Chandler Walters on the Making of Post Malone and Morgan Wallen's ‘I Had Some Help’

“It's been a great morning!” Chandler Walters beams.

The timing of our conversation with Walters, the man who has ascended from steel guitar TikToker to one of Post Malone's go-to songsmiths over the last 12 months, could not be any better. Just hours before we meet, it's announced that one of the six songs Walters wrote for Post's 2024 album, F-1Trillion, the blockbuster, ubiquitous Morgan Wallen collaboration, ‘I Had Some Help’, has received two Grammy nominations.

“I got a call an hour and a half ago as I was leaving a meeting, and I was like, ‘Holy crap!’” Walters gushes. Although an incredible moment, ‘I Had Some Help’s Grammy recognition is unsurprising. Since arriving in May 2024, the infectious, pop-country hit has racked up over 760 million streams on Spotify alone, as well as spending six weeks at the pinnacle of the Billboard Hot 100 and picking up 2024 CMA Awards nominations for Single of the Year, Song of the Year, Musical Event of the Year and Music Video of the Year. Its spell atop the all-genre chart helped to consolidate it as Billboard's Song of the Summer, and ‘I Had Some Help’ is already finding itself at the peak of many End-of-Year rankings.

Musically speaking, ‘I Had Some Help’ is a classic country heartbreak anthem with a playful, light-hearted twist, as Post and Morgan attempt to shirk the blame across an addictive, caffeinated instrumental. The hook is a certified earworm, with the sheer star-power of this collaboration nudging ‘I Had Some Help’ into mega-hit territory.

But in a way, the context in which ‘I Had Some Help’ was spawned was far more significant than its musical composition. Country fans had been longing for Post Malone to venture into the genre ever since his now-iconic 2015 tweet, “WHEN I TURN 30 IM BECOMING A COUNTRY/FOLK SINGER”. After tentatively testing the waters with a snippet of ‘Guy For That’, ‘I Had Some Help’ was chosen as the song to officially announce Post Malone's foray into country, as the world waited with bated breath.

It launched the ‘Chemical’ hitmaker's F-1Trillion (Long Bed) project - 27 songs spanning traditional country, bluegrass, Western swing, pop-country and much more, all of which are nimbly and reverently pieced together to produce a love letter to country music as a whole.

At the heart of Post Malone's F-1Trillion sessions was a core group of writers comprising Post, Walters, ERNEST, Ashley Gorley, Charlie Handsome and Louis Bell, with Nashville's beloved Losers Bar & Grill serving as the seedbed for much of the project.

“The first night I got invited over to the studio was actually the CMA Awards last year”, Walters recalls, “They were over at Blackbird, and Post had been interested in wanting a steel guitarist there and Ern called me. He was like, ‘Yo, Post wants you at the session right now!’ I pack my shit up, and I was there in the quickest amount of time I could be. Right as I walked in, it was me, Post, Brad Paisley, Charlie [Handsome], Ernest and Louis Bell. We were all in there, and I was like, ‘What in the world is this room right now?’ We all hit it off really well. It was a great time, and I think once Brad left, we ended up writing ‘What Don't Belong to Me’”.

Such is the mythology surrounding Losers in relation to this album, Post Malone even included a song named after the bar. On the Jelly Roll-assisted ‘Losers’, Posty tips his cap to three of his F-1Trillion inner circle, Charlie Handsome (“Chuck”), ERNEST and Walters, on the opening line, “Last-callers, last-chancers / Nine-to-fivers, truckers, dancers / Couple Chucks, Erns, and Chandlers”.

Walters chuckles, “That was Post's idea. We were all sitting in the room, and he said it. I thought it was a joke. Post was like, “A couple Chucks, Erns and Chandlers” and we all laugh. We're like, ‘That would be hilarious!’ And he was like, ‘No, that's what we're gonna say’. After coming out of that session, I was like, ‘Bro, we just got our name dropped in a Post Malone song’. It was funny. That song's amazing”.

