When Stephen Wilson Jr. performed a dark acoustic version of “Stand By Me” on the Country Music Association Awards in November, a large swath of the genre’s fans finally heard him for the first time.

He picked up some new followers that night – not only among consumers, but also in the music business. And yet, as important as the appearance was for Wilson, he barely remembers it. He had a bit of an out-of-body experience, which might have been the best way for him to navigate it.

“Something happened in that moment, and I’m glad I wasn’t there for it,” he says. “I think that’s just your body’s way of protecting you from it, so you can do what you’re supposed to do. So you can be the vessel you’re supposed to be, kind of uninhibited by your own emotions.”

The day before that opportunity, Nov. 18, Big Loud created more possibility by releasing a new single, “Gary,” to country radio via PlayMPE. The primary character can “fix about anything a hammer can’t handle,” as the chorus suggests, making him almost an anachronism as the world hurdles into artificial intelligence.

“AI ain’t gonna show up when your septic tank blows,” Wilson Jr. counters, “but, hey, Gary will, and if his name is Gary, you’re probably in good shape. At least, that’s just what I’ve experienced.”

“Gary” was inspired by a somewhat mysterious tragedy. In 2023, Wilson spotted a memorial billboard along the highway that paid tribute to a pre-teen named Gary. The details of the boy’s death weren’t obvious, but the name jolted Wilson.

“There ain’t a lot of boys named Gary these days,” he thought.

It became the first line of the chorus as he wrote the bulk of a song on his drive, honoring a simple, fictional man with numerous contradictions. Gary is not particularly religious, but worries that people no longer pray when they eat. He’s concerned about saving money for the future, but he smokes, engaging in an expensive habit that reduces his time on Earth. He’s talented and dependable, but mostly overlooked. He keeps up with the news of the world but doesn’t speak with his brother. Still, Gary is generally a good guy.

“The Garys that I grew up with were guys that could just fix everything,” Wilson says. “They always had a cigarette kind of stuck to their lip while they were talking, and they’d always shoot you straight and always did you a solid.”

Wilson bookended the chorus with the “ain’t a lot of boys named Gary” line, then captured the character’s complexities in the verses, written mostly without access to a guitar. When he finally put it all to music, he purposely matched a familiar, repeating, four-chord progression.

“That really repetitive loop was important because Gary’s a hustler, he’s busy – like, even when he’s retired, he’s trying to keep himself busy,” Wilson notes. “I wanted to add this feeling of unnecessary tempo to it, like he’s retired, but he’s on the move for no reason. He’s gonna run until his heart stops, and literally, it does at the end.”

He played it at some point for producer Ben West (Carly Pearce, Ella Langley), and when they started sorting through material for Wilson’s next album in December 2023, West brought up “Gary.” It wasn’t done, Wilson insisted. Over the next several months, he toyed with ideas for a bridge, and he finally developed one by breaking from the song’s narrative tone and elevating into a highly emotional section. He immediately added the song to his set list as he toured a one-man acoustic show, and it landed repeatedly with the audience.

When he shifted into a band format, his two supporting musicians weren’t familiar with “Gary,” so he had them sit out the first time until the bridge, then jump in and add a lengthy vamp after the last verse that extended the performance to more than five minutes. It worked so well that it became the de facto arrangement.

Wilson finally recorded “Gary” in February 2025 at Gravitron Studios, built in a converted house near David Lipscomb University. West and Wilson didn’t want the band – including drummer Julian Dorio, bassist Miles Burger and steel guitarist Scotty Murray – to grow stale sitting around while Wilson recorded the solo portion of the song, so they cut the back end of the performance first. They went after it with a certain recklessness.

“We wanted to be more like garage rock, kind of capture the live band,” West says. “It’s a little more guerilla recording style in that way, and we weren’t too careful about anything.”

Once the full-band instrumental was done, Wilson tackled the acoustic body of “Gary,” but there was nothing folky about the performance. West miked the guitar five different ways, capturing different elements of the sound in each track, giving them the ability to make that guitar sound bigger on playback. Most listeners wouldn’t notice it’s a solo performance unless they were told.

Wilson gave it a raw tone, too.

“I’m playing very high up on the neck, so you can actually hear the scrape of the pick hitting the wood on my fretboard,” Wilson says. “It’s actually like a hi-hat.”

Further experimentation led to what West calls “an orchestra of gut strings.”

“He hit this chord that had a weird note in it, and he had a really long reverb on it,” West recalls. “It’s the sound that starts the song, along with the harp, where it’s just like a chime, and it doesn’t sound really like a guitar. It could be anything.”

Changing the tone of the five guitar tracks or double-tracking Wilson’s vocals in different stanzas helped to create some drama to the arrangement, even as Wilson played alone.

“Up until the band part, it had to be just super-minimalistic,” Wilson suggests, “because Gary is super-minimalistic.”

Big Loud had a different song in mind for a single, but when the team heard “Gary” in October, the plan changed. Suddenly, West needed to cut more than a minute out of it to provide a single version that was less than four minutes.

“We were pretty brutal,” West says. “We got the knife out and started hacking away at the arrangement.”

They preserved the story, though, with “Gary” coming off as a quirky, lonely guy who feels his life slipping away and wonders if his classic blue-collar skills will go extinct in the next generation. That would mean all the Garys in society are at risk.

“We all kind of feel,” West says, “like Gary in a weird way, watching the world change around you, not sure where you belong in it.”

But Gary, and others like him, should always feel at home in country, even as AI challenges their identities and sense of purpose.

“Country music has always kind of figured out a way to celebrate the working human, the person that gets up and gets things done,” Wilson says. “I’m trying to figure out a new way to celebrate that character.”