Country star Dillon Carmichael on making an album with Jon Pardi, and songs to save lives

Dillon Carmichael has heard people say that you should never meet your heroes.

But the 29-year-old county musician never found that to be the case.

“Everyone is friendly here,” says Carmichael during a phone call with The Bee in advance of Kiss County’s $5 Summer Concert Series on Thursday, Sept. 15 at Fresno’s Woodward Park Amphitheater.

“Ninety-five percent of everyone in Nashville is nice and kind,” he says.

“These people are just great people.”

Some of those people have had three decade of hit songs and are “some of the biggest superstars on the face of the planets,” Carmichael says.

And some have become friends, he says.

Case in point, Jon Pardi: the neotraditional country star whose just-released album “Mr. Saturday Night” has already produced a No. 1 song.

“I look up to Jon so much. He’s really worked his hind end off,” Carmichael says.

“He’s made a lot of really good decisions.”

Dillon Carmichael and Jon Pardi collaboration

And Pardi helped Carmichael make what he considers to be the best set of songs of his career. Pardi is credited as a co-producer on half of the 14 songs on Carmichael’s album “Son of A,” which was released last year.

The album was the by-product of a recording session the pair did mostly because they were bored and didn’t have anything else to do, the pandemic having halted bands from touring.

They went into record a few songs and ended up with an album’s worth of material, including the title track, which Carmichael considers his “pride and joy” and a real accomplishment as a songwriter.

It’s something he’s been working on and fallen in love with since he moved to Nashville.

Carmichael has been playing guitar in bands since he was 12, and always knew he wanted to be on stage and perform, but he had no interested in writing songs.

“It just didn’t sound like a lot of fun to me,” he says.

Plus, he’d seen his uncles — John Michael and Eddie Montgomery — have careers recording songs other people had written. It all changed for Carmichael when he moved to Nashville, he says. It’s taken him the past eight years to get good at songwriting and with the songs on “Son of A” he’s seen how his music can transform people.

“That’s what I want to do as a songwriter: I can’t develop medicine that saves life; so, I write music.”

His current single, “If I Wasn’t Your Man,” is an ode to his fiancé, Shayla Whitson. The pair are slated to be married in less than a month. The song is streaming now and will be available on the upcoming deluxe edition of “Son of A.”