How Corey Kent’s ‘Something’s Gonna Kill Me’ Took a Spirited Venture to the Edge

After topping out at No. 3 on Billboard‘s Country Airplay chart with his RCA Nashville debut, “Wild as Her,” Corey Kent’s follow-up has an even wilder image embedded in its second verse, in which the singer notes that he “broke 100 on two wheels.”

It’s not just a story. Pressed on that detail, Kent points to a motorcycle he used to own, a muscular Indian Scout Bobber that looked as if it was built for speed. He felt obliged to find out just how fast it could go.

“That was a really fun bike,” Kent recalls. “You get a new bike, you got to test the parameters of it and get comfortable with it. And so it definitely happened in Texas. You can find a nice stretch of road and really get after it.”

Kent’s triple-digit thrill ride is just one of numerous daredevil acts — from roller coasters to love — that make their way into “Something’s Gonna Kill Me,” a song that emphasizes his passion for life on the edge.

The topic arrived during an October 2022 creative retreat in the Dallas area, where Kent and three songwriting buddies -— Lydia Vaughan (“If I Didn’t Love You”), Austin Goodloe and Joybeth Taylor — knocked out six songs. “We got an Airbnb, this pink house,” muses Goodloe. “We’re just like, ‘Well, this is awesome. We’re in Barbie Dreamland here.’ ”

At one point, Kent got to his feet and expounded on his penchant for risky adventures, lamenting how often others insist he needs to live more carefully. “My response to that was always, ‘Get busy living or get busy dying,’ ” he notes. “There are things in life that have big risk. But if they add to your enjoyment, then maybe it’s worth it. You got to figure out what works for you.”

His co-writers honed in on that sentiment, and as they explored other ways of saying it, Kent philosophized further about life: “Something’s gonna kill me at some point, so I might as well enjoy it.” The first part of that clicked as a title — Vaughan insisted they write it down — and they listed a handful of potentially addictive pursuits that can place body, life or soul in peril, including the highway, whiskey, smoking and songwriting. “I would live in a cardboard box before I quit writing songs,” says Vaughan.

They attacked the chorus first, and as it reached the “Something’s gonna kill me” hook, they realized that phrase served better as the chorus’ setup, forcing them to find another last line that would rhyme with “One day I’m gonna die.” Initially, it became a breakup song; thus, what killed the singer “might as well be this heart of mine.” But they shifted into a philosophical motif and freestyled other options –— for a few minutes, they laughingly subbed in “Something’s gonna kill me/ Might as well be pizza pie” — before they finally landed on “If something’s gonna kill me/ Might as well be what makes me feel alive.”

Once the chorus was done (or almost done; they would come back to it later), they focused on the opening verse, launching with a recollection of a California sunset. That doesn’t directly describe any risk-taking, though it still fits the song’s general attitude. “That line kind of implies some sort of free-spiritedness,” Vaughan says. “None of us are from California, so it implies the travel, implies the exploring and then it also, to me, implied kind of an all-nighter — like, ‘Hey, I’ll sleep when I’m dead. I’ve got things to do.’ ”

The rest of the two verses matched dangerous events to an adventurous, galloping guitar, and the energy in the room mirrored the spirit they were trying to portray. “We’re just standing up and screaming at the top of our lungs — I’m sure the neighbors from the Airbnb thought we were crazy,” says Goodloe. “It’s the most adrenaline that I’ve felt while writing a song. Usually, you’re sitting down with an acoustic guitar and everyone’s kind of being quiet. And we were standing up, running around the living room of this pink house, just screaming, ‘If something’s gonna kill me.’ ”

Before it was over, they inserted a rising melody into the pre-chorus at the end of verse one, then finished the chorus by stretching the final syllable of the stanza’s last word, “alive,” into five upward-moving notes. The pre-chorus and tag gave the chorus a subtle, and unintended, symmetry.

“It just popped out, and it is nice that there’s a theme of ascending notes,” Goodloe says. “I feel like the whole song, if you saw it on a graph, it’s just climbing the whole time — like melodically, lyrically, the energy. It’s cool that there is an anchor on each side of the chorus. They’re related.”

Goodloe finished the demo back in Nashville, working with the same level of adrenaline during that part of the process, and the song got an extra dose of it once Kent took “Something’s Gonna Kill Me” into a session with producer Jay Joyce (Eric Church, Lainey Wilson).

Guitarists Charlie Worsham and Rob McNelley turned the galloping foundation into a more elaborate opening pattern, contrasted with descending electric guitar chords. Joyce dropped in a number of unusual, spiky sounds over the track’s four-on-the-floor drumbeat and lobbed a whistling explosion that led into an instrumental break. The guitar solo took a gnarly, upward tack before everything dropped out, leaving Kent’s vocal fully exposed to launch the final chorus. That move wasn’t planned; Joyce signaled it to the players as the solo transpired, and the rest of the team followed his lead perfectly.

After the cut, Kent asked the engineer if they could get a playback of his vocal, but Joyce intervened.
“Jay literally ran halfway across the room, waving his arms like, ‘No, no, no, don’t do it,’ ” recalls Kent. “He goes, ‘If you can’t hear it in the track, if it doesn’t bother you as you’re listening to it as a whole, there’s no reason to pick it out and pick it apart.’ He goes, ‘Stop overthinking. We’re human, we’re imperfect. It’s meant to be that way.’ It was one of the best lessons I’ve ever had.”

Worsham added harmonies, and the entire production made “Something’s Gonna Kill Me” an edgy musical statement. “The final cut was a little riskier and outside the box [than the demo], which is what that song needed,” Kent says.

It definitely connected with the audience. Outside of the established “Wild As Her,” “Kill Me” is the most streamed track from Kent’s Blacktop album on Spotify, garnering three times as many plays as any other non-single from the package. It was an easy choice for the next single, released by RCA Nashville to country radio July 5 via PlayMPE. The dangerous theme solidifies his brand, and the sound is just different enough to separate him from the pack. That’s a risk/reward scenario Kent can embrace.

“Nobody great,” he says, “ever sounded like anybody else.”