In a Heartbeat: How Chad Sellers Turned Quiet Truths Into Songs That Outlive Him
- All Country News
- 4 hours ago
- 3 min read
Chad Sellers never wrote songs to be loud. He wrote them to be true.
That distinction matters when you listen to In a Heartbeat, the posthumous folk-Americana EP that now carries his voice forward. These aren’t stadium anthems or algorithm bait. They are close-miked confessions, built o. the kind of writing that trusts a single line to do the work of an entire chorus.
Sellers, who passed away in August 2023 at age 44, came to songwriting later than most. Born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1978, he spent the first half of his life as a sponsored marathoner, entrepreneur, coach, and community builder. Alongside his high school sweetheart Bridie, he raised two sons, Gavin and Samson, and helped shape Iowa’s youth running scene through leadership and the founding of new programs. Even then, he was telling stories, just not yet in three-minute increments.
When the family relocated to Nashville in 2017, Sellers didn’t arrive chasing a deal. He arrived chasing a question: what happens when a poet finally gives himself permission to write songs?
The answer came quickly. Drawing on his background as an English major and published poet, Sellers developed a lyrical voice that felt both literary and lived-in, never overwritten, never trying to sound “Nashville.” His songs leaned into internal rhyme, conversational phrasing, and images that felt overheard rather than engineered.
By the time Sellers began work on In a Heartbeat, he was writing for himself with the same restraint he gave others. The project, finished posthumously by his family and Nashville collaborators and produced by Adam Sickler, is not an attempt to mythologize grief. It’s an exercise in understatement. Acoustic textures, patient tempos, and uncluttered arrangements give his lyrics the room they demand.
But the heartbeat of the project and its quiet masterpiece is “Kids Of Your Own,” co-written with Bryan Ruby and David Ross. It’s a story song in the purest sense: no gimmicks, no big production swings, no false drama. Just perspective, delivered with devastating patience.
And I’d cry if I wasn’t laughing
At everything you think you know
You’ll see it when you’re my age
The time moves anything but slow
You can turn and look at me today
And joke that I’m getting old
But hold on, the future’s coming for ya
’Cause someday you’ll have kids of your own
In a Heartbeat is not a farewell album. It’s a document of a writer mid-stride, still discovering how much he had left to say. Four songs now stand as both a beginning and an ending, a small catalog, yes, but one that carries uncommon weight.
To keep his memory alive is not just to remember Chad Sellers the man. It’s to keep listening to Chad Sellers the writer, the one who believed that a single, well-chosen line could tell you everything you needed to know about a life.
And in that sense, he’s still running.
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