Brett James: The Invisible Export Keeping America’s Balance-of-Payments Afloat One Heartbreak at a Time

Brett James and the Quiet Implosion of the American Song-Export Economy
By Our Correspondent Who Has Spent Too Many Nights in Airport Lounges Listening to Country Mixes

NASHVILLE—While the rest of the planet argues over whose naval drone gets to block whose grain freighter this week, Brett James is hunched over a Steinway in a converted church, trying to rhyme “heartbreak” with something that will scan in Seoul. You probably don’t know his face; you’ve definitely sung his heartbreak. The man is the sonic equivalent of a Swiss bank account: invisible, dependable, and stuffed with other people’s feelings.

James is the rare American export that doesn’t require aircraft carriers to protect the shipping lanes. Since the late ’90s he has written or co-written roughly 24 number-one songs on four continents, which means a melancholy Tennessean you can’t pick out of a police line-up is currently soundtracking karaoke bars in Busan, wedding receptions in Birmingham (both of them), and Uber rides across twelve time zones. If soft power had a Spotify Wrapped, Brett James would be its most-played poet.

The global significance? Start with balance-of-payments math. A single James-penned hit can generate between four and seven cents per stream; multiply by the 2.3 billion people who pay for streaming outside the United States and you’re looking at a trade surplus built on three chords and the truth—cheaper than Boeing, less flammable than LNG, and nobody has to bribe a port official. Washington could defund the Voice of America tomorrow and still beam late-capitalist longing into every earbud as long as James keeps rhyming “bar” with “car.”

Of course, nothing exposes the absurdity of national borders like a song. “Jesus, Take the Wheel” (James, 2005) is now a crowd anthem in Manila karaoke joints where 80 percent of the singers have never touched a steering wheel and statistically worship a different savior. The lyric travels passport-free; the royalty payment does not. Every time a teenager in Lagos covers Carrie Underwood on TikTok, a microscopic wire transfer bounces from Alphabet Corp. to Downtown Music Publishing to a bungalow on Wedgewood Avenue, keeping the American current-account deficit sober enough to stagger another fiscal quarter. Call it missionary work with compound interest.

The darker joke is that James specializes in emotional austerity: songs about monogamy, mortgage-level heartbreak, and the steadfast belief that somewhere between the Mississippi and the hereafter lies redemption and a decent taco. These are luxury emotions in most of the world. Try explaining to a Syrian refugee family in Istanbul why “growing up is just letting go of beer” (James/Wyatt, 2019) and watch the concept of American exceptionalism implode faster than the lira. Yet the chorus still hooks them; humans everywhere are suckers for the sound of someone else surviving their twenties.

Meanwhile, Nashville’s songwriting factories have become the last reliable assembly line the United States hasn’t outsourced to Vietnam. The writers’ rooms resemble UN Security Councils—minus the veto power and plus a keg—where a Canadian atheist, a Pentecostal from Georgia, and a DJ from Stockholm argue over whether the post-chorus should drop on the relative minor. The resulting product ships instantly, weightless, untaxed by customs dogs. If only insulin could be uploaded at 140 beats per minute.

Geopolitically, James’ catalog is a low-yield warhead of nostalgia. Russia can ban McDonald’s, but it can’t stop its own citizens from humming “International Harvester” while queuing for black-market Big Macs. China may censor NBA tweets, yet on Douyin you’ll find 1.4 million videos featuring a Brett James hook, each one another tiny Trojan horse of Americana galloping past the Great Firewall. The State Department spent $2.3 billion last year on public diplomacy; James got a BMI award and a free guitar. Guess which one shows up in more teenagers’ algorithms.

So here we are: a planet lurching from supply-chain plague to sovereign-default carnival, and the most stable transnational currency is still a brokenhearted chorus sung by a divorced dad from Oklahoma. It won’t reverse the polar ice melt or de-weaponize the Suez, but for three minutes and thirty seconds you can forget that the canal is clogged with yet another grounded container ship called—because irony is also export-grade—Ever Given.

In the end, Brett James isn’t saving the world; he’s just sound-tracking its slow-motion liquidation sale. Which, if you think about it, is exactly the kind of soundtrack we deserve: tuneful, vaguely hopeful, and repeating every four minutes whether you’re in Nairobi or New Jersey, waiting for the next ship to come in, the next heart to break, the next chorus to assure you everything’s gonna be alright—even when the charts, the climate, and the credit-rating agencies all insist otherwise.