Like a lot of local Taylor Swift fans, Robert Ellis Orrall tried without luck to buy a ticket to one of Swift’s 2023 shows at Gillette Stadium. So he had to hear from friends about one of the setlist surprises: “Invisible,” a song that Orrall wrote with Swift for her debut album, which he also co-produced.
“Invisible” is just one of the hundreds of Orrall compositions that were recorded during the four decades he spent in Nashville. Rascal Flatts, Lindsay Lohan, and the Beaches are just a few of the stars who’ve cut his tunes.
Now he’s back on his home turf on the North Shore, and his so-called retirement project has been reforming his band with the exact same lineup that made it a major draw in the Boston club scene in the late 1970s and early ’80s. (The group plays the Cut in Gloucester this Friday.)
After decades of writing for others, Orrall has plenty of material he’s been saving for himself: He’s released two recent records and has a two-LP set in the works.
“We’re a local band again,” Orrall said of the group, which also includes guitarist Kook Lawry, bassist Don Walden, and drummer David Stefanelli. When the group first formed, RCA Records quickly scooped them up for a trio of albums that established Orrall as a master craftsman of smart and poignant power-pop. The deal meant that the four bandmates were opening for U2 and the Kinks when they weren’t headlining rooms like the Paradise Rock Club and the now-shuttered Inn-Square Men’s Bar, playing songs like the endearingly quirky “Call the Uh-oh Squad.”
The band’s 1983 duet with Carlene Carter, “I Couldn’t Say No,” cracked the top 40 of the Billboard Hot 100. Like many Boston acts before and after, the band enjoyed critical praise but modest major label sales. After they were dropped, the group made a 1986 record that was shopped around with no buyers. (It finally saw the light of day when Orrall released it in 2024 as “The War Between Us.”)
Finding himself at a career crossroads, Orrall said he noticed something when leafing through the charts in Billboard magazine.
“Most rock bands wrote their own songs,” he explained. “But when I looked at the top country hits, they were often written by somebody other than the artist.”
Orrall spent a few years going to Nashville for writing sessions before pulling up stakes and convincing his wife, Christine, to move there in 1990. The day they got to town Orrall went straight to a celebration party for Shenandoah’s No. 1 country hit, “Next to You, Next to Me,” which he had co-written. Songs for Reba McEntire and Martina McBride followed, as did co-writing sessions with Hal David and Leon Russell.
The country division of RCA ended up signing Orrall.
“When I told my wife I had a deal, she said, ‘Did you tell them that you had already been on RCA and that you didn’t sell a lot of records?’,” Orrall said with a laugh. Twice Orrall played country music festivals at Foxboro Stadium. A 1994 project with Curtis Wright earned the duo a CMA nomination.
Orrall inspired one of his Boston new-wave-era peers, Angelo Petraglia of Face to Face, to also move to Music City.
“One day he calls me up and says, ‘Hey, I’ve got this 13-year-old girl coming over, you’ve got to help me write a song with her,’” recalled Orrall. “Because at the time my daughter was also 13, and I was making a little record with her.”
Orrall had another appointment, but he canceled it when Petraglia mentioned that the young girl had a major label deal — with, as it happened, RCA.
“Hundreds of songs are written in Nashville every day,” said Orrall. “The hard part is getting them recorded, and the easiest way is to write with the artist.”
When that young girl, Taylor Swift, walked into the session with two much older men, Orrall said she was in the creative driver’s seat.
“She said she wanted to write a song that was like Avril Lavigne, but country,” he said. The song became “I’m Only Me When I’m With You,” which Orrall recorded himself on his most recent record, “Wonderland.”
Orrall said he hasn’t seen Swift since the premiere of “Hannah Montana: The Movie,” whose soundtrack included the Swift-Orrall co-write “Crazier.” But when Swift was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame this year, she spoke about writing with the “incredibly wise and experienced” Orrall and Petraglia.
A very different legacy of Orrall’s time in Nashville is Infinity Cat, the indie label which has released records by Orrall’s sons Jake and Jamin, whose duo JEFF the Brotherhood were beacons of Nashville’s rock underground. The brothers are now two-thirds of the group Vorhex Angel.
In 2020 Robert and Christine spent part of the pandemic in Gloucester. They noticed a listing for a small house in Manchester-by-the-Sea and decided to move back to Massachusetts. Next to the house is an even tinier memorabilia-adorned studio where Orrall makes music.
The cover of his January album “Wonderland” promises “... and more unrequited love songs,” yet the Orralls have been married for 47 years. When they were high school sweethearts growing up in Lynnfield, they briefly broke up when they went to different colleges. Orrall said he still draws on the heartache that he felt.
“She kind of crushed my heart,” he said, “but I’ve made my career writing songs about that.”
ROBERT ELLIS ORRALL AND AN AFTERPARTY WITH FUNKBUCKET
At the Cut, 177 Main St., Gloucester, Friday, Aug. 7, 6 p.m. Tickets: $19.50 and up. thecutlive.com