The new single “Two Ships,” from Country singer Macartney Reinhardt is a song about a relationship that has ended and it was written with Kylie Sackley and Stone Aielli,  a duo who have had their songs recorded by Keith Urban, Sam Hunt, Alan Jackson, Priscilla Block and many more.

Macartney Reinhardt describes this experience as, “I have co-written before, but this is one of my favorite ones that I have ever done. I was on Instagram one day and Stone messaged me saying I would love to write with you and then he brought in Kylie. The first song the trio wrote together was “Cowboy Without a Conscience,” released earlier this year (2025). We really meshed from the beginning.”

Although the song has a summery feel to it, don’t let that fool you, because with a big smile on her face and her dimples showing Macartney Reinhardt says “Two  Ships,” was written on one of the few days of the year when it was snowing in Nashville.

“I wanted to write a song about when you go from being so close in a relationship and then after the relationship it (feels) like you never knew that person. That has always been a strange thing to me, how you can go from every day being with somebody and being so close to him and then a breakup. It is like you don’t know him. Then Kylie came in and she said I have this idea called Two Ships. She asked do you think we could combine those. I said yeah, definitely. She had taken it from Two Ships passing in the night that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem. We just started working off of it. We started the first verse and then went to the chorus. We made a little track for it and we went from there with it. It was one of those songs that wrote itself,” she says.

Describing the song as, “a pretty ballad type song and slower than the ones I have put out recently,” she says,  “It outlines when you are getting near the end of a relationship and what it starts to look like. The first verse talks about the memories you have with that person. (It is when) you feel like you don’t even know who these people are. You are getting near the end of the relationship and it’s falling apart.  You know what is coming and you don’t want to accept it. You are thinking about when there were better times. By the bridge it talks about when you are at the point of just passing and you have nothing left to say to that person. It is not knowing who they are anymore. They went from being your best friend and your favorite person in the world to being a complete stranger.”

So, Macartney, how does a barely nineteen-year-old young lady with an incredibly handsome boyfriend and who the two of you are obviously really in love, write a breakup song?

“That is just what I gravitate towards. I take experiences from the past and even if that is not what I am going through at the moment. Right now, I am not going through that experience. I took from a previous relationship. I try to take things from other times in my life and write about them. They are usually breakup songs and sad and slow. It is a lot harder for me to write a really upbeat song, but I try to put more of those out there, because people don’t want to be sad all of the time.

I consider myself to be a happy person, but every time I sit down to write, it just gets sad,” she says. 

Baggio a multi-instrumentalist from the Netherlands introduces “Two Ships,” with a pretty banjo solo. Sean Rogers produced the song.

Macartney Reinhardt grew up in a small town forty-five minutes from Atlanta, Georgia, before moving with her parents to Nashville when she was fifteen, after travelling back and forth between Georgia and Nashville for a year. Spending a week in a hotel each trip gets expensive. Now if venues want to book her for gigs as she says, “I wouldn’t have to say I am in Georgia, sorry I can’t do it.”

She continues, “We moved so I could be in the midst of the music scene here.

“It was hard, because I was still in school Then I went to virtual (school) the last two years of high school. That was the main adjustment. It wasn’t bad getting adjusted to living in a different state, because we had been here so much, and we had stayed in hotels for a week every month. That wasn’t very hard for me. It was harder for me not going to public school and just sitting at home and doing school. That is when I started playing out multiple times per week.”

Now Nashville feels like home and as a nod to the city, Macartney Reinhardt co-wrote the song “Coming Home,” with Allie Colleen.

“I wrote it before I moved to Nashville. I met Allie at a songwriters’ round here in Nashville and she was so good. Her songs are amazing. I feel like she was one of the first people in town who took a chance on me. I went up to her and said I would love to write with you. She said okay, let me get your number and we can setup a co-write. We did and it became “Coming Home.” I remember she asked me what I wanted to write the song about and I said I don’t know. I said I have just always felt like Nashville was home, but I never knew it was home until now. That is where the line ‘I’m coming home for the first time,’ came from. That is how I felt about Nashville that this was the first time it ever felt like home,” she says.

As for what she learned during that co-write experience, she says, “I felt that co-write with her gave me more confidence in who I am as a writer. I really started writing a lot after that. I felt that gave me a boost of (assurance) that I didn’t know I needed, but looking back I certainly needed at the time, being a fifteen-year-old girl walking into a city with thousands of musicians. I think more than anything that gave me the confidence that I could write with people that I wanted to and that if I set my mind to it, I would be able to do it in Nashville.”

As for video that accompanies the song, “The purpose in taking that angle with the video was so people would know that is the skyline, that’s the river and people would know that I was definitely in Nashville filming that with my photographer Justin. He did such a great job. He always does a great job with all of my album covers and everything. I had put out four or five singles by that point and I decided it was time to have a music video. I wanted that to be the one.”

It almost seems that Macartney Reinhardt was destined to find a career in music. “I started guitar lessons when I was five, but really, I started singing for as young as I can remember.

I tried to play guitar at that age, but I wasn’t good enough with it at all, because my hands were so small. I couldn’t even reach around the guitar. That was the first lesson I ever did, but I decided I didn’t want to play guitar at that time. It was just too hard for me, so I asked the guitar teacher if he would teach me voice lessons. I did that with him for a few months and then I got an actual voice teacher. She was my foundation. Her name was Raquel Rae. I would always need to tell her a story first. She was so good and so kind to me. She was always so patient with me and then we would get into voice lessons. I am really grateful that she was so kind, for my first voice teacher, because that can really change how you feel about things.”

