Eric Burgett On His New Single, Classical Music, and Building a Farm Boy Piano Shell

Guitar is generally the instrument of choice for most front men and women in country music, but Eric Burgett has combined his extensive keyboard knowledge with his love of country music to develop a sound and approach unique to today’s Nashville. With a master’s degree in piano pedagogy, and consistently releasing new singles online while opening for acts like Chris Stapleton, Charlie Worsham, and other piano men like Phil Vassar and Jim Brickman, Burgett’s not the typical country singer of this day and age. He talked to American Songwriter about his latest radio single, “New York” and his new online releases during a phone call from his home a few minutes east of Nashville.

“We put out a single called ‘Sometimes Late at Night’ back in August,” Burgett said, “and that’s out at country radio right now. It’s gotten almost to the top 40, but I don’t know where it’ll end up. Aside from that, we’ve been putting out a streaming track every six to eight weeks. With streaming we can put a feeler out there, see what people gravitate to theme-wise, but it’s also for my fans to see what they want, really.”    

His new single, “New York,” was a co-write with Tiffany Goss (Chris Janson, Delta Rae) and Bruce Wallace (Dierks Bentley, Montgomery Gentry), and was produced by Matt McClure (Lee Brice, Lucas Hoge). “It was from a story of Bruce’s about a friend who was trying to get to New York for the holidays but had to cancel the trip and stay in Nashville,” he said. “We actually wrote it a few years ago. Bruce and I had been writing for a while, and he said he had this idea that needed piano. He wanted to call it ‘New York,’ and I thought that title had piano written all over it, because of Steinway [being headquartered there] of course, and the greats that lived there, like Billy Joel playing Madison Square Garden. Bruce had a phrase like, ‘Honey, I’ll be your New York.’ So we all got together and I started it on piano, and Bruce and Tiffany had their guitars and they started jamming along, and I sang ‘I’ll be your New York’ and it was pretty easy to write from there.”

While most keyboard players simply use a portable disassembling keyboard stand onstage, Burgett, a true piano player at heart, constructed a piano-type shell to hold his Nord keyboard. “I’ve always used Nord keyboards because I love the feel, the sounds are great, I just absolutely love them,” he said. “So I crafted this mini baby grand-looking piano shell that I put my keyboard in for live shows. It actually has a lot of my branding involved as well. What I mean by that is, I grew up in a small farm town in central Illinois, and we had a lot of grain bins around where I grew up, and I crafted the piano shell out of corrugated metal so it looks like a grain bin, with 2x4s for the legs and a camouflage trim around it. And the lid of the piano actually looks like a barn door.”

A lot of people go to Nashville to attend Belmont University and enroll in its music industry programs as a precursor to breaking into the business, but that was only half the story for Burgett. “I went to Belmont for piano teaching and classical piano, actually,” he said. “I ended up playing recording sessions and working as a dance accompanist. And then I auditioned for the Nashville Ballet and they hired me, and that was a good part-time gig while I was writing songs during the day and going to grad school at night. I’m always trying to find avenues that use my classical training, because that’s the basis of everything I do. If I hadn’t taken classical piano lessons as a kid I don’t know where I’d be piano-wise or songwriting-wise. It’s kind of crazy that classical music and country music can go hand-in-hand, but for me, it’s definitely playing piano that put me in this spot.”