It’s been quite the year for Laura Veltz. The Nashville-based songwriter, who has co-written such hits as Maren Morris’ “The Bones” and Dan + Shay’s “Speechless,” after breaking through in 2013 with Eli Young Band’s “Drunk Last Night,” expanded her songcraft to an even higher level.

Veltz, 44, co-wrote the No. 1 song on Billboard’s Country Airplay year-end chart for 2025: “High Road,” performed by Koe Wetzel and Jessie Murph. She also landed more than 40 cuts with artists across nearly every genre, including rapper BigXthaPlug, pop star Demi Lovato, and gospel artist Blessing Offor, helping her earn her second Grammy nomination for songwriter of the year, non-classical. Before the Feb. 1 Grammy ceremony in Los Angeles, Veltz will receive another honor: the National Music Publisher Assn.’s songwriter of the year. The award will be presented at the NMPA + Billboard Songwriters Awards party on Jan. 28 in Los Angeles.

The five-time Grammy nominee started in her family band, Cecilia, before moving to Nashville to pursue songwriting more than 15 years ago. Artists including Kelly Clarkson, Reba McEntire, Tim McGraw, Lil Baby, Ben Platt and Miranda Lambert have recorded her songs as well, but she has found a particular sweet spot with young women, including Lovato and Murph, both of whom she’s written with extensively, including 11 songs on Murph’s Sex Hysteria.

Ahead of her big week, Veltz talked to Billboard about embracing where she is in her career, her life/work balance and what songwriting in Nashville looks like today. She then takes us behind the scenes of five of her biggest 2025 cuts.

You often find yourself writing with women who are a generation or half generation younger than you, like Jessie Murph or Demi Lovato. What connection do you feel with them?  

I think my particular connection has to do with safety. And I really specifically enjoy connecting to young women in– if I’m old enough– a maternal way, but sometimes big sister way. I don’t feel scared of being older than these women. Maybe it’s why these women might enjoy being around me. I’m not envying their youth. I’m identifying the things that make our youths familiar and similar, but I think sitting with somebody who loves being a mom and is physically unafraid of getting older is sort of comforting.

I’ve worked very, very hard on my inward self. I’m the type of person who probably shouldn’t be alive because of the things that I’ve been through in my life. I’m very grateful that I’ve made it this far in life and I think that resonates with young women who are pretty much told by every source in society that they should be afraid of getting older.

You just said you shouldn’t be alive. You’ve been open about experiencing homelessness with your parents when you were younger. Is that what you mean? 

I’m estranged from my parents. They just put us in a lot of dangerous situations when we were little, in terms of alcohol use and putting us in the houses of other people who you find out later were very unsafe. It’s an innumerable amount of times when I could have been a statistic or a milk carton person. I absolutely could have been in situations that end your life, and I’m just really grateful that didn’t happen.

That comes across in your songwriting. You’re not writing about a girl in a pick-up truck. While you have some lighthearted songs, you aren’t afraid to tackle tough topics, like Demi Lovato’s “29,” which is a searing song about a young girl in a relationship with a much older man.

I think I’ve finally gotten to a point where I realized what my superpower is. I don’t do the same thing twice, because I don’t believe a human being is replicable. I don’t believe the human condition is identical. I feel fearless. I don’t feel like there are songs that shouldn’t be written. I think if we need to talk about it, we need to talk about it. I see it now, after 20 years doing this, my songs do come out a certain way. And I don’t know why that is, but when I listen to them, I’m like, “Wow, that went to the bone.” Even if it’s just hilarious and making fun of thing by way of women’s senses of humor.

How does a song like 2019’s “The Bones,” which spent 19 weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart, change your life?

Oh, my God, permanently. It’s an insane thing to happen that you go and you do the same exact motion— by that I mean it’s probably a lot like digging for gold — and then one moment you just hit gold and you’re like, “Oh my God, everything just changed.” It was just my homies. We just wrote a song like we always do, and it really impacted the legacy I’ll get to leave behind and the care I get to give my children. Yeah, a very, very, very dramatic effect on my life.

That’s as a writer. What’s a song that changed your life as a listener?

“Just Another Day in Paradise” by Phil Vassar. It is just a sweet little country bop about an everyday moment in a person’s life. You’ve got kids, you got dogs, you got bills to pay. And then the hook is “It’s okay, it’s so nice, it’s just another day in paradise and there’s no place I’d rather be.” I’m 19 years old. I am living in tumult. I’m in a family band I don’t want to be in. I’m living this kind of alt-life that has nothing to do with the casual American dream, and I hear this song, and I cried.

I realized much later that that day set in motion a desire for normalcy. I wanted to just have a house, a bunch of kids and some dogs to feed, dealing with the bills and gratitude for that life. I changed my behavior because of that song. It was one of the very first country songs I had ever heard, too — so you could say it made me move to Nashville.

Many Nashville writers work 9-5, five days a week. How do you control your writing calendar?

I approach most things pretty fruit-loopy, and I don’t have methodical approaches on that. I could write 50 songs in a week if the vibe is there. If the vibe isn’t there, I cannot push myself to do things. I’m much more precious about my energy, and if something is sucking me dry, I’m just like, “Nah, I’m okay.”

This year, I’m really taking things down because I want to spend more time with my 11-year-old twins. I told my team, “Let’s stick with three days a week, and we’ll just see what that feels like.” Meanwhile, my publisher, [Big Machine Music’s] Mike Molinar, was like, “Hey, something came up.”  I was like, “Look, I’m a last- minute b-tch. Let’s go.” Something comes up the night before, and it’s one of my “no” days but I feel like it, I’m going to be into it.

