BY LISA STAYTON
MOUNTAIN CITIZEN

On Saturday night in Inez, the headliner stepping onto Harvest Fest stage at 9 p.m. will be a songwriter who seems to carry a little Gulf humidity in his phrasing and a lot of lived-in patience in his melodies. CJ Solar has the kind of résumé that often reads louder than an introduction—cuts for big-ticket artists, two No. 1 hits as a songwriter, a Grand Ole Opry bow, and a Top 10 song. Yet he carries himself like a working player who still believes the next song might be the best one.

“I write almost every day,” he told the Mountain Citizen, “usually with collaborators, trying to create something I would want to listen to.” The practice is both discipline and credo. He sits down, puts pen to paper, and tries to catch lightning before it wanders off.

When we spoke this week, Solar was in Maine, where the mornings are clean and the pines stand in formation around a lake, working with the nonprofit Creative Vets at the Travis Mills Foundation.

“I am hanging out up here in beautiful Maine, writing some songs with veterans. It is like a little retreat, kind of therapy,” he said. The work is simple in description and complex in effect: listen hard, shape a life story into a verse, make a chorus tough enough to hold what hurts. “We just finished telling one veteran’s story, turning it into a song,” he said. “It is a beautiful thing.”

Solar’s accent, Baton Rouge, arrives like a backbeat. He talks about home the way musicians talk about their first guitar, as if the instrument imprinted something permanent.

“A lot of things in Louisiana—food, music and culture—carry a soulful feeling that reflects the people, the camaraderie and the spirit of South Louisiana,” he said. “I felt that in music.”

It is an explanation that doubles as a map of his songs: sturdy grooves, unshowy hooks, a grain of voice that leans warm rather than slick. He names Creedence Clearwater Revival as his first favorite band, then nods toward the great southern rockers and country storytellers John Fogerty, the Allman Brothers, ZZ Top, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson as if you could triangulate his catalog by drawing lines between them.

If you have heard his writing at a tailgate or over a truck’s half-blown speakers, you likely met it mid-cheer. He mentions “Up Down,” the Morgan Wallen hit he co-wrote, not as a trophy but as a case study.

“I love when songs become part of people’s lives—’Up Down’ on a boat, ‘Some Girls’ during a breakup,” he said, before shifting to his own recent work. “Sky Falls Down,” released this year, began as a private promise to someone in his life who was going through a hard time.

“I wanted them to know I would be there,” he said. The song then turned outward in a way he did not expect.

“Since its release, many people have said it reminds them of their children,” he said. Expectant mothers wrote. Parents of grown kids sent the track as a note they did not quite know how to write.

The single “10,000 Lighters” came from a different kind of witnessing.

“I bet if you’re the Rolling Stones and you were looking out at an arena, it would just look like a crazy starlit sky if people were holding up their lighters,” he said, remembering the old ritual of flame and song, how a crowd can become its own galaxy. The tune imagines a quiet night in the middle of nowhere as somehow contiguous with that arena glow.

“It’s just a truck-bed hangout song with a rock-show twist,” said Solar. “It is fun to play live, and I am glad it made this record I am working on now.”

As a songwriter, “Up Down” garnered him an American Society of Composers Award and the Nashville Songwriters Award for “10 Songs I Wish I’d Written.” He co-wrote Jason Aldean’s “I Don’t Drink Anymore,” Jerrod Niemann’s Top 30 single “Blue Bandana” and “The Regulars,” and Justin Moore’s “Between You & Me.” He also had writing credits on Mike Ryan’s “Damn Good Goodbye” and Kyle Park’s single, “What the Heaven,” which hit No. 1 on the Texas regional radio chart.

Across a steady run of EPs—“Hard One to Turn Down,” “Get Away With It,” “Coming My Way,” and “No Sleep Till Nashville,” and the 2022 full-length “The Future’s Neon,” Solar has kept the music coming. Recent releases include “Good Day For A Heartbreak,” “Lies I Tell Myself,” “Sky Falls Down” and “10,000 Lighters.”

