Country music fans—those who are paying attention—realize that not only are plenty of country singers from somewhere above the Mason-Dixon line, but more and more come from north of the U.S.-Canadian border. Nicole Sumerlyn grew up in small town British Columbia and now lives in Vancouver, but she found her way to Nashville.
Vancouver recording artist Nicole Sumerlyn
Nicole visited Music City first as a teenager and realized she wanted to go back as an official adult. She made the most of those visits, connecting with other Canadians who had already settle in Nashville and began songwriting. The result of one of those visits is her debut single “Over a Drink,” written with fellow Canadian Jimmy Thow of the duo Sons of Daughters.
They met through a mutual friend, producer Mitch Merrett. Nicole said, “That’s the thing about Canadians. When we go to Nashville, it’s such a small little group, so when someone’s down there, we all say, “Oh! Canadians!”
Co-writing together, Summerlyn and Thow clicked, she said. “He’s a fantastic writer. We wrote that song within an hour and a half on our first write together. He knew me as an artist and what I was looking for in a sound, so it was easy to come up with something.” Nicole admits, “I’m an open book. I tell anybody my story. I’m a little too honest sometimes, and it gets me in trouble.” That day, she says, she was telling him about her love life and someone she was seeing that wasn’t going all that well.
“I said something about ‘over a drink,’ out of context, and he thought it was a cool song title. I said, ‘Let’s roll with it,’ and we did.” The song, she said, fit her sound and represents where she is in her life right now, so it seemed perfect for her first single release.
She recorded the song a couple of months later—“all over the place.” The vocals were recorded on Vancouver Island, with a few musicians from Nashville sending tracks. For someone accustomed to the entertainment world, she said filming the music video for “Over a Drink” was a great experience.
The video was filmed by Meaghan Gipps in a bar in Vancouver that turned over the lower part of the venue for filming. “I had all my buddies with me,” says Sumerlyn, “and they couldn’t really take it seriously. The guy playing the male role—the quintessential underwhelming first date, is actually one of her best friends too.
Her single “Over a Drink,” addresses some of the challenges of dating, and Nicole admits that during Covid, those challenges have increased.
She said, “I live with my two best friends and we’re all single. It’s tough because we’re at a point in our life in our early twenties where we want to be meeting people, going out and having fun. But that’s just not safe right now. We have to think of other ways to do it, and it’s a lot harder. You can’t really go out like we used to do before. It’s impossible.”
Those roommates are not in the music business, she says, but they are her biggest supporters
“I’m especially happy to have them around when I’m doing live shows on Facebook. They’re my audience,” she said. While she has continued to write and play, Sumerlyn admits that she took a little time to hibernate at the beginning of 2020.
“I don’t know what was going on. I had been hustling for ten years, touring and songwriting. I decided, ‘I’m going to be a normal 23-year-old for a while. Just enjoy my friends and family and cook food.’ That was good for a couple of months. Then I started looking at my guitars and saying, ‘I miss you!’ I missed writing. Then I went through some life things and started writing like crazy. It’s good to take a break and regroup, to recognize that I do really want it. It was important to take that break, a blessing in disguise because it made me understand how much I love music and love writing.”
Few twenty-three-year-olds can claim to have spent ten years in the music business, but Sumerlyn got off to an early start. Growing up in Abbotsford, a blue-collar farming town in British Columbia, she always enjoyed the outdoors, with mountains and nearby water offering opportunities for hiking and camping. While they didn’t have a family band, her dad played guitar and her mother played piano. For Nicole, starting lessons at six led to picking up her dad’s guitar and then songwriting.
She pays tribute to her early influences in some of her online performances she called “The Songs That Have Shaped Me” that include Willie Nelson, Patsy Cline, and Johnny Cash.
“My mom’s side of the family mainly are big county fans. Dwight Yoakam was always on the radio and Patsy Cline. I’m a huge Willie Nelson fan. Traditional country music is a part of my soul that makes me so happy to hear the guitar and fiddle and that twang,” she says.
She started attending a fine arts school in eighth grade, and after years of dance training, she considered performing on cruise ships. But after years of dancing, she wrote and sang a song for her school’s Christmas recital and fell in love with the stage.
“It was a leap for me. I loved being on a piano, playing a song that I wrote. The response was nice, and I just got addicted to it. I made the transition from dance because I fell in love with songwriting and country music, sharing things I had written,” says Sumerlyn.
When she was about fourteen, she started working with other songwriters and signed a writing deal. “I was put head-first into the industry at a young age,” says Nicole. “For the first couple of years, of course, I was writing about my teenage heartbreaks, about what happens at the time in my life, but I was fortunate enough to work with some cool people, so my writing evolved. They taught me and grew with me.”
While she admits there are songwriting legends she’s admired with whom she would like to write, “there’s never a shortage of people to write with. People inspire each other.” She enjoys teaming up with her Nashville songwriting friends. Most of the songs she write are intended for her own recording projects.
“I’ve been writing for a while now, and there are songs we’ll write in a room that are meant for me,” she says, but sometimes she says she’ll writing a song that would be better for a male singer or for someone with a different range. “I’ll think, “I know an artist who could sing those high notes, who could pull that off way better than I could. And I want the songs to be heard. Even though my main thought is to be an artist, I want those ‘song babies’ to be heard in the world.”
While Sumerlyn enjoys letting “Over a Drink” have its time in the world, she has plans for 2021, including a current project in the studio still being kept under wraps. Asked about a future full-length project, she anticipates other songs with the same sassy mood as this first single.
“I’m a gritty country girl myself,” she said. “I think that definitely is a mood that will be on the record, but I’m not all sunshine and rainbows. I’ve been through things in my life too that I write about that I want to share, so it’s going to have a different side of as well.”
She looks forward to life after the pandemic, too, performing live and traveling in person to Music City for writing and songwriter rounds. For now, though, she’s enjoying having her first release, something she is proud of.
“’Over a Drink’ just got added to my hometown radio station,” she said. “I grew up listening to that station, to the radio host every morning on the way to school. Now my song is on it. That’s a simple thing, but quite an experience as a new artist,” Nicole said.