If any artist can marry the right lyrics with the right melody in three minutes flat and connect with an audience, it’s Greg Bates. Full of energy and ambition, he’s always ready to write, forever in search of that perfect song.

In the most genuine sense, he is a true product of Music City, motivated not by the trappings of country-music stardom, but by the reward of a well-written lyric and mel...ody. For Greg, it really did all start with a song.

“I was crazy about reading liner notes,” says the 24-year-old singer, guitarist and songwriter, who is poised to release his self-titled major-label debut on Republic Nashville. “I started picking up patterns of certain songwriters and hearing them in the music, and that was always the coolest thing to me.”

Traditional ’90s artists like Randy Travis, Dwight Yoakam and...