“When I moved to Nashville, my bucket list had two items: get a No. 1 song and play the Grand Ole Opry,” he said. “I have done both.”

The new list is hungrier but no less earnest: “Get a No. 1 as a performer and sell out a 10,000-person venue so I can see 10,000 lighters,” he said. And it tracks with the way he talks about the job: brick by brick, show by show, always traveling light.

He loves small-town festivals most, he says, because the room belongs to everyone.

“The festival matters to the community and the town rallies around it,” he said. “People arrive excited, and that, combined with an excited band, makes for a great time.”

Saturday’s set in Inez will honor that pact between stage and street.

“A fun, high-energy show,” he promised. “Whether there are 10 people or 10,000, we give the same performance.”

He and his band will play the songs you might know from the radio, the ones he has cut himself, and a fistful of covers from the family tree—Lynyrd Skynyrd, Travis Tritt, John Fogerty, Montgomery Gentry. He designs his set lists like a well-sequenced LP, calibrating for first-timers and diehards, making room for old country and a little more rock, trusting that if you like country with a southern-rock lean, you will find your pocket. And if you show up skeptical, he is happy to win you over one chorus at a time.

There is a story he tells about Pikeville, where he opened for Hank Williams Jr. at the arena. After the set, a lot of people came to the merch table—not just to buy something, but to introduce themselves, to say the show meant something. The memory is less of a detail than a sensation, the feeling that the distance between the singer and the audience can disappear if everyone agrees to let it.

“From the stage, seeing people enjoy themselves is a unique feeling,” he said. “It is an honor when people spend their time and money to share that experience.”

If Solar is sentimental about live music, it is the rigorous kind: show up, play hard, leave it all there. He still attends concerts as a fan, still believes in the ungovernable joy of a chorus landing where it ought to. He loves the old lighter tradition.

“Nothing makes me smile faster than seeing a lighter at a show,” he said. And he loves the way a festival compresses a town into one singing body. Somewhere between the therapy songs in Maine and the bar-band stomp of a Saturday night, he has located a center that feels both real and humane: write what you know, do not chase the trend line, let the work find its people.

“Write from the heart, write what you know and make the best songs you can,” he recalled an early mentor telling him. The advice stuck.

He is not likely to bring a full table of merch, maybe a few koozies, a couple of ball caps, but he will be easy to find after the set, signing, talking, lingering. He is working on a new record deal designed to get more songs into the world at a steadier clip, and he sounds quietly fired up about the pages he is drafting now.

“I’m writing some of my favorite songs I’ve ever written at the moment,” Solar said.”

The ambition is familiar but sharpened.

“I’m just excited to pour a little gas on the fire and hopefully take things to the next level.”

Away from the stage he is quick to demystify. He laughs about a “useless” party trick. “I can put my foot behind my head. Oddly flexible. It turned out useful when I started Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Flexibility helps.”

In the shower he tends to write rather than rehearse.

“I often make things up,” he said, and if something catchy from the day has nested in his head, Britney to Aerosmith, it will likely surface in the steam. The worst scrape he will admit is rolling a side-by-side into a barbed-wire fence at his grandmother’s place and bailing out unhurt.

He is candid about the grind.

“I am not sure,” he said when asked what he would do without music. “I joke that if you have a backup plan, you should probably do that because music is fulfilling and fun, but difficult.” In high school he figured he might teach history if he did not chase the other thing. He chased it anyway. Nashville rewarded the risk, then raised the stakes.

In the end, the thing Solar offers is not spectacle so much as contact. The Baton Rouge soulfulness he talks about, the sense that music, food and community are extensions of the same impulse, travels well. It can make a lakeside writing room in Maine feel close to Court Street in Inez. It can make a southern kid’s first favorite band echo across a hillside. And it can make a Saturday night headliner sound like a neighbor, asking only that you meet him halfway. If you do, you might find yourself in a little starlit galaxy of your own making. Bring a lighter if you have one.

Follow CJ Solar on his website cjsolar.com, Facebook, and Instagram. Check him out on Spotify, YouTube, TikTok, Amazon and Apple Music.

(Susie Skyles contributed to this story.)