“You have to tell everybody it’s just a dancing song.”
Curb recording artist Harper Grace is a tad nervous about one phrase in her mesmerizing new single, “underneath the harvest moon.” Grace reveals in the chorus that she’s “in a knockin’-boots kinda mood,” a statement that has urban-slang precedent. Based on Luke Bryan’s “Knockin’ Boots,” plus 1990s songs by rapper Candyman and R&B trio H-Town, listeners will likely assume she’s in a sexual mood.
Grace didn’t have that in mind when she wrote it, but she realized that listeners might read that into the song shortly after she wrote it, at age 21, in 2021.
“To be honest with you, I was younger, and I actually didn’t know what that meant,” the native Texan says. “I genuinely thought that that meant like, ‘Oh, they’re going on the dance floor and knocking their boots because they’re spinning around on the floor,’ until I got back home. I think I played it for my mom or dad and they’re like, ‘This song’s really good, but oh, my — knocking boots?’”
The phrase arose during a writing session at The Shed, an East Nashville home studio owned by writer-producer Cameron Jaymes (“She’s Somebody’s Daughter”). He started a drum beat to set a musical mood, and fellow writer Steve McEwan (“Summertime,” “Only You Can Love Me This Way”) applied some elaborate, R&B-ish major-seventh chords on guitar.
“In country sessions, you’re taking quite a risk when you’re getting away from the normal four chords that everybody plays,” McEwan notes. “I thought, ‘Let me just try this kind of vibe with these unusual chords and see how they react.’”
The response was positive. Jaymes mimicked the sound on a Wurlitzer — which, he says, made the progression sound like “yacht-rocky chords” — and McEwan voiced a melody before they had an actual storyline. When the phrase “harvest moon” popped out, it intrigued them, and they spent 30 minutes or so discussing why that felt authentic to the music they were playing.
The harvest moon is the full moon that occurs closest to the autumn equinox. In the context of the song, it felt like a sweetly romantic idea: dancing in the moonlight instead of in a honky tonk. “Rather than the neon keeping you up all night, rather than drinking and dancing until the neon turns off, it’s [beneath] a harvest moon,” Jaymes says.
They still used a barroom jukebox and alcohol to set the tone as the female protagonist realizes that “Oops, the bottle’s empty,” hinting that a particular cowboy should buy her a drink. It helped the couple — and the song — move forward. “One of the first lyrics, I think, was ‘[Take] those lips off of that beer and [bring] ‘em over here,’ which I thought was really, really funny,” McEwan recalls. “That kind of set the sassy tone for the song.”
The chorus melody lifted from the verse just enough to place the topline into a clear, sweet spot in Grace’s range, and that “knockin’ boots” line came into focus. Whether she’s suggesting a dance or something even more intimate, she’s making sure the guy doesn’t miss the signals. “Every once in a while,” Grace reasons, “maybe the girl’s got to say something.”
In the second verse, an unusual word from verse one returned — “Oops,” they did it again — while Grace employed an image of weepin’ willows. It could be interpreted as literal trees underneath the harvest moon, though it also has some artsy intent. “It’s definitely meant as the metaphorical ‘weeping willows swaying in time,’” she says, “which is the description of the partners having the opportunity of actually dancing.”
They semi-intentionally dropped lyrics along the way — including “cowboy,” “lasso” and “country night” — that strengthen the song’s country cred amidst the seventh chords.
Before they stopped, a bridge seemed apropos. They didn’t need any new lyrical information, but a chant-like cadence provided a sonic side trip before they rode the chorus out one last time. “I thought it was kind of hypnotic,” McEwan says. “You can just feel them dancing.”
Jaymes turned the day’s work into a demo, using a hint of steel guitar balanced against several vocal add-ons: a “Pontoon”-like lick at the close of the chorus and a few electronically filtered backing parts.
Grace held her first tracking session Oct. 28, 2021, at Nashville’s Blackbird Studios, with Jaymes and Ben West (Ella Langley, Stephen Wilson Jr.) producing. Grace was a bit wide-eyed — “That was my first-ever session being in Nashville,” she says — and it tested her mettle. They put “harvest moon” first on the itinerary, but a whole cadre of friends and business associates came to the session and were partying a bit in the control room. It didn’t seem to bother the musicians, but it put Grace under pressure as she sang a fairly intimate song.
Grace, says Jaymes, “needed a little bit more of a closed environment to be vulnerable.”
After one of the hangers-on leaned over engineer Dave Clauss to hit the talkback button and offer unsolicited advice on her performance, Jaymes had Clauss shut down the mics so he and West could talk to her in private in the vocal booth. They told her not to sweat it — they could get the final vocal later — and reminded her that she was a great vocalist. Just ignore the circus. It helped ease the process.
The musicians meanwhile cut new tracks alongside a few elements from the demo, including some of Jaymes’ keyboard parts. Nate Dugger created a burning guitar solo, likely playing off a lyric about the emotional “fire” in the story. Dugger also overdubbed steel before the session ended, helping to define the song’s eventual format. “We were trying to ride that line of country and pop and in-the-moment,” West says.
Grace ultimately cut her vocal back at The Shed, the less-hectic environs where they’d written “underneath the harvest moon.” She chipped in thicker harmonies while Jaymes created even more adventurous electro-vocal counter melodies. His wife, Kelly Brier, threw in a few harms, to boot.
The material from that period remained in the Curb vaults for several years, a wait that allowed Grace, now 25, to mature a bit. “Everyone believed they were great songs,” she says, “but the image of who I was wasn’t fully making sense, I guess.”
She revised her management team — presumably putting an end to control-room kibbitzing — and the marketplace changed a bit, too. Thanks, in part, to Langley and Dasha, romantic female assertiveness is better received in country. “It’s been five years since we recorded it,” West says, “but it’s still right on time.”
Curb released the single to country radio via PlayMPE on July 10, in plenty of time for this year’s harvest moon on Sept. 26. Grace knows she may not be able to control how fans interpret “harvest moon,” but she hopes they can at least allow room for the meaning she assigns to it.
“My version of knocking boots is a two-step on a hardwood floor,” she insists. “I don’t want anyone to think that I’m implying anything else other than that.”
