Nashville's growing podcast landscape includes a wide range of top shows, including Bobby Bones's podcast "Bobbycast" about pop culture across the spectrum, songwriter-turned-podcaster Laura Veltz, who talks about the creative and financial realities of the music business on "Songwriter Soup," plus "God's Country" by songwriters Dan and Reid Isbell, combining their love of country music with their enthusiasm for the outdoors.
However, there's one more about to join the flock that is worth taking note of, especially because she is shining a light on women songwriters across genres. You may not know Parker Welling's name, but if you love country music, you've almost certainly heard her songs.
She co-wrote Russell Dickerson's "Yours," "Blue Tacoma,"
and "Love You Like I Used To," plus Thomas Rhett's "What's Your Country Song."
The Grammy-nominated Nashville songwriter has helped pen five multi-Platinum No. 1 country singles, and her songs have collectively surpassed 2 billion streams. Three more are now climbing country radio at the same time: Luke Bryan's "Country and She Knows It," George Birge and Bryan's "Ride Ride Ride," plus Dickerson's "Worth Your Wild."
Welling has spent years behind the songs. On Sept. 17, she's stepping behind a microphone to launch "Women's Writes," a new weekly podcast about the relationships between the people who create songs together.
Welling's longtime collaborator and friend Lydia Vaughan will join as co-host.
"I am such a huge fan of country music," Welling told The Tennessean. "Whether I worked in it or not, it still would have been my favorite thing on planet Earth."
The podcast is recorded in Welling's home studio, a room that the mother of two has transformed into a warm, country-inspired set. Guitars hang against dark blue floral walls. A blue couch faces two leather chairs. Rugs cover the floor beneath cameras and studio lights. Teal blue letters prominently spell out "Women's Writes" on the wall behind the recording area.
The room is filled with personal touches. One banjo guitar came from Welling's great-grandmother's basement. A tiny table designed to look like a pair of jeans tucked into cowboy boots was a Facebook Marketplace find from a friend.
Welling said she wanted the space to balance the masculine and feminine sides of country music.
That balance is also part of how "Women's Writes" began.
A writing retreat changes course
Welling and Vaughan were headed to a writing retreat in Gatlinburg with a female artist and male producer when the producer had to cancel two days before the trip. They invited a female producer who was available to take his place.
It wasn't intended as a statement.
"We were like, we've never been at an all-female writing retreat before," Welling said.
Welling and Vaughan began wondering why.
Both had spent years writing with artists of all genders, but women remained less likely to find themselves together in writing rooms simply because there were fewer of them, Welling said. She also noticed that some male artists naturally built songwriting into activities they were already doing together.
"The idea was that male artists build fun into what they're doing," Welling said. "They're not trying to exclude females. It's just kind of the nature of the beast. It's like, 'I'm going on a hunting trip. I'm going to bring my bros with me.' And they end up writing while they're doing that. And so we were like, 'What's our equivalent of that?'"
Within a month, they organized a "Women's Writes" camp with 15 female songwriters, artists and producers. Instead of hunting, Welling describes it as a giant sleepover. There were games, karaoke, a themed denim dinner and a meal prepared by a friend who is a chef.
And songwriting, of course.
One song from the camp was recorded by Lauren Watkins with Sheryl Crow.
"We were like, 'Hey, this works,'" Welling said. "If girls hang out together, maybe we'll start creating together and maybe that will change what happens. The ripple effect of that is maybe we'll see more female songwriters on the radio and on records."
The camps eventually gave Welling and Vaughan the idea for a podcast carrying the same name.
Can another podcast break through?
"Women's Writes" arrives in an enormous and still-growing podcast market. Outside the music business, Nashville-based Olympic gold medalist Shawn Johnson East and former NFL player Andrew East have produced hundreds of episodes of "Couple Things," about marriage, family and life together, as well as Pilates entrepreneur India Newsome and her creator husband "B~Love" Barrett, with a similar podcast called "She & I," about marriage and relationships in Music City.
