake we were able to to separate Mac’s vocal from the voice memo and load it into Pro Tools and build the recording around it. Quite the task and an incredibly moving, precious and delicate one. I’m simply so grateful that Mac can be present on this record in his own voice.
5. The deluxe edition also features contributions from KT Tunstall, Jamie Wyatt, and Cassandra Lewis. How did these collaborations come together, and what did each artist bring to songs that already carried such a personal history?
Mac and I had always imagined some of these songs as duets. Because they carry such a personal history, it was important to find artists who could bring something new to them without losing the honesty at their core. I’ve long admired KT, Jamie and Cassandra, and I love all three of their voices. Each has such a distinct identity and such an instinctive way of communicating the emotion and story of a song.
I had a few ideas of the songs we wanted to have duets on but I defaulted to whichever songs connected with them the most. Lost To The River for example was not one I’d ever imagined as a duet but KT added a whole new dimension to it.
6. With six accompanying videos rolling out through the end of the year, Out of This Town is becoming more than just an album release. How do you hope listeners will experience the story behind these songs, and what would you most like people to remember about Mac Davis and the friendship you shared?
I see the album and the videos as a journey into the songs, the creative process and the stories behind them. I’ve always enjoyed creating a distinct world for each of my albums, but I have never opened up the process or pulled back the curtain quite like this before. This project allows people to see not only where the songs ended up, but where they began.
I want people to feel Mac’s soul in this music. He had an extraordinary gift, but he also had warmth, humor, generosity and a profound respect for the song. Our friendship meant an enormous amount to me, and these recordings capture something genuine that we shared.