Lakelin Lemmings Employs a Road Map For Her First Radio Single, ‘Get Around Boy’
Categoria: Musica
Billboard's Makin' Tracks column looks at the writing and recording process behind Lakelin Lemmings' "Get Around Boy."
Por Billboard | 04/06/2026
When West Tennessee musician Phillip Lemmings discovered in 2005 that his wife was pregnant, he faced a crossroads. He played guitar and mandolin in a five-piece country band, Forty5south, that had released two albums. But with his daughter, Lakelin, due to arrive in May 2006, it meant the family would have two kids under the age of three. Staying out on the road with a job that was an economic drag no longer made sense, so he quit the band, and Forty5south broke up. Phillip remained friends with the group’s lead vocalist, Ash Bowers, who became a successful songwriter-producer (Matt Stell, George Birge). As Lakelin hit her teen years, she demonstrated real talents as a songwriter and singer, and Phillip lobbied Bowers periodically about her potential. When she reached age 17, Bowers started pulling her into writing sessions and crafting songs that fit her voice and story. With “Get Around Boy” — her first single released to radio — Lakelin, now 20, picks up professionally where her dad left off. “It’s a real full-circle thing,” she says matter-of-factly. The Lemmings home-schooled their children, which allowed Lakelin to see much of America in an RV. “We were able to enjoy our childhood and travel and do all the things,” she says. “I was really thankful.” Her songwriting efforts required travel, too. She continued to live in Henderson, Tenn., and routinely drove 135 miles for co-writing appointments with Bowers in Nashville. Mike Mobley (“Billy’s Got His Beer Goggles On,” “Easy”) became one of their collaborators, and when the three of them explored her story, she mentioned breaking up with a guy back home to devote her attention to her career. “You see a little tear in her eye,” Mobley says, “just enough there to go, ‘Yeah, she’s still caught up on the boy.” That comment didn’t become a song that day, but before their next appointment — June 6, 2024, at Bowers’ Wide Open Music in Nashville — Mobley spent more time connecting the dots between her travel and the sacrifice of relationships that often accompanies a touring lifestyle. He came back to their next writing session with an idea. “I just started picturing her driving across the country, chasing her brand-new life, and meanwhile, [the memory of] this first love from back home riding shotgun the whole time,” Mobley says. “He’s still getting around because he’s going with her emotionally.” That turned into a title, “Get Around Boy,” and he brought an opening line for the chorus, about a “beach out in California,” plus a semblance of a chorus melody to that next writing session. They turned it into an audio travelogue, and began listing places at least one of them had visited. She had traveled to 30 states, so it was easy finding locations she knew firsthand. In fact, the only one they incorporated in the song that she hasn’t experienced is Sedona, included because it rhymes loosely with California. They took some liberties with her real-life story, projecting in the verses that the rel