LeNae Goolsby Waited 40 Years to Write Her First Song. The Wait Shows.

The dream she shelved

At 13, she knew exactly what she wanted to be. A country songwriter. Like her uncle.

Her uncle was Joe Chambers, an RCA staff writer in Nashville who co-wrote "Somebody Lied" — a No. 1 for Ricky Van Shelton — plus "I Meant Every Word He Said" and Randy Travis's "Old 8x10." Real credits. The kind of family tree that either lights a fire in you or scares you off entirely.

For LeNae, it lit a fire. Then life poured water on it. Marriage. Kids. Law school. Businesses. A career as a healthcare executive. An author's identity. Songwriting got filed under "someday" for a few decades.

But here's the thing about people who process the world through writing — the writing never actually stops. Books, blogs, copy, marketing. LeNae has always been better at getting it down on the page than saying it out loud. The songs were just waiting for a door to open.

How she actually makes the music

Let's be clear about this, because it matters and she wants it right.

LeNae isn't a musician. She's not pretending to be. She writes the lyrics, builds the concepts, shapes the story, makes every creative call. Then she uses AI as the production tool that turns those words into something you can hear. That's it. That's the arrangement.

She's not chasing Nashville with a band and three instruments she doesn't play. She's a writer who finally found a way to finish the job. The reason the music exists is the writing — the experiences, the relationships she understands differently now, the things she got wrong and can finally see clearly. AI is the door, not the room.

People have loud opinions about that, usually before they've heard a note. Fair enough. But the story here isn't the tool. It's the four decades of lived material behind it.

"Who Told You That?"

This single is a direct descendant of her uncle's "Somebody Lied" — that same brilliant premise where someone insists they're completely fine and completely over it, and proves the exact opposite with every word.

"Who Told You That?" lives in that territory. It's about the story you tell yourself after somebody leaves — how little they mattered, how done you are, how none of it could possibly still sting. And how the harder you sell it, the more obvious the truth gets.

Then there's the part nobody wants to admit: the checking in. Looking them up. Seeing who they're with. Telling yourself it's just curiosity when you're still tangled in the whole thing. Social media made that a national pastime. LeNae just wrote it down.

The song sits on her first ever album Hard To Hold Onto, and the album cost her something real — not trauma, more like opening a drawer you haven't touched in years and realizing there's unfinished business still in there. Writing it meant admitting certain things affected her more than she'd given them credit for. That she wasn't as detached as she liked to think. That some patterns weren't as accidental as she'd told herself.

The part she had to get past

Honestly? Feeling ridiculous.

When you've already built a whole adult identity — wife, mother, lawyer by training, business owner, executive, author — and then you start posting country songs on the internet, a voice shows up asking if you've lost it. LeNae heard that voice. She kept going anyway.

The surprise was how much her people showed up. Friends, family, and a husband who's been treating this like it's worth taking seriously since day one, listening to everything and cheering her on.

What she wants a new listener to feel is simple. She's not writing from the mountaintop with everything figured out. She's writing from the messy middle — things she misunderstood at the time, handled badly, can laugh at now. If one line makes somebody feel a little less weird about their own experience, the song did its job.

What's next

No five-year master plan. She built the catalog around Hard To Hold Onto, and now the work is exposure — releasing, promoting, finding the people these songs were written for. She wants to keep writing, keep getting better, and see how far this thing goes.

Start with "Who Told You That?" on YouTube, then dig into the catalog on Spotify. Follow her at @songsbylenae and on YouTube.

Some people wait too long to start. LeNae just waited long enough to have something to say.