Ashley Gorley, Variety’s Songwriter of the Year, on Being Part of Country’s Big Crossover Moment: ‘There’s a Lot More Freedom in This Genre Now’
variety.comChris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Who should be counted as country music’s currently most successful songwriter?
You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who could come up with a metric where the end result is not clearly Ashley Gorley, who’s being honored as Songwriter of the Year at Variety‘s annual Hitmakers event.
He has been a co-writer on five of the last six Morgan Wallen singles, all of which inevitably topped the country chart — with “Last Night” also going top 5 at pop radio, no small factor in the song spending a near-record 16 weeks at No.
1 on the Billboard Hot 100. He just got named songwriter of the year at the ASCAP Country Music Awards for a record 10th time, on the basis of having 10 songs among the org’s 50 most-played hits of the past year.
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