Walters’ ability to flit between the steel-soaked classic country of ‘Who Needs You’ to the more contemporary feel of ‘I Had Some Help’ is a testament to the Georgia native's encyclopaedic country knowledge. After moving to Nashville straight after he graduated in 2021, Walters pricked the ears of one of Music City's premier hitmakers, ERNEST, through his viral TikTok steel guitar performance videos. ERNEST invited Walters to join his band and signed him to his burgeoning new publishing house, Ern's Cadillac Music, which is poised to become country's equivalent to Cactus Jack or G.O.O.D Music. The duo worked together for much of ERN's variegated and widely lauded 2024 record, NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE. The shape-shifting, mercurial sonic texture that colours this album set the tone for Walters’ approach to the F-1Trillion writing sessions. Walters warmly describes ERNEST as “my best friend. Ever since we started touring together, we clicked. I feel like, if we both lived different lives, we would somehow still end up finding each other. We're always on the same wave”.

“I remember writing ‘Who Needs You’”, he reflects, “ERNEST and I started it in rehearsals earlier that day, when it was just me and ERN, we were freestyling, and I was playing some some swing stuff. That traditional swing style of music is my favourite in the entire world. Playing guitar is something I've always loved, and those are the hardest songs to have to play, I think, and there's something fun about that”.

‘Who Needs You‘ oozes the freeform swagger and signature bounce of a traditional Texas dancehall jam, while ‘I Had Some Help’ feels decidedly sleeker and more polished. Despite the latter being infused by a synth-based, pop-driven instrumental, the origins of ‘I Had Some Help’ pivoted around Walters’ steel guitar.

“The steel part became what we ended up singing for the verse melody”, Walters explains. As for the wonderfully tongue-in-cheek concept behind the track, that was inspired - of course - by an evening spent at Losers, “Charlie and all of us were out at Losers the night before. It's probably unhealthy, but that's my home...! Post came in and ordered white tea shots for the entire bar - it was like 100-something shots. And I looked at Charlie, and I was like, ‘I don't know how the hell we're going to do this’, and he goes, ‘Well, we're going to need some help’”.

Walters reveals that, from there, the song fell into their laps, “The next day in the studio, I knew it was our Morgan day, where we had to try and get a Morgan song for Post, and ‘We're going to need some help’ morphed into ‘I Had Some Help’. I fired off that title, I was like, ‘Yo boys, what if we wrote this today?’ It was very fast. I have the entire voice-note on my phone of us writing that song, and it's 24 minutes long”.

As part of a conversation with Theo Von for his This Past Weekend podcast in September, Post Malone tantalisingly hinted that he'd recorded a second song with Morgan Wallen. Although not one of the co-writers on this mysterious offering, Walters remembers it fondly, “It is a great song. It was [too] experimental for the project, though...Everything that came out of those sessions was really special, whether it ended up on the record or not. All those songs were amazing. Every writer was putting their best foot forward. It was an awesome thing to be a part of”.

During the F-1Trillion album rollout, it felt like each song and guest artist unveiling was a colossal, seismic moment, but what's striking about hearing Chandler Walters discussing the writing process for the project is how casual and free-flowing it was. He repeatedly depicts the sessions as feeling deeply “organic”, with the strength of the “vibes” being emitted in the room championed above all else. Excitingly, this led to more than 100 tracks being written for F-1Trillion.

“There was a massive pool of songs”, Walters confirms, “There were over 100 songs we had demos of. Obviously, I wasn't on all of them, but the whole album is probably more than 100 songs. I remember when the list kept dwindling down. It got to 50, and then the band came in, and they cut like 40 songs with the full band, ready to go. There were so many of them, they just picked what kind of vibes they wanted”.

Out of those 100, Walters cites one unreleased track, titled ‘Cry Me the Mississippi’, as holding particularly rose-tinted memories for him, “We wrote so many special songs. I remember the first song I ever played steel on in a session with a full band. I'll never forget, Paul Franklin - who is my idol and the best steel player ever - was in the room tracking and Post just turns to me and goes, ‘Hey, do you want to play on this song?’ And I'm like, ‘I don't know. Like, that's Paul Franklin right there!’ They made me set up my steel in Paul Franklin's spot and play on the song we had written earlier that day. It's called ‘Cry Me the Mississippi’...I would definitely say that's a highlight. The first session I ever played on was with Aaron Sterling on drums and Derek on guitar, like all the boys, and I'm just over there shaking, trying to play something that I think makes sense”.