You co-wrote the No. 1 song on Billboard’s Country Airplay year-end chart for 2025, “High Road,” performed by Koe Wetzel and Jessie Murph. There are seven songwriters credited. Were you all together?

It was written in stages. It’s such an honor to be a part of a song, especially one that’s like that. Mainly because you take your eye off of the ball in country for five minutes and  get swept up in other genres, which I have been, so it’s been a very bizarre thing to suddenly be like, “Oh wow, look at that. I’m still rocking country stuff doing all this other stuff!” It’s hard to maintain them all. This is where I started. I’m still doing things here. It’s very satisfying.

We’ve gone from an average of 1.8 songwriters on a Hot 100 No. 1 song in the ‘70s to 5.3 in the 2010s. Why is that? Do you have a sweet spot for a number of songwriters on a song?

I don’t have a hard, fast rule about what the right way to do it is. Even though it feels like an enormous amount, [it] sometimes creates something that’s never been heard before… I’ll tell you that those huge numbers don’t always reflect songwriting. Sometimes those credits reflect producers who add things and end up on the copyright now. There are lots of times when there are credits on a song that are not necessarily the people who are sitting in a room thinking of words and singing melodies into the air and holding instruments or even being behind a computer and writing music. There are times when people end up on those that aren’t actually writing the song. But I wish I could tell you how to fix that problem. I don’t know.

That goes back to the days of Elvis, when Col. Parker insisted Presley get songwriting credit even if he didn’t participate in the songwriting. AI is also entering writing rooms. How are you incorporating AI into your songwriting process?

I’m not. I can’t necessarily track what [my co-writers are] doing every time, but I feel like I would know if a co-writer was using AI for ideas. I feel like that is a really risky situation for a million reasons — the main one being, this is your favorite thing to do on earth. You’ve chosen the best career. The most exciting, most fun thing is writing poems. The idea of giving that over to a robot seems foolish [and] boring. Secondly, ideas come because you’re constantly thinking about them. If you give yourself a crutch, they will stop coming. For me, my ideas are relentless. It doesn’t ever stop. I’ve had ideas even just chatting with you on the phone right now.

Below, Veltz reveals in her own words the stories behind writing five of the songs that helped earn her a songwriter of the year Grammy nomination.

“Blue Strips” (Jessie Murph): Jessie and I have written so many songs together, but the day we wrote “Blue Strips” holds our record for most songs written in a 24-hour window. We play this game called “beat roulette,” where our cowriter, Bēkon, plays 10-20 minutes of a beat on a loop. Jessie riffs for all of those minutes while I hunt for the song, story or idea. If we like it, we give ourselves 10 or so additional minutes to finish. Then we move onto another beat.

We did that around 30 times in one night! Two of those songs ended up on Sex Hysteria, one of which was “Blue Strips.” One other fun fact is that as soon as that beat started, “I just bought a mansion in Malibu” fell out of Jessie’s mouth. We built the story from there, and the rest is history. 

“About You” (BigXthaPlug and Tucker Wetmore): Word got around that BigXthaPlug wanted to make a rap album with all country features. I’d worked with BigX before on “Holy Ground” featuring Jessie Murph, and loved everything he was doing, so this idea thrilled me. I dedicated a lot of my pitch writing sessions to serve up choruses to BigX and his team — and one fateful day, writing with my Nashville homies, Jon Hume, Jackson Nance and David Ray Stevens, we got one. And to top it all off, one of my favorite voices in country music, Tucker Wetmore, ended up being the featured artist. Watching that song find its home and this whole project doing so well has been one of my favorite parts of this year of my career.

“What Tomorrow’s For” (Blessing Offor): I met Blessing during Grammy Week years ago. He and I instantly dove into a huge conversation about God and the human experience, connecting over our similar views of the world, even though I’m not a practicing Christian. Whatever energy we found that day poured right into the first song we wrote months later in Nashville with AJ Pruis.

“What Tomorrow’s For” is our comfort song for anyone having a shitty day for reasons that, in the moment, make no sense, and feel unfair. We were delighting in how we get a new chance every time the sun rises, no matter how bad a day is, courtesy of whatever is cosmically in charge of all this. I’m grateful to Blessing for inviting me to write with him and finding the through-line of our perspectives of our maker. 

“Grand Bouquet” (Maren Morris): “Grand Bouquet” was one of three songs I had the privilege of writing with Maren at Electric Lady Studios in New York City. I’ve always had a remarkable rapport with Maren, but this was my first time experiencing the Swiss Army knife that is Jack Antonoff. His talent for pulling music out of phase, bending instruments to his will and inspiring the room into new realms really pushed Maren and me to summon fresh melodies and new stories out of our writing.

This particular song is one of my favorite lyrics I’ve ever been a part of. I love when a person realizes something new about themselves, particularly when that something requires them to change, self-correct or apologize. Some of my best seasons as a human being grew from extending apologies and I think there should be more songs for those moments. 

“Leave Me Too” (Josh Ross): I have strong feelings about this song not only because I think it’s really well written, but also because I wrote it with my sister, fellow hit song writer Allison Veltz Cruz. We were writing with Ben Stennis and Michael Tyler that day and I remember this moment when we all landed on the hook, “If I were you, I’d leave me too.” I stood up and shut the door. I don’t even think I noticed I was doing it! My reasoning I guess, was that I didn’t want anyone else in the publishing house to catch this idea. I thought it was so good, it shocked me that it hadn’t been written before.

The subject of this song touches on the same themes I love present in “Grand Bouquet.” Admitting something uncomfortable to oneself, about oneself, is brave. Hot, even. I don’t think there’s truer selfless love than letting go of someone who, you know in your heart, deserves better than you. I’m grateful to Josh Ross for recording it. It’s a mature way to approach a break-up, but one that would save a lot of people time and heartache.