As one of Nashville’s first-call session players, Derek Wells’ work can be heard on tracks by the who’s who of the country world and beyond – with names such as Brooks & Dunn, Maren Morris, Mason Ramsey, Kelsea Ballerini, Luke Combs and Post Malone all recruiting him for their records.
Wells’ parents are both musicians – his mom a songwriter, singer, and pianist, and his dad a guitarist and producer – but being raised in a family of musicians didn’t necessarily mean that he had it easy.
On the contrary, it forced him to prove himself and think carefully about whether he wanted to pursue music and sideman-ing as a career – with all its massive highs and lows – or not.
“I actually had a very real understanding of how good you had to be, because I’ve watched my dad play guitar, and he’s great, and, I still watched him have ups and downs in his career as a sideman and as a guitar player – lose gigs and go from this thing to this thing,” he says on the Zak Kuhn Show.
“I knew I wasn’t ready at all. In that period, when I came home, I was living in the basement. I had a job waiting tables. I did nothing but go to work to wait tables, and come back and play guitar in the basement.”
As he sums it up, “If I wasn’t at The Cooker [the restaurant], I was playing guitar. I didn’t have a girlfriend, I didn’t hang out… I was just trying to prove to my parents [that] I wasn’t going to be a loser.”
When they saw him taking his craft seriously, his parents decided to pitch in. “They were like, ‘Okay, we see the hours you’re logging. If you’re serious, here are some things you should be working on. One of those being – go buy the Nashville Number System book.’”
Emerging from Music City, the Nashville Number System is a shortcut number system that conveys chord progressions, originally developed in the mid-’50s by the Nashville vocal group, the Jordanaires. At the time, the outfit was very much in demand, recording multiple sessions and songs per day.
Since they were only given lyrics – and not sheet music – they didn’t have time to memorize their harmony parts for so many songs, so they came up with a system of using numbers based on each song’s key, kind of similar to solfège (Do-Re-Mi, etc.).
Wells continues, “I'd say, every week, when the new records came out, I would go to Walmart, and I would buy a contemporary or classic country record, like something you would hear on country radio.
“And then I would buy something that I thought was just cool, like an Incubus record or something. I would just try my best to learn those records, cover to cover. I was not good enough – but I was practicing all these things at once [and] trying to teach myself how to write the charts.”
The grind has definitely paid off for Wells, with the in-demand guitarist recently sharing the spotlight with Chris Stapleton, Brothers Osborne, Keith Urban, Dan + Shay, Reba McEntire, Clint Black, LeAnn Rimes, and Little Big Town at the 60th Academy of Country Music Awards.
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