Then came the struggles every parent experiences at one time or another, in trying to get their child to bed. It wasn’t making those milk and cookies last fifteen minutes longer, but rather the fact her father (Joe Reinhardt) is a musician, playing the electric bass guitar, to be more precise. He had a recording studio in the basement of their home.

“I would always like to go down there and listen to whoever was playing and singing. My mom had a hard time getting me to go to sleep, because I wanted to go down there. I was always surrounded by music, so that also built my love for music. I think if I hadn’t been around, it so much, I wouldn’t have known it from such an early age. Everybody on my dad’s side of the family is music oriented. It made me realize at a very young age what I wanted to do,” she says.

When she was fourteen years old, in the year 2020, she was just one of five artists nominated for Teen Artist of the Year at the Georgia Country Music Awards. In 2001 she was back once again for the same event.

Her roots in Georgia are captured in the song “Bones,” and she explains, “I wrote “Bones,” about my family and where I grew up and came from. I wanted a song for my hometown. I wanted to mention my grandparents who passed away five and seven years ago. I wanted a song dedicated to the town I grew up in and that made me the person I am today. I feel it is a heartfelt song, but storytelling at the same time. It has orchestrations in it. I didn’t know that my producer was going to put the orchestrations in, but he did. I think they add so much to the song.

There is a little graveyard in Georgia near where I grew up. It is the oldest church and cemetery in the entire county. My grandpa went to church there and he always said he wanted to be buried in that cemetery. That is where my grandparents are buried and that is what that song is about.”

The song “Bones,” was co-written with Macartney Reinhardt’s producer Sean Rogers and Hannah Diones.

At the time of our conversation Macartney Reinhardt had just returned from a tour of Oklahoma and Texas and we wondered what types of venues she plays, since she is eighteen years old admission to bars and clubs in most American states is limited to those twenty-one years old and older).

“For some reason I can usually get booked at places like that, but I have a hard time getting in still. They usually don’t ask your age when they are booking you, but it is trying to get into the club. The bouncers are really strict about it. Luckily, here in Nashville, I think the earliest club is five o’clock when they start twenty-one and up. Almost any club you can do during the day, she says. 

As for her recent tour, “It went great, I toured Oklahoma and Texas. We started in Oklahoma for a couple of days and then we went to Texas for the rest of the (time). We were there for a whole week and it was fun. We got to see tourist attractions there in between the radio stations we stopped at. We went to Dallas and Fort Worth.”

Musically, the song “High Horse,” is worth listening to just to salivate over the electric guitar solo by Baggio from the Netherlands. It is however an important song lyrically, because of the message that Macartney Reinhardt wanted young girls to hear.

“I wrote this song in February, and I wanted to write a song about my life and friends. I have always had friends, but never close friends and (the friends I had) never “got me” doing music. I was bullied really badly when I went to private school. I was in middle school, and all the girls in my class bullied me really badly. There were only seven other girls in my grade, and I couldn’t get away from it. I wanted to write a song about how I was treated by them. I wanted to say they could get on their high horse, and I didn’t really care if they did. They could go on and do whatever they wanted. I was over it and it didn’t matter to me.” 

Let’s talk about your song “Hey Girl.”

“It was the first song I put out with my producer Sean. We wanted a song that could speak to a lot of people and no matter what you are going through and no matter who you have in your life or who you have lost you are strong enough to make it yourself.

For any young person who is or has been bullied (this writer is a double survivor of a domestic home and being bullied), the words speak to you, “One day you’ll look at this with a smile / Knowing brick by brick it built you mile for mile / And all that’s worth remembering / You’d do it all again to be / This girl.”

The three main things we wrote it (the song) about were heartbreak, grief and friendship issues and about mental illness. I struggle with anxiety and depression, and I wanted a song that could speak to other people in a way that I wish songs I would have heard at the time when I was very anxious or depressed could speak to me.

I wanted a song that can uplift girls, and I know how hard it is being a girl in this time. It is really, really, difficult with social media. You are constantly comparing yourself to people and you difficult feeling beat down by other people. I just wanted a song that girls could listen to and anyone that feels like that, but I feel girls are compared a lot to other people. I wanted a song that they could feel that and relate. The idea of the song is to empower girls. The past year since the song came out, I have been through a lot. I have gone back and read the lyrics to the song to empower me and to help me get through the tough times in this past year,” says Macartney Reinhardt.

The music industry is tough and even some of the most talented people do not get their chance to shine in the spotlight, but Macartney Reinhardt is already shining and her star is only going to get brighter. Remember we told you that.

Please take time to visit the website for Macartney Reinhardt and you can also follow her on Instagram. You can listen to her music on YouTube. Return to Our Front Page 

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This interview by Joe Montague  originally published November 28th, 2024 was updated June 28th, 2025 and is protected by copyright © and is the property of Riveting Riffs Magazine All Rights Reserved.  All photos and artwork are the the property of  Macartney Reinhardt unless otherwise noted and all  are protected by copyright © All Rights Reserved. This interview may not be reproduced in print or on the internet or through any other means without the written permission of Riveting Riffs Magazine.