“You are not enough.”
That’s the indirect message people often receive on social media, according to a recent study led by Dr. Phillip Ozimek at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany. Thanks to the personalized ads and the endless posts featuring people at their best, the project found that the more participants consumed social media, the more unhappy and inadequate they tended to feel.
Unwittingly, Ozimek’s work provides scientific support for the newest Dan + Shay single, “Bigger Houses.” Since their 2013 arrival in the national spotlight, they’ve been able to change their lives in a material way. But that success also gave them a dramatic ability to recognize that money can’t buy happiness.
“We get caught up in this rat race,” says the duo’s Dan Smyers, “of always wanting more, always feeling insignificant, looking at what everybody else has gotten and thinking ‘They’re doing so much better than me.’ ”
Country, of course, has frequently reminded listeners that it’s better to be rich in character than in financial assets. It’s a message that’s present in Dolly Parton’s “Coat of Many Colors,” Porter Wagoner’s “Satisfied Mind,” John Anderson’s “Money in the Bank” and Tim McGraw’s “Last Dollar (Fly Away).” And Smyers’ wife, Abby Law Smyers, provided similar advice when songwriter Andy Albert (“Thinking ’Bout You,” “Rednecker”) and his wife, Emily, were showing Abby the new house they had bought to accommodate their growing family. They repeatedly mentioned the things they wanted to change, and Abby periodically noted that the place was already beautiful. And then she made an offhand comment that everyone in their circle was buying bigger houses.
Albert wrote the title “Bigger Houses” down, and he put more thought into it ahead of a writing session with Smyers and Jordan Minton (“Good Time,” “Your Place”) on April 5, 2023, at the home of songwriter Jordan Reynolds (“10,000 Hours,” “Speechless”).
“I kind of started unpacking it,” Albert says, “how everyone’s always just chasing the next thing and how sometimes happiness is right in front of you. You just have to choose to slow down and accept it.”
As it happened, the writing session was a low-pressure situation. Dan + Shay had wrapped their next album, though it was still untitled. So the guys were free to write whatever they wanted. And when Albert served up the title and the all-important setup line — “The thing I’ve found about happiness is/ It don’t live in bigger houses” — they had something that resonated with all of them. Smyers had a line, “There’s always gonna be a higher high,” that he had planned to use in another song, but they repurposed it as the opener for a chorus that led to the “bigger houses” payoff.
Reynolds, on guitar, and Smyers, on piano, developed the musical framework; Smyers, in particular, oversaw the melody since he knew lead singer Shay Mooney’s voice best. That said, Mooney’s range is wide enough that they weren’t likely to make a misstep.
“Dan really has it all dialed in,” says Albert. “He’s such an amazing melodic writer. I think he just had a vision for it and just played through it for a half hour or whatever, and then all of a sudden, it sounds just exactly right. ‘Now we get to kind of sit down and fill in the words.’ ”
Many of the phrases they built into it — such as “greener grass in the yard next door” or “never gonna fill an empty cup” — played on clichés without exactly using them.
“The line that I remember the most is when we were writing the verse,” Minton notes, “And Andy said, ‘I’m not worried about keeping up with people named Jones.’ That is the coolest way I’ve ever heard someone say that phrase, and it made that phrase feel like I’ve never heard it before. That should be the name of a song: ‘People Named Jones.’”
In the second verse, they laid out a series of classic home-ownership sights and sounds: kids playing upstairs, dogs romping in the backyard and a couple rocking a porch swing. The only thing missing was a white picket fence.
“We tossed around throwing that in there,” recalls Minton. “It was kind of trying to dance around that picture as much as we could without going all the way. There’s plenty of clichés that we tried to twist in different ways, and it felt like that was going to be hard to put in a fresh way.”
At the end of the session, Smyers moved from piano to guitar, and Reynolds sang lead as they built a demo with mandolin and Dobro. Smyers subsequently sent it to Mooney, who was visiting his parents in Arkansas. It was the perfect scenario to hear a song about prioritizing family. “From the very first chorus, man, it was a strange experience because it felt like I was in the writing room,” Mooney says. “It’s so personal, it felt like words that I had in my spirit, almost just like this is exactly where I am in my life right now.”
Dan + Shay, along with the label and their team, thought “Bigger Houses” needed to be on the album — it needed to be the title of the album — so they set up a recording session at Nashville’s Backstage. They only hired one musician, guitarist Bryan Sutton, who played live as Mooney sang in the studio. Sutton also overdubbed new mandolin and Dobro parts, and outside of Smyers layering on harmonies, that was the whole thing.
“I fully thought that Dan was going to produce it out bigger,” says Reynolds, “but it stayed pretty stripped. We kept referencing, you know, Adele is one of the only people who can get away with super-stripped moments, but when it happens, it’s massive. And we always talk about how Shay has the capabilities of tearing the house down with just him and a piano.”
Mooney took an extremely restrained approach to the “Bigger Houses” vocal, determined to keep the focus on the words. “There’s not a lot of embellishment,” he concurs. “Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.”
Smyers apologized to his co-writers for not making “Bigger Houses” bigger, even though he thought the spare arrangement was right creatively. “There was probably no way it was ever going to be a radio single with this production approach,” he says.
But while in Los Angeles to work on The Voice, Dan + Shay began fantasizing about it as a follow-up to “Save Me the Trouble.” As fate would have it, Warner Music Nashville had the same thoughts. Warner released “Bigger Houses” to country radio via PlayMPE on Jan. 9. It debuted at No. 54 on the Country Airplay chart dated Feb. 17. Even though the song advocates an acceptance of life as it is, Reynolds can’t help but hope it gets big.
“The higher it gets on the charts, the more I’m encouraged by culture and where people are,” he reasons. “That’s honestly been so encouraging [that] other people relate to this because I think it’s easy to [think] we’re the only people who feel this way.” Regardless of how it performs publicly, “Bigger Houses” has made a huge impact on its creators.
“I think my competitiveness and drive was a big part of the reason I have gotten where I am,” says Smyers. “But I think it also caused me to miss a lot of great moments and cool things along the way. [“Bigger Houses”] changed that. I’m going to kind of move to a new mindset.”