People sometimes ask how many of these songs are written in an afternoon. The honest answer is that the writing is often the fastest part. What takes the time is everything that has to line up around it.
Here is roughly how one goes from nothing to a finished video.
It starts with a situation, not a title
The first thing that exists is usually a scene. A man teaching his son to drive a tractor. Somebody standing in a church car park who has not gone in yet. A woman folding laundry that belongs to someone who is not coming back.
Titles come later and they come from inside the song. Trying to start from a clever title tends to produce something that sounds like an advertisement for a song rather than a song.
The test for whether a situation is worth writing is simple. Can you see it? If you can picture where the light is coming from, there is probably a song in it.
The second verse decides everything
First verses are easy. You are describing a scene and description is comfortable.
The second verse is where songs live or die, because that is where something has to change. Time passes, or a fact you did not have gets handed to you, or the person you thought was speaking turns out to be somebody else. If the second verse only repeats the first with different scenery, the song will feel pleasant and go nowhere.
A lot of writing time goes into that one section. Everything before it is setup and everything after it is consequence.
Melody follows the way people talk
Country melodies tend to sit close to speech. There is a reason the genre produces so many singers who are described as conversational rather than technically dazzling.
When a line is hard to sing naturally, the problem is almost always the words, not the tune. Rewriting the line so it can be spoken comfortably usually fixes the melody at the same time. If you would not say it out loud to another human being, do not put it in a song.
Arrangement is mostly restraint
The instinct once a song is written is to add. A second guitar, a string pad, another harmony in the chorus. Most of that gets taken back out.
The parts that survive tend to be the ones doing a job. A fiddle answering the vocal at the end of a line. A steel guitar holding a note under a word that needs weight. A kick drum that is really just the sound of somebody walking. If an instrument is only there to fill space, the space was doing better work.
Silence is an instrument in this genre and it is badly underused.
Then the picture
Every song needs an image, and the image is not an afterthought. For a lot of listeners it is the first thing they encounter, before a single note plays.
What works is a face. Not scenery, not a beautifully empty landscape, but a person with a visible expression, ideally in relation to somebody else. A father looking at a child. Two people at a distance from each other. Warm evening light, because warm light reads as memory.
Empty landscapes photograph beautifully and communicate almost nothing. That was a lesson learned the hard way.
And then it goes out
The finished thing is a video, a title, a description, a thumbnail and a set of themes it belongs to. All of it has to agree with each other. A tender song under a hard looking image will confuse people, and confusion is the one thing an audience will not forgive.
Then it goes up, and the honest part begins, which is finding out whether any of it landed. Some songs that felt slight turn out to be the ones people play at funerals. Some that felt monumental sink without trace.
You cannot predict it, so you write the next one.
The part that does not change
Underneath all of it, the job is the same as it has always been. Notice something true about how people actually live, say it plainly, and get out of the way.
Everything else is production.