How Dylan Marlowe Landed (And Harvested) a ‘Picture Perfect’ Title: ‘We Were Dreaming These Things in a Moment’

Challenge a good ol’ boy on a tractor to diagram a sentence and the reaction would likely amount to a short grunt.

But play that same guy the new Dylan Marlowe single, “Picture Perfect,” and he’d probably smile over the obscure John Deere reference and appreciate the twist of a common adjective into a verb, even if he couldn’t explain how or why that twist worked. It’s also a sure bet that he’d relate to the song’s topic: the desire to find peace of mind on a piece of land. It’s a slice out of Marlowe’s own story.

“There was a plot of land, it was 80 acres,” he recalls. “We literally were like, ‘This is what we’re wanting to buy. It’s a good deal.’ We literally had driven to the land, looked at the land we were dreaming about, where the house was going to go, where the fence was going to go, where a gate was going to go. Like, we were dreaming these things in a moment.”

Oddly enough, Marlowe was fenced out from the initial writing session when that property emerged as a song idea. Marlowe’s then-current single, the Dylan Scott collaboration “Boys Back Home,” was at No. 12 on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart, and when Nate Smith came up sick, Marlowe was a last–minute fill-in for Audacy’s Stars and Strings acoustic concert in Hollywood, Fla., last November.

Marlowe’s “Boys Back Home” co-writers, Seth Ennis and Joe Fox, encouraged him to take the gig and promote the single, as did Play It Again Music founder Dallas Davidson, Marlowe’s manager and publisher. Those three kept the writing appointment they’d set for that day, and in Marlowe’s absence, they decided to tailor something for him. Ennis had a title, “Picture Perfect,” that would typically work as a two-word adjective, as in “picture-perfect wedding.” But Marlowe had told Fox in a phone call the previous night about driving with his wife, Natalie, to view the 80-acre plot. Fox thought they could employ “picture” as a verb, something like, “When you picture us, picture perfect.”

“Joe made it a little more interesting,” Davidson says. “I’m like, ‘I’m in, let’s write this thing.’ ”

They started from the top, verbally re-creating Marlowe’s experience with the property, describing the land and the way a house might fit with the tree line. It led directly to a chorus that opened with that verb — “Baby, close your eyes and picture perfect” — before drawing on homey images: handprints in the concrete, pencil marks on the door frame. And Davidson placed a 4020 in the barn, referencing a John Deere model that he’d inserted into a previous Luke Bryan track, only to have Bryan remove it.

“That’s an iconic tractor,” Davidson recalls. “You had a no-cab 4020 — I drove one when I was 15 years old, working pecans. A guy named Junior taught me how to drive a 4020, and I’m glad that made it in there.”

“If people question it,” Marlowe adds, “that might give them something to go look up. It might make them pay attention.”

After the 4020 line, Ennis extended the “picture” verb to the next level: “Baby, picture baby pictures in the hallway.”

“I didn’t know if it was a thing at first,” Ennis says. “I was like, ‘Hey, would it be dumb if we said, “Baby, picture baby pictures”? Is that lame to say the same thing twice?’ And then Dallas, who’s this multi-hit songwriter, looks at me and he’s like, ‘What are you talking about, dude? That’s awesome.’ ”

As they finished the first verse and chorus, they began hearing the melody as something better suited for Bryan, so they reworked it.

“Seth kind of spit out a new chorus melody,” Fox recalls. “It was a completely different vibe, like different chords, different melody. But we had the lyrics, so we kind of went and just revised it to be a little more Dylan.”

Davidson suggested they halt there so Marlowe could work on the next verse and make it even “more Dylan.” They emailed a guitar/vocal version to Marlowe, who -listened to it repeatedly on the flight back to Nashville the next day. Once he was home, he wrote a second verse and a bridge on the porch, outlining how the amount of road work he was taking on was to provide financial roots for the couple’s dream.

“I was working my butt off, playing shows, trying to save so much money, and also just confirming [the motivation],” Marlowe says. “Women like to be reaffirmed that you’re doing that kind of thing.”
Marlowe’s co-writers gave the new sections a thumbs-up, and Ennis cut a new guitar/vocal version that pulled the whole thing together.

Fox produced the master at Sound Stage, intent on finding a middle ground: enough bite to elevate its sound beyond ballad territory but slow enough to convey its seriousness and sincerity.

“The tempo of this song was a pain in the butt to figure out,” Marlowe says.

Ilya Toshinskiy laid down an oscillating, two-note acoustic guitar figure as a foundation, and the rest of the arrangement adhered to that part, particularly a simple six-note up-and-back riff that blended a Fox vocal pass with Scotty Sanders’ steel guitar and Dobro.

“Joe did the perfect amount of having it rocking, but it also serves what the song is talking about,” Ennis says. “You don’t necessarily want rock’n’roll, in-your-face screaming guitars when you’re talking about what this song is talking about. I think that he nailed the vibe.”

They scrapped the bridge so they could get back to the chorus sooner, and Fox weaved in a notably spare guitar section.

“I’m not a fan of shredding guitar solos,” Fox says. “In the ’80s hair metal days, which I like, they always found a way to make the guitar solo a part of the song so you could sing the solo back.”

Sony Music Nashville’s Columbia imprint released “Picture Perfect” to country radio through PlayMPE on May 12 as the follow-up to “Boys Back Home,” which peaked at No. 2 on the Country Airplay chart dated Jan. 18.

“Ken [Robold] and Taylor [Lindsey] are new at Sony as the heads, and they are firm believers in songs, which I appreciate,” Marlowe says. “They just said, ‘Hey, this is a good song. It may not have the same numbers as “Boys Back Home” off the bat, but we believe in this song, and we believe you when you sing it.’ It was very mutual.”