Marin’s Alex Kline breaks barriers
Marin’s Alex Kline breaks barriers in Nashville’s ‘guy’s club’
As a teenager growing up in Marin County, Alex Kline loved the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Grateful Dead, went to Reggae on the River with her friends, taught herself to play guitar and spent hours writing songs in her bedroom. She dreamed of being in the music business someday, thinking maybe she’d move to Los Angeles and try to make it as a songwriter. She had a fantasy about playing lead guitar for a ska-punk band like No Doubt. She never imagined that she’d move to Nashville and become a trailblazing female country music songwriter and producer in a business that has long been dominated by men. But now, at
35, after a dozen years of dues paying in Nashville, she’s making country music history as the first solo woman producer to have a top 10 country hit by a female artist.
“There’s a statistic that just came out that since 2012 only 2% of the songs in the Billboard Hot 100 had any sort of female producer,” she says, citing a stat from a 2019 study on the gender gap in country music by researchers with the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative. “I never saw a lot of female producers growing up. It’s definitely a man’s world, especially in Nashville.”
Researchers concluded that when you look past the success of stars such as Carrie Underwood, Kasey Musgraves and Maren Morris, women creators are woefully underrepresented in country music. In addition to women making up just 2% of producers, only 16% of country artists are female and even fewer — 12% — of country songwriters are women.
“It’s definitely a guy’s club, but I see it as a challenge that I want to conquer rather than being discouraged,” Kline says. “My response to that — we need more women in the producer role to break out of those stereotypes.”
Before the pandemic, she cowrote
and produced the top 10, chart-climbing love song “Somebody Like That” from the album “Love, Heartbreak & Everything In Between” by up-and-coming singer Tenille Arts, one of Country Music Television’s Next Women of Country and an Academy of Country Music nominee for new female artist of the year.
‘Little song that could’
“Tenille is a brand-new artist on an indie label and she’s a female in country music, which makes it harder to break through,” Kline says. “But this has been the little song that could.”
Arts credits Kline for helping shape her sound and musical image, saying, “She works harder and more hours than any producer I’ve ever met,
and she’s a perfectionist in the best way.”
Rather than being holed up in Nashville during the pandemic, Kline and her dog, named after the country legend Patsy Cline, have been been riding out the lockdown with her parents, both retired attorneys, in their hilltop home in Nicasio in the West Marin countryside.
“If it wasn’t for the pandemic, I would have had to be in Nashville,” she says. “But since people have learned to write and record over Zoom, I came back here to be with my family and enjoy Marin County, my favorite place on Earth.”
When she was 14, she moved with her family to Marin from her native Minneapolis. It was life changing for her. She be
“I never saw a lot of female producers growing up. It’s definitely a man’s world, especially in Nashville.”
— Alex Kline
came instantly enamored with the beauty of the landscape and fascinated by the county’s rich musical history.
“Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and the music from the ’60s and early
’70s in Marin was super inspirational,” she says.
“Of course, I went through a Grateful Dead phase. One of Jerry Garcia’s last known residences is just up the hill from where we live in Nicasio. Supposedly he still haunts the studio in that house.”
As a kid, she rebelled against the classical piano lessons her parents gave her. Instead, she fell in love with the guitar after being turned on by the finger-picked intro to “Under the Bridge,” a track on the Chili Peppers’ album “Blood Sugar Sex Magik.”
“I convinced my parents to buy me a crappy guitar,” she says. “I don’t think they thought I would stick with it as much as I did because I hated the piano. I think they thought this was a phase.”
“But they were obviously wrong,” she adds and laughs.
Drawn to Nashville
In 2003, she graduated from High School 1327, formerly Sir Francis Drake High School, and spent a year studying at Sonoma State. After taking a gap year off to work in a surfer coffee shop in Santa Cruz and travel in Europe, she enrolled in the Berklee College of Music in Boston, studying guitar and songwriting.
In her first year at Berklee, she went on a spring break field trip to Nashville’s famed Music Row, visiting studios, attending clinics with Berklee alumni, observing songwriter rounds and taking in shows, the highlight being the Grand Ole Opry.
“Even though I didn’t grow up thinking I wanted to write country music, that’s when I realized that Nashville was where the really great songs were being written and that’s where I wanted to be,” she says. “I love pop music and other genres just as much as country, but when it comes to writing, I think there’s something about sitting down with an acoustic guitar and writing a song that tells a story. I felt what I did musically fit more in Nashville than anywhere else.”
After three years at Berklee, she moved to Nashville in 2008 with some friends with the goal of becoming a songwriter. In Music City, country and bluegrass shows at the Station Inn, an iconic venue that was featured on the recent Grammy Awards, inspired her to become a multi-instrumentalist.
“After seeing all the incredible players on mandolin and banjo and dobro and all those grassy instruments, I was like, ‘Oh my god, I’ve got to get a mandolin and learn to play that. I’ve got to get a dobro and learn to play that. I’ve got to get a banjo and learn to play that,’” she says. “I learned just enough to be dangerous.”
Before she broke through as a songwriter, she had her first taste of success as a performer with the Lunabelles, an all-woman country group that was signed to Sony Music and scored a hit single with a song called “A Place to Shine.” But after two years with the band, she realized that life on stage and on the road wasn’t for her.
“Being an artist is not as glamorous as people think it is, especially at the beginning,” she says. “Even though it seems amazing to hear fans screaming your songs night after night, I can’t really imagine living on the road 250 days a year. I was kind of on autopilot playing the same handful of songs over and over again. I was itching to be at home more, creating rather than being on the road re-creating.”
After the breakup of the Lunabelles, Kline was writing songs and recording demos in her bedroom when she got a call from her friend, singer-songwriter Erin Enderlin, asking her to produce an EP for her.
“I never thought of myself as a producer,” she says. “I just thought I was some person doing demos in her spare bedroom. That was the first moment I realized that maybe I actually was a producer.”
Hooked on producing
The EP, “I Let Her Talk,” was so well-received that it led to Enderlin, with Kline by her side playing guitar, making her debut at the Grand Ole Opry, a coveted gig that signals that you’ve arrived as a player in Nashville.
“It was so cool being a part of making someone else’s dream come true,” Kline says. “From then on, I was hooked on producing.”
Not long after, she began making a name for herself as a songwriter. While working for Reba McEntire’s agency Starstruck, she co-wrote a hit single, “Damn Drunk,” for country star Ronnie Dunn that got to No. 36 on the country charts. From there, she he went on to write songs for McEntire (“The Bar’s Getting Lower”), Mitchell Tenpenny (“I Get the Picture”) and a slew of other country artists.
And then came her career-boosting association with Arts. With Arts and fellow songwriter Allison Veltz Cruz, she co-wrote and produced “Somebody Like That,” a song about falling in love with the ideal man. It’s had more than 65 million streams, debuted at No. 2 on the iTunes country chart, spent three weeks at No. 1 on Radio Disney Country and No. 1 on Billboard’s Bubbling Under Hot 100 chart.
In a few weeks, Kline will be returning to Nashville with a groundbreaking song under her belt and a promising career in front of her as one of the rare women producers in country music.
“Sometimes I can’t believe that with this song I’m the first woman to have done this,” she says. “I feel like I’m blazing a trail and I’m happy to do it, hoping it will inspire other women to start doing the same.”