Country singer-songwriter David Nail has never shied away from writing about his own life, as many of the songs from his decade-plus career are drawn from his time growing up in the small town of Kennett, Missouri. On Bootheel 2020, which follows his 2018 EP Only This and Nothing More, Nail digs even more deeply into those roots, crafting a six-song collection that charts a path from his own upbringing to that of his young son Lawson. The EP includes three new songs, as well as two spoken interludes, both delivered by Lawson and captured on the fly during conversations at home. Experienced together, the six tracks offer an intimate look at how where we come from shapes not just us but future generations. "All these songs, in a lot of ways, were inspired by stories or memories or conversations I've had with people about growing up, or where we grew up, or back home," Nail tells Apple Music. Below, Nail shares what drove him as he wrote each of Bootheel's tracks. Prelude (feat. Lawson Nail) "It was the very last thing that we did, and there was literally zero thought about doing anything like that until that morning. And he's a pretty deep child, and so now a lot of times, while disciplining him, he'll always ask, 'Was that what PawPaw and Grammy did to you? What'd they say when you did that? How'd they react?' And so for whatever reason just having those conversations, they just popped into my head, like what if I could get him to say some things that I could incorporate into these songs? He's very similar to me in a lot of ways, both personality and he kind of favors me somewhat physically too, and so I just felt like it would be a sweet way to let him introduce me and the project as a whole." Roach Motel "Even now, if I listen to it, there's angles that I feel like I hear where maybe the story is this, or maybe this is what happened, or maybe this is how these two people got together. Maybe the girl is young; maybe the girl is old. One of the things I'm most proud of is I wrote it in a way that I feel like the more people listen to it, I think the more people will kind of get that. But yet by the end of it, you just had this amazing amount of respect for this girl. She was still standing and still alive today and, in a lot of ways, thriving now more than she ever had." Nobody Knows "It was around Halloween; my son had fallen in love with the Michael Jackson song 'Thriller.' I started reading about it and some of the instrumentation they used and some of the things that they wanted to do an experiment with sound-wise. And so when I went in the studio, I just asked [piano player] Reed [Pittman] if there was some sort of synth bass that he could use to just create, I don't know, a sound, tone to it. Certainly when I wrote that song or started it, the 'Thriller' record and any of that was so far from my brain. But it just goes to show you that sometimes, I guess, fate gets involved. Because that was fresh in my consciousness, I had this enthusiasm and eagerness to explore something that was greatly different than anything I'd ever done." Interlude (feat. Lawson Nail) “It was the second one we did, and we only did two. And that was the one where I had to cross my fingers and pray that he answered it how I was hoping that he would answer it, because you never know. When he said it the way he said 'Granddaddy,' man, I remember just getting that tingling feeling from all the way down to my fingertips to the end of my toes. And it was just one of those moments where I was like, 'Man, I could have asked this ten times, and nine times out of ten, he couldn't have answered it this perfect.'" Back Home "I've said a ton of times, every song that I've written about where I grew up or how I grew up or references home, I always swear is the last one. But at the same time, I feel like any time you spend that sizable chunk of your life in a specific place around specific people, that's a part of you. Regardless of how much you may try to leave it in the rearview mirror or to put it behind you, that's who you are." Back Home (Piano Version) "The first memories I ever have singing are singing to my dad playing piano. He was my first accompanist. And I've been fortunate enough to have some really great piano players. But the piano's always been extremely important to me and a very special instrument. The last EP I did a piano version. And I made a commitment then to, in essence, pay tribute to the piano, pay tribute to my dad."