Gabby Barrett was newly married and eager to share her joy in song of finding her soulmate. The country music singer emerged on the Nashville scene after appearances on American Idol in 2019, where she met her future husband and fellow contestant Cade Foehner. Looking for new material on what would become her debut album, Goldmine, Barrett met up with a team of songwriters, one of whom is Jim McCormick, a man who has penned hits for the likes of Kelly Clarkson, Tim McGraw, Keith Urban, and Luke Bryan while also teaching the Craft and Business of Songwriting course at Loyola University in New Orleans.

At tonight’s Academy of Country Music Awards, Barrett will sing “The Good Ones,” the result of this creative collaboration and a song that catapulted to the top of Billboard‘s country charts in September 2020. Goldmine garnered 15.98 million on-demand streams in its opening week, breaking the record for the largest streaming week ever for a debut country album by a woman. It reemerged in the number one spot this week in advance of the prime-time ceremony.

“It’s a real romantic song,” said McCormick during an interview with WWL-TV on April 17. “Gabby at the time was wanting to write a song about finding her fiancé  She had this idea for a good one—he was one of the good ones.”

McCormick, a multi-Grammy Award nominee, calls himself a “briefcase songwriter” and views his job as helping turn the vision of recording artists into lyrics that will resonate with listeners.

“In general, in Nashville particularly, where it’s very much about the lyric, I try to start out with a good idea for a title or a lyric and build the song around that—write the chorus first so that it really bolsters up the lyric, fortifies it so that it’s bulletproof and then kind of back up and write the first verse into the chorus and go write the second verse and maybe a bridge but all the while just staying very focused on what is the central idea of the song.”

In “The Good Ones,” Barrett poetically describes her true love as A love me like he should one / Like he wrote the book one / The kind you find when you don’t even look one / Anybody can be good once / But he’s good all the time / He’s one of the good ones / And he’s all mine / He’s one of the good ones.

“We just chased that idea of the good one—my cowriters Emily Landis and Zach Cale along with Gabby. Like we do everyday, we did our very best and tried to bear down on the song by getting the best lyrics and melody we could do that day.”

In spite of the social isolation that defined much of 2020 due to COVID-19, McCormick found it to be a productive and creative time.

“The ironic effect of COVID was that everybody jumped on Zoom to write songs and it became a much more efficient sort of occupation,” he said. “I think I wrote more songs over the pandemic year than I had in any previous year. I think the result of that is going to be widespread.  I think there’s going to be a plethora of great songs coming out on the records that are being made now from this body of work that everybody created.”

McCormick is a graduate of Georgetown with a degree in English. He returned to New Orleans after graduation and spent eight years on the road with his band, the Bingemen, which ended their run in 1999. In the past, he taught at UNO and worked at a music trade publication. He has served as board governor and vice-president for the Recording Academy and on the Nashville Songwriters Association International board. In 2012 he wrote two No. 1 Billboard country chart songs for Jason Aldean and Brantley Gilbert. In 2020 he received a 2020 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Cutting Edge Conference, a gathering of established and aspiring music industry professionals.

Barrett was named best new female artist for 2021 in advance of The Academy of Country Music Awards, which will air on CBS at 7 p.m. CDT on Sunday, April 18, and stream on demand on Paramount+.