Gatton Speaks to Everyone on “Heroes, Hookers, Pastors & Pilots”

Nashville-based songwriter and artist Gatton is a rare breed. He is able to put his heart on his sleeve and consistently see more than meets the eye.

After facing a tumultuous and mournful period which gave way to an unexpected season of growth, Gatton was instilled with the purpose to seek out and interview overlooked yet inspiring characters that hide within everyday life. 

“I have interviewed 78 people so far and it has changed the trajectory of my life and helped me to discover my ambition. To be a student just as much as a teacher. To listen intently and to learn from other people’s side mistakes and to tell the world of what I’ve learned,” he says. “I want to shift perspectives in the art that I create, that is my soul’s ambition. People are hard to hate close up, move in.”

He shares that ultimately, his goal is to forge unity between all people from all walks of life, an ethos he encapsulates in his stripped-down, emotional, and soul-bearing single “Heroes, Hookers, Pastors & Pilots.”

“I wrote this song because my soul’s passion is to remind this world of our shared humanity. Though we have different interests, childhood traumas, goals, and we look different, we all long to love, to be loved and to belong. If we can grasp that and allow it to shift our approach toward people, then it creates space for things like empathy and forgiveness, it is the key to unity,” he explains. 

This compulsive need to connect and draw inspiration from unlikely corners is what distinguishes Gatton not only as an artist but as a person. No matter where he is or who he is talking to, Gatton finds the shining common thread between all of us. 

He hopes others are able to draw the same conclusion. 

“I want people to recognize that we are all more the same than different. We are all human. The fear and the bravery, the love and the loss, the tears and the belly laughs, the mundane and the extraordinary, and the beginnings and the ends. We all experience these things and much more, and recognizing our shared humanity is the start to mending this undeniably broken world.”

He goes on to add that he sees this song as, “an invitation to journey through my personal discovery of our shared humanity. In the first verse, the song starts with the recognition of how beneficial it was for me to be told I was not enough because it forced me to search deeper in the tendencies of the people that have hurt me and recognize a common theme…we all long for belonging. In the chorus the song quickly transitions to become a letter written to ‘the heroes, hookers, pastors, pilots, murderers, and those who would never lie’ encouraging them to recognize that we are more the same than different because at the end of the day…everybody cries.”

The single, building to a colossal crescendo of sweeping emotion about the hopeful and damning correlations within humanity, tapers at the end not with a bang but a whimper of sobering truth. 

Listen to “Heroes, Hookers, Pastors & Pilots” now!