LeNae Goolsby Waited Decades to Write These Songs. "Who Told You That" Was Worth the Wait.

The Song She Wanted to Write at 13

At 13, growing up in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, she wanted to be a country songwriter. Not a vague daydream, either. Her uncle, Joe Chambers, was an RCA staff writer in Nashville who co-wrote "Somebody Lied" (a No. 1 for Ricky Van Shelton), "I Meant Every Word He Said," and "Old 8x10," cut by Randy Travis. So the blueprint was right there at the family table.

Then life did what life does. Marriage. Kids. Work. Law school. Businesses. LeNae Goolsby became a wife, a mom, a lawyer by education, a business owner, a healthcare executive, an author, a longevity podcast host. Every practical box, checked.

But writing never left. Books, blogs, copy, marketing — she's always been better at putting things down than saying them out loud. She just never got back to songs. Until she did.

How She Actually Makes These

Let's be clear on this, because it matters and because she's dead honest about it: LeNae isn't a musician and isn't pretending to be. She writes the lyrics. She builds the concepts, the stories, the creative direction. She uses AI as the production tool that turns her writing into something you can actually hear.

That's it. That's the setup. She didn't want to fake her way into learning three instruments and assembling a band in this chapter of her life. AI removed the one barrier standing between the words and a finished song.

And here's the part people skip: the reason the music exists is the writing. The lived stuff. The relationships she understands differently now than she did inside them. The tool got her access to the rest of the process. The perspective is all hers.

"Who Told You That" and the Story We Tell Ourselves

The song grew straight out of "Somebody Lied" — that premise where somebody swears up and down they're completely fine, completely over it, and proves the opposite with every single word.

"Who Told You That" lives in that same territory. It's about what we do after somebody leaves. We start narrating how little they mattered, how done we are, how it never even hurt. And the harder you insist, the more obvious the truth gets.

There's a less flattering layer too — the checking in. The looking someone up. Seeing what they're doing, who they're with, telling yourself it's just curiosity when you're really still attached to the story. Social media made that a sport. LeNae wrote it plain.

It's part of her first album, Hard To Hold Onto, and most of it is personal. These are relationships and experiences she hadn't thought about seriously in years, revisited with hindsight.

So what did it cost? Her words: "Mostly some comfortable versions of my own history." Writing it meant admitting certain things affected her more than she'd credited. That she wasn't as detached as she told herself. That some patterns she developed afterward weren't as accidental as she liked to believe. Not traumatic — more like opening a drawer you haven't touched in years and finding stuff you never dealt with.

The Real Hurdle Wasn't the Music

The hardest thing she had to get over wasn't songwriting. It was the fear of looking like she'd lost it. She had a whole established, practical adult identity, and then — out of nowhere — she's writing country songs and putting them online. She braced for judgment. The AI piece added another layer, since people have loud opinions about AI music.

What actually happened surprised her. Friends and family showed up. Her husband is her biggest fan — listens to everything, cheers her on, treats it like it matters. That made it easier to keep going.

She's not writing from the mountaintop. She's writing from the middle of it — things she misunderstood, handled badly, can laugh at now. The whole point is that somebody hears one line and thinks, okay, somebody else has felt this too. Less alone. Less weird about their own history.

What's Next

No five-year master plan. She built out the catalog around Hard To Hold Onto, so the focus now is exposure — finding the audience, releasing, promoting, seeing how far this thing goes. She started because she wanted to write songs. Now she wants to find out how far she can take it.

Follow the journey on Spotify, Instagram, and YouTube.