The podcast host and country artist found himself drawn to the stories of his fellow songwriters, which he's capturing on 'Ten Year Town'

Even by Nashville’s run-yourself-ragged standards, Troy Cartwright’s workload stands out. At any given moment, he’s juggling three jobs, all of which carry full-time demands. Cartwright is a prolific songwriter in Music City, an independent artist grinding out a career, and the host of a podcast shining a light on the pressures and rewards of writing country songs.

In March, the Texas native and Ten Year Town host released the EP Etc. All the Rest, his first new release since 2024’s full-length, Bygones. Raised in Dallas, Cartwright was captivated by the open spaces in West Texas, and Etc. All the Rest is steeped in metaphors and imagery that evokes those spaces.

“A lot of records that I have always loved for years and years are ones that have a little bit of a sense of place,” Cartwright says. “Like Nebraska by Bruce Springsteen or Southern Accents — Tom Petty — where the context is dripped in there, but it’s baked into the whole record. This EP is a part of a larger record that’s coming out this year, but I just wanted to make something that had a sense of place.

“When I started writing this thing, I was just thinking about how, when I was six years old, my great grandfather passed away. He had died in Dallas, but he lived his whole life out in Lubbock, and that was the first road trip I’d ever been on. When you’re young, you remember strange things. And having grown up in Dallas, I had never seen that kind of space before. Sure, all space looks the same, but West Texas — it’s flat, it’s huge, the sky looks bigger somehow. That feeling stuck with me.”

The title track is something adjacent to a love song, featuring a guy waking up hungover in a hotel room with little recollection of the night before, making a call to his significant other in which he can only muster, “I love you baby, et cetera, all the rest.” Cartwright wrote the song while driving to a show after a friend told him about waking up drunk in a Palm Springs hotel. He says the lyrics came quickly.

“It’s the story of a guy who has kind of messed up his life, and he can’t tell you exactly what’s wrong,” he says. “But he can draw a big circle around it. I love that way of telling a story. A great song always puts the name to a feeling that you can’t describe. That character telling that story really became my point of view for this whole project.”

Cartwright got his start in Texas in the early 2010s, playing frequently with artists like Wade Bowen, Randy Rogers, and Josh Abbott. In 2015, he recorded a full-length LP, produced by Wes Sharon (Turnpike Troubadours, Southall) which eventually helped him land a publishing deal. He moved to Nashville in 2017.

He recalls the first time he set foot in Nashville’s Red Door, a popular haunt for songwriters, and being struck by the community that composers in country music had built for themselves.

“I knew that people wrote songs for a living, but it never clicked for me that all these people lived in Nashville and hung out in one place, and were kind of into songwriting in the same way that I was,” he says. “It was like I had crash-landed on the Island of Misfit Toys, and I was home. These are my people, you know?”

Since then, his own songs have been cut by the likes of Ryan Hurd, Josh Abbott, and even Nickelback.

Once he became established as a writer, Cartwright started Ten Year Town to bring to light the feeling of community that fascinated him on that first Red Door visit. Now with more than a hundred episodes under his belt, he says hosting other writers is as important to his music as his life experiences.

“There’s sort of this thing that happens, both when you’re writing a song and when you’re doing an interview,” he says. “It’s almost like you’re trying to crack a nut somehow, and get it to open all the way up. I’ve done a hundred-plus interviews, and there’s always a moment where the façade drops, and you get to the heart of what you’re really talking about. On the podcast, that’s the journey.”

Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose book (Almost) Almost Famous will be released April 1 via Back Lounge Publishing.