Acclaimed entertainer Charles Esten has continued to attract an array of audiences with his storytelling skills. Whether he’s on your screen, on stage in front of you or coming through your speaker, the artist and actor always aims to tell stories in the most authentic and truthful manner possible.
For over a decade, Esten devoted himself to cultivating a collection of songs that emphasize the beauty of love and life even during hard times. On Friday (Jan. 26), he finally shared that full collection with the world when he released his independent debut album, Love Ain’t Pretty.
Serving as a co-writer on all 14 tracks with acoustic guitar credits, Esten spoke candidly with MusicRow about the time and care poured into the project.
From the time he was little boy, Esten loved to sing and make his own music. This love led him to win his school’s third-grade songwriting competition, and join a band during his college days at William & Mary. When the rest of the group parted ways to pursue other careers after graduation, Esten still wanted to chase his musical dream. He had a few actors friends in Los Angeles and decided to move there and try that, in hopes of meeting and joining another band.
Although he never met that desired other group—and grew quite busy when he found success in acting—Esten never stopped writing and always had instruments in his home, even teaching his kids how play to guitar and piano. It was when he scored the role of Deacon Claybourne on ABC/CMT’s television series Nashville and made his way to Music City that his first love and passion came back into his life full-force.
“I had been practicing on my own for so long that suddenly coming into this world, where you could co-write with an incredible songwriter and be surrounded by great musicians who would hop on [the song] and record it with you, felt like I was walking into heaven. This is where I felt like I was meant be,” he shares. “I began making music immediately, but took some time before deciding what kind of album I wanted to make.
“[Nashville] is built in such a way that people can quickly get up and perform, whether it’s on Broadway or at writers’ rounds. As a young actor in Los Angeles, it’s brutal trying to be heard or seen, and often takes a long time. But here, people can easily be heard or seen. I’m not saying it’s easy to make it, but it’s easy to be seen.”
During his time on the television series, Esten started to piece together Love Ain’t Pretty with producer and title track co-writer Marshall Altman and other great musicians. While filming Nashville, he learned that the truth within a scene and song is what connects them to their audience. The charismatic creator divulges the realness he and Jeffrey East infused into track “When Love Ain’t Love,” tapping into truthfulness to accurately articulate evolving feelings that can be difficult to describe. “That song is clean and simple. It’s a little poetic, but it’s mostly just something that is very real and true. I believe [those lyrics]—there’s not a word in there that I don’t believe.”
Known for his roles as Claybourne and Outer Banks‘ Ward Cameron, Esten’s acting skills help him to switch his view on life to a different lens in the music world.
“As an actor, you have to get good at putting yourself in someone else’s boots and walking in them for a while. So when writing from different perspectives, I become [those people] in the same way that I become Ward or Deacon,” he notes. “You have to use as much empathy and emotional intelligence as you can muster to [present ideas] from a different point of view.”
“One Good Move” marked the first Love Ain’t Pretty single release, which Esten spontaneously wrote with Sam Backoff, Zarni deVette and Elise Hayes while on a writing retreat after he disclosed his younger, more rebellious behavior back in the day to them, deeming his wife Patty his “one good move” during that time. “I call my wife ‘the blessing from which all others derive.’ It started with her, so why not start the releases with my ‘One Good Move’?”
Another single from the album is “Down The Road (feat. Eric Paslay).” Esten says that once he, Paslay and Dylan Altman got the concept down and rock gusto going, things took off and they developed the hopeful anthem that encourages listeners to look towards the future and the good times to behold. When writing, Esten likes his songs to be both “singable and sayable,” and is constantly asking himself and/or his collaborators “What do we want to say here?”
It was the answer to this question that ultimately determined the title track. While penning the last of the record’s tunes, Esten, Marshall Altman and Jimmy Year posed it to one another and sought to find the response until one of them said, “It’s hard, it’s tough, it’ll wreck you, love ain’t pretty.” The artist states that the following line, “but it’s beautiful,” is what he believes completed the answer to that faithful question, and says the song as a whole seems to sum up everything the album touches on.
“You have to write what you love and write what moves you,” says Esten. “Love ain’t pretty, life is hard—those are a given—but I would love if any of these songs became something that people could go to during hard times, or something that could make them laugh on their road back to happiness. If this was a part of that soundtrack for somebody, that would mean everything to me.”
