And when it comes to listening to country these days, he says it happens “just accidentally now and then.” Even today, he still counts artists of other genres as favorites — Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, George and Ira Gershwin, Randy Newman, the Band.

But it’s not what you might be thinking. McDill won’t rail against the current state of country music.

“I always wanted it to change,” he says. “I’m sort of like Eddy Arnold.” Arnold was among the pioneers in the 1960s when country records took on the lush, orchestral arrangements of pop music. The singer was asked whether he disliked how country music had been meshed with pop, but he claimed he was never a traditionalist. He just wanted to sell records.

McDill talks about how country music has evolved by pointing to changes he saw in how it was recorded. He recalls how early Nashville studio setups with a single microphone over the drum kit were different from the Memphis groove, with every drum given its own mic, that he learned from producer Stan Kessler of Sun Studios. Nowadays, McDill says he hears more bass drum in country music.

“Nashville couldn’t stand still,” he says. “The museum wouldn’t be welcoming a million people a year if country music had been frozen in time — in some period in the past — like a lot of people thought it should.”

If “Gone Country” were recorded today, for example, McDill says it wouldn’t have steel guitar on top of an electric-guitar riff.

“I think that’s a sea change there,” he says. “At the time, I think they had to (include pedal steel), because (electric guitar) was edgy and almost rock and roll, and they had to say, ‘No, no, no! It’s country.’” McDill says today’s writers grew up listening to hip-hop and other genres, so he is unsurprised they are influenced by those musical styles.

McAnally, who has co-written hip-hop-inflected country music, like Sam Hunt’s “Body Like a Back Road,” leaves his lyrics on a computer instead of a notepad. He writes in a group setting more often than McDill would have. But he still finds it remarkable that the lyrics of “Gone Country” — pedal steel and all — remain so relevant today.

“Everyone’s still moving to Nashville trying to cash in,” he says. “But you don’t not like those characters in that song. You get it.”

He marvels again at McDill’s help in connecting us through his empathy and gentle touch — his concise and poetic way of telling lush stories.

“I find there’s no excess in his songs — nothing’s put in for a syllable. Most contemporary writers may throw in an ‘old,’” he says, to give a line an extra beat. “His songs do not do that, and he doesn’t compromise the melody in the process.”

And then McAnally turned back to “Good Ole Boys Like Me,” as he often does when talking and thinking about songwriting.

“I want to make people feel,” he says, “the way that song makes me feel.”