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’
Chris 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.