If the adage, “luck favors the prepared,” holds truth, then singer-songwriter Scott Stepakoff may well be the poster child for its verity. The writer, who just signed a new publishing deal with Black River Entertainment, has had a great deal of luck – co-writes on Kip Moore’s first single, “Mary Was The Marrying Kind,” Tim McGraw’s “It’s Your World,” and three cuts on Kelsea Ballerini’s debut album being recent examples – but a diverse set of jobs, a ranging musical background, and a conscious pursuit of improving his songwriting and inviting inspiration have both earned and inspired such successes.
“I really started as a singer, who happened to write songs,” Stepakoff says. The Atlanta native grew up with the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, and an affinity for words, which led him to both an advertising degree to be a copywriter and a move to LA, where he worked in TV production and was in a jam band.
“I was writing songs, but they were crude,” Stepakoff says. “We were a jam band, it was like two, maybe three chords, and melodies weren’t very thought through. It was just more about jamming. And it was fun.” But a nostalgia for the south brought him back to Atlanta, and he began to take a more serious look at music, staying up late writing and learning how to craft a song. “You’ve gotta read stuff,” he says, when I ask him what constitutes an education in songwriting. “Write a journal, listen to tons of music, like as much music as you can, get better at your instrument, and write as many songs as you can.”
While back in Atlanta, Stepakoff began working with a guitar teacher and making trips up to Nashville, working a range jobs that in some ways served as a songwriting education of their own. He returned to copywriting for a time, drawn to the creative challenge of the economy of words, using as few words as possible to convey something greater in the strongest way. He also trained to be a therapist – “I never made a living at any of this stuff,” he says – a pursuit that while ultimately not career-bound, can’t have hurt his ability to understand emotion and convey it into song.
When it comes to such conveyance, Stepakoff is deliberate and thoughtful, something that makes for complexly engaging songs. On his album Unlived Lives, he plays with those dynamics, balancing sad or vulnerable lyrics with soaring melodies that make for a complex emotional texture. “I’ve noticed that in stuff that I’m drawn to, that maybe sometimes reflects in my writing, there’s, to use your term, a vulnerable or sad or what could otherwise be a depressing lyric married with an uptempo or a major-y kind of melody. It sort of makes the lyric more powerful, and kind of digestible,” he says.
Lyricism is important to Stepakoff, who peruses poetry and browses bookstores in search of ideas or phrases that could inspire him creatively. “One of the songs that Kelsea [Ballerini] cut was a song called ‘Square Pegs,'” he says, referencing one of the three songs he has on the breakout’s debut album, The First Time. “That morning I didn’t have anything – I think I may have just like had that title written down – I just liked the sound of it but didn’t know what it meant or anything, how to hook it. I just started playing around with different cliches associated with square pegs, like square peg in a round hole, and started thinking about it, and square pegs make the world go ’round – I thought it was a cool sort of mixture. I was like, what if it’s a song about people who are different?”
Taking that extra moment to turn a title into a concept or search for a new idea is something Stepakoff takes seriously, and he sets aside time weekly to chase those sources of inspiration. “It doesn’t necessarily just show up,” he says. “You have to be tuned into it.” His routine to cull inspiration involves perusing poetry or browsing bookstores, or just surfing the web for new ideas. He’s also fond of clichés, and the opportunity they afford to be twisted to say something interesting and different. At times, his routine can seem like more of a non-routine – “I have four or five different ways I drive from place to place,” he says. “I need things changing, I need the scenery to be changing.”
With country trends continually in flux, it’s important to be open to new concepts, and Stepakoff clocks the hours to invite those concepts to land. Take a listen to his album Unlived Lives, and if you’re in Nashville, catch him Monday at 6pm at Whiskey Rhythm.