Roughly 54% of U.S. women age 12 and older said they had listened to or watched a podcast in the previous month, according to Edison Research's annual Infinite Dial study earlier this year. That's up from 39% in 2023. Among men, monthly consumption reached 62%.
Video is increasingly part of that definition. Edison Research reported this year that weekly podcast consumers are now just as likely to watch podcasts as listen to them.
That shift is visible inside Welling's studio. "Women's Writes" isn't simply two microphones plugged into a recorder. The show was designed with its visual presentation in mind, using cinema cameras and drawing inspiration from highly produced shows such as "Call Her Daddy."
Dr. Jennifer Bailey Woodard, a professor at Middle Tennessee State University who teaches podcasting and audio journalism, said a crowded market doesn't necessarily mean there isn't room for another show.
"I don't think that podcasting has reached a saturation point yet," Woodard said. "I think there's so many niches to explore, so many possibilities with it."
The challenge, she said, is identifying a specific audience and giving it something it can't easily find elsewhere.
"Every podcast is going to start with an idea," Woodard said. "It's really about finding out, is your idea going to have the proper niche?"
Woodard believes "Women's Writes" has one.
"I did a little bit of preliminary research... and nobody's doing this that I could find. So that makes her special," Woodard said.
The show will release weekly, alternating interviews with songwriting teams and shorter episodes in which Welling explores creativity, inspiration, collaboration and the mechanics of writing songs in Nashville. The first season focuses on female collaborators before expanding to other creative partnerships in future seasons.
The road less traveled
Country singer-songwriter Lauren Alaina is the first guest.
"I can't imagine launching this any other way than with Lauren," Welling said.
The three women have written together extensively and are close friends. Future episodes will pair collaborators including Ashley McBryde and Terri Jo Box, as well as Jessi Alexander and Connie Harrington.
The questions aren't necessarily about where someone was sitting when a hit was written or who came up with the chorus.
Welling wants to know why two people can walk into a room together and repeatedly make something neither would have made alone.
"What makes this work?" she said. "What's the chemistry between you that makes you feel like I can say anything or I can take a risk?"
Vaughan knows that chemistry firsthand.
The songwriter, whose credits include Jason Aldean and Carrie Underwood's "If I Didn't Love You," said Welling's ability isn't limited to telling stories herself.
"Parker knows how to tell a story and how to listen to a story," Vaughan said. "She deeply cares about songs and people, and somehow she can connect the dots in someone's story that they might not have even connected yet themselves."
The podcast has also forced Welling to examine her own craft.
She calls herself a songwriting "nerd." Preparing for interviews sends her digging through catalogs and searching for connections. Her solo episodes have taken seemingly simple questions and turned them into investigations of where ideas come from, how writers create convincingly for someone different from themselves and how influences pass from one generation of songwriters to another.
One episode explores what Welling calls "untraceable magic," the creative lineage connecting a songwriter to the people who taught and inspired the people who taught and inspired them.
"I don't get a lot of time to sit and really reflect on what am I doing as a creative," Welling said. "I kind of forget that it's kind of magic and there's so much to learn even if you do it for your whole life."
Welling originally pursued a career as an artist, but in her mid-20s, a severe vocal injury changed her path. Two large polyps on her vocal cords led to two and a half years of intermittent vocal rest and eventually surgery. By then, Welling had decided she preferred writing songs to being the person singing them. She still sings. She never stopped writing.
With "Women's Writes," she's finding a new way to use her voice — and, in some ways, is just beginning to share it with the world.
"It's been really fun for me to still kind of be a student of the craft in a new way," Welling said.
Bryan West is a music reporter at The Tennessean, part of the USA TODAY Network. Follow him on Instagram, TikTok and X as @BryanWestTV.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Nashville songwriter Parker Welling launches podcast | Exclusive
