She has co-written with the likes of Carrie Underwood and Kenny Chesney. Now a North Delta musician and songwriter has released an original song of her own.
Kat Higgins is loving life these days in Nashville, Tenn.
Born and raised in North Delta, Kat is the youngest member of “The Higgins” a country music family band popular between 2005 and 2010.
She has been in Nashville for the last 10 years where she co-wrote Mexico with Underwood and Knowing You with Chesney.
As a songwriter, she is under contract with BMG and just released a new song which she wrote and performs called We Go Driving.
The Optimist recently caught up with Kat over the phone to talk about her new song and other aspects of her music career in Nashville.
“I started making trips with The Higgins about nine and a half years ago and I was thinking of writing more, so I would say the last eight years I shifted to being here permanently,” she said. “The Higgins have taken a break, but we never say never. We might do another Christmas album and get back together and do more music, because we still make music when I get back home. We love it.”
She said she was lucky enough to sign a publishing deal with SONGS out of Los Angeles and after writing for a few years got a chance to pitch to Underwood.
“She just heard the song…we write songs every day and the publishers take pitch meetings and they pitch the songs and she loved that song, so we ended up co-writing together,” said Higgins. “It opened up a lot of doors… it connected me with my current publisher BMG. It’s been great. The Kenny Chesney thing happened again just from a pitch meeting and then it led to him wanting to meet me. It’s been whirlwind, but I’m really happy with how it’s all going. It’s all because of songs. The connections were made through the songs.”
She said the idea for We Go Driving came on a late-night drive home in Nashville.
“I was on the interstate and saw a little boy in the front seat of a car as I passed by…I just noticed him and I thought ‘wow’ it’s super late, I wonder why he is still up,” she recalled. “When I got home my mind was still turning and I started writing this song with his story in mind. A few days later I got together with Troy Verges and we wrote the rest of it and since then I’ve found that people relate with it even though it’s not their story. It’s a story about a little boy and his mother leaving in the middle of the night…leaving a difficult situation at home. Even if someone hasn’t experienced domestic violence or a rough childhood of any kind they can still relate with it just seeing themselves in that picture and feeling the child within them. We all have a child within us that still has a lot of emotion and we deal with that in our adult lives.”
The song was released on May 15.
“I was pleasantly surprised. I’m just blown away by the reaction specifically by the Nashville industry. A lot of the people I work with and just the community here as just been loving it,” she said. “Being my first song I released it independently and casually. Even with it not on a playlist on Spotify yet it had 3,000 plays in six days. That tells me it is connecting with people’s hearts.”
Hear the song and see a performance from Higgins on YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MN_Rx8e6Yyg.
