Muscle Shoals sound inspired his music

“Muscle Shoals to Music Row,” it felt like his recent “Out of this Town” album came full circle.

The album is a collaboration between Girelli and songwriter Mac Davis, who recorded 12 albums at FAME Recording Studios in Muscle Shoals.

Girelli and Davis met in 2013 and spent time at Davis’ Los Angeles, California, home where the songs on Girelli’s album were developed.

However, they were never produced. Davis died in 2020 due to complications from a heart bypass surgery.

Now, more than a decade later, Girelli was happy to finally release the music for public enjoyment, and he was thrilled to visit the Shoals, where he said the ties to Davis were tangible.

“I’ve never been to Florence before, and I feel like I feel Mac around,” Girelli said. “I was in FAME Studios this morning. I wasn’t expecting to see as much of Mac as I did in FAME. There’s a life-sized cutout of him, a guitar of his and all the records he recorded.

“I was taken aback by how much of Mac there was in that studio. I feel like I can feel him around here.”

When he met Davis, Girelli said he felt an immediate connection.

Both men, he said, were from small towns and had to work very hard for what they achieved in the music industry.

Girelli himself grew up in northern England, but he said he grew up listening to American music.

“My dad played a lot of American music around the house, and I always felt very influenced by American music,” he said. “I have a big voice myself — maybe an operatic voice in another universe — and I naturally gravitated toward Elvis, Roy Orbison and Bruce Springsteen, artists who sang big songs with big melodies.”

As Girelli grew up, he said he began to feel a deep connection with music and would sit and listen to his father’s music “for hours and hours.”

“Nothing else in life made me feel like that,” he said, noting that he began to write his own songs when he was around 11 years old. “That was a whole other feeling. It was a kind of euphoria that made you feel and also felt cathartic at the same time.

“I knew then music was

DOWNLOAD IT

Coyle Girelli’s “Out of this Town” can be downloaded or streamed anywhere you listen to music.

the only thing I should do — and thankfully it’s worked out. “I feel like I have a spiritual connection to music. It’s not just songs or singing — it’s in my cells, and I feel like there’s a magic and spirituality to it.”

Girelli said “Out of This Town” feels especially cathartic, because at the time that he and Davis wrote the songs, he was experiencing a time of great personal transition.

While some of that transitory period revolved around personal relationships, much was centered around his music itself.

“When me and Mac were introduced, one of the first things he said was he wanted me to sing the music my voice was meant to sing,” Girelli said. “Coming from England, I didn’t know if I was allowed to lean into the Americana sound I loved.

“He gave me the permission to kind of lean into this stuff, and it changed my trajectory as a songwriter and an artist.

“I feel like the whole album is very much linked to this area.”

Girelli said the songs on the album are precious to him, and he strove to take “real care” of them in the 12 years since he and Davis wrote together.

“There’s a reason they weren’t already out there,” he said. “I wanted to make sure Mac would be proud of the sound and where it ended up. We also have him singing on one of the tracks, so I took a lot of care. There’s a lot of emotion packed into this record. I think he would be proud.”

As Girelli prepared to tape his episode of “Muscle Shoals to Music Row,” he hoped the record would find its way to an audience of people who will find the music as healing as he finds it to perform.

“I think the point of music is to connect people,” Girelli said. “Music has this unique, almost otherworldly ability to make people feel a certain way. Mac and I — our shared experience of growing up in a small town connected us. The performance I get to do here, in a place he spent so much time, makes that connection more poignant to me.”