in 2023, Dan Nigro hit a wall. The Grammy-winner songwriter-producer had tried just about everything he could think of with the bubbling under pop phenomenon — boosting the production, cleaning up the lyrics, adjusting the key — and yet the song still didn’t have that special X factor they were looking for.. “We knew that something about it was really special, but we could not figure it out.
It’s a song we wrestled with for a while. We laid down a demo, and the two of us felt like it wasn’t right. We knew something was special about the song, but we couldn’t tell what it was that we were getting wrong. So, we worked on it for a day, we put it away, and then a few months later, she came in for something else, and she was like, “What about that one song we wrote? I feel like there’s something there.
I know Kayleigh has said this song was “a b-tch to write,” and that very much tracks with what you’re describing here. I feel like it was the production and the process that was really tough. Actually writing the song was quite fluid. I remember she came over one day, and I was like, “Well, now we need a bridge.” She wrote the bridge all on her own in like two minutes. She said, “Put the pre-chorus chords on,” I looped it, and she just got on the mic and went for it.
When a song is difficult to get right, especially from the production side of things, I become so self-conscious of it that I can never see it super clearly. Also, “Good Luck, Babe!” is so dramatic — I tend to keep my productions pretty minimal for the most part. But “Good Luck, Babe!” is such an epic production — there are like 100 string parts! When I’m adding that much production, I tend to feel like I’m doing too many things.