Following the finalisation of F-1Trillion, Walters was given the opportunity to showcase his impressive steel-playing in front of hundreds of thousands of fans across North America, when Post Malone invited him to become a keystone of his new country band for his wildly popular F-1Trillion tour. Aptly, the run concluded with Posty's first ever stadium show in Nashville, Tennessee in October - proving how unanimously he has been embraced by the country world.

Walters stresses, “I gotta say, Nashville was the coolest one for me. It was so special to be able to play Nissan Stadium. I go to Titans games and watch other concerts there. It was so cool, and it was full. Even after all the stadiums we played with ERNEST and opening up for Morgan, I still think that might have been one of my favourite stadium shows ever...the line for Losers that night was insane”.

Two years ago, the thought of having steel guitar in Post Malone's live band would have been ludicrous. What place would steel have amidst the fierce 808s and rattling hi-hats of trap hits such as ‘rockstar’, ‘Psycho’, ‘Wow.’ and ‘Congratulations’? Fascinatingly, Posty still performs his biggest rap chart-toppers, but with seamless countrification, courtesy of Walters and his fellow band-members.

After most of the F-1Trillion tour-stops, he would host his own ‘Walters Western Wednesday’ after-parties, which doubled-down on his traditional country upbringing on flag-bearers such as George Strait. During his Flora-Bama set, Post Malone made a surprise appearance, and their joint rendition of Zach Top's ‘I Never Lie’ promptly spread across TikTok like wildfire, “I got to fly my whole band down there. Right after I got off the stage with Post, I would get a police escort to the next bar immediately, and we would set up. I'd basically walk right on stage there, and then we would play for an hour and a half, Post might come. He came to the Flora-Bama one, and it was amazing having him out there”.

He goes on, “We sang ‘Am I Blue’ by George Strait, and then sang, ‘I Never Lie’ by Zach Top - or we tried to! My band had never played it, and I had never sang it, but that was the video that went viral...And man, in Austin, Texas, in Boston after Fenway and in Nashville at Losers, they were all slam-packed. I mean, you couldn't fit another person into any of them. It was a great vibe. We're just doing what feels right, you know? And it felt right for me to do a little Western Wednesday thing, and the after-parties ended up working out. It was amazing to get to get to host my own thing after Post, and I'm very thankful for him letting me do that”.

These packed-out after-party performances, coupled with the fact that Chandler Walters used to front a three-piece band in high school, are seemingly laying the foundation for the beginning of Walters’ solo career in 2025. There's a burgeoning sense of anticipation surrounding the hugely talented artist, and the popularity of his ‘I Never Lie’ duet with Post Malone has the same feel as the famous 2022 video of another fast-emerging Big Loud artist, Lauren Watkins, singing with Morgan Wallen, before the world had heard of her. It seems the label might be preparing Walters for a similar launch in the coming months.

Walters teases, “There's a lot of very exciting stuff on my end that I'm so thankful to be a part of. We have some awesome stuff coming. I definitely have my own solo record coming, and as well as a collaborative project...and you know what? We're bringing country music back. It's going to be super, super traditional”.

What's more, as well as (hopefully) a debut project from Walters on the horizon, it seems we can look forward to many more country records to come from Post Malone. Some have wondered whether F-1Trillion was a mere detour, with Posty then returning to his trap and indie-pop sound - but this seems far from the case.

Chandler Walters concludes, “Absolutely. I look forward to making many more records with him. I think he's in the same mindset, too”. After penning such a formidable collection of F-1Trillion stand-outs - ‘I Had Some Help’, ‘Right About You’, ‘Losers’, ‘What Don't Belong to Me’, ‘Who Needs You’ and ‘Devil I've Been’ - Post Malone will surely call on Chandler Walters yet again for his next body of work. By that point, Walters will likely have his debut solo record under his belt, along with a slew of new cuts as a writer, the product of his Cadillac Sessions project with ERNEST - and we suspect he might need to make room for a Grammy gong, too.

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