Hitmaking Songwriter Shane McAnally Awaits New Baby: ‘It Was Meant to Be’ (Exclusive)

Shane McAnally knows you aren’t “supposed to” have a baby when you’re over 50.

But so what? The hit-making songwriter, who turned 51 this month, is now just days away from the birth (via surrogate) of a much-wanted third child, a boy, who will be joining a family that also includes husband Michael Baum and 12-year-old twins.

“I know things are changing all the time,” McAnally tells PEOPLE, referring to social conventions. “And of course, since ours is a nontraditional family anyway, we don’t feel like those rules apply.”

McAnally long ago stopped letting “the rules” dictate either his life or his career, beginning most notably with “Somewhere with You,” his 2010 blockbuster hit, recorded by Kenny Chesney, that broke down barriers of what country music was supposed to sound like.

Since then, McAnally has been enthroned as Nashville songwriting royalty, racking up 50 No. 1 songs that he’s written and/or produced, including such classics as Sam Hunt’s “Body Like a Back Road,” Miranda Lambert’s “Mama’s Broken Heart” and Keith Urban’s “John Cougar, John Deere, John 3:16.” And while collecting four Grammys along with way with Kacey Musgraves’ recordings, he’s also branched out to Broadway, writing (with Brandy Clark) the Tony-winning Broadway musical, Shucked, currently on national tour.

Now, as he’s awaiting his baby’s arrival, McAnally is also defying more convention with an astonishing career pivot, reinventing himself as a standup comic, soon to head out on the road to open for Walker Hayes on 10 tour dates.

“I’m really starting to get the whole idea of a second act,” McAnally says about the dramatic changes he’s been ushering into his mid-life.

What ultimately inspired McAnally and Baum (who has worked on the business side of his husband’s career) to expand their family was yet another recent life-altering change. In late 2023, they escaped the Music City grind and resettled in Santa Barbara, Calif., a posh coastal community known for its laidback vibe.

“We have really nested,” says McAnally, who still commutes to Nashville about once a month. “Our kids have found an incredible rhythm here. It’s just been a really good thing for our family. Michael always says, ‘Things grow here,’ and so we just wanted to expand the love. I’ve wanted to have another baby a lot through the years.”

As they’ve pursued surrogacy for the second time, McAnally says, they’ve taken it as a sign that every step of the process has gone smoothly.

“It just started to feel like it was meant to be,” he says. “I have to trust the way the universe does things, and it was all green lights.”

That said, McAnally admits that his daughter, Dylan, and son, Dash, were all red lights when they learned their dads were contemplating a family addition: “They were just like, ‘Absolutely not.’ ‘We’re good. We love the number four, and everything’s great.'”

Of course, McAnally also acknowledges the futility of breaking this sort of news to two children on the cusp of adolescence. But, he adds, he and Baum probably have only themselves to blame for the response: “We’ve given our kids such license to speak their minds.”

Convinced the twins would “come around,” a few months later the two fathers presented them with a sonogram image to announce their future sibling.

“It was not well received,” McAnally says with wry chuckle.

He now takes heart in his many friends who also have spaced out their children and have told him, “It’s different when the baby comes.” His son also has recently given him some added hope: “He’s already asking, ‘How old would he have to be before he could sleep with me?’ and ‘When will I get to show him basketball?'”

As for his daughter? “We just have to get through the initial part and make sure she doesn’t smother the baby!” he says with a hearty laugh.

The birth will be in San Diego, about 250 miles south of Santa Barbara, and as with the twins, McAnally and Baum plan to be present for it. Once the family is back home, both dads intend to throw themselves into caring for their newborn, which will include trading off overnight duty (as they did with the twins) with the help of a part-time nurse.

The twins arrived around the pinnacle of McAnally’s hit-making run, and looking back, he says he knows he was stretched too thin then. This time around will be different, since he’s long since removed himself from the hamster wheel of chasing radio singles. Spending time with his kids, he says, is “what I look forward to most and where I find the most joy. I feel purposeful when I do that.”

His new foray into comedy is offering him purpose in other ways, too, though it’s taken him a while to figure out this next move.

For some time now, he explains, he’s been searching for a different creative outlet that would allow him to perform — an appetite kindled when he served as a mentor on Songland, the songwriting competition show that aired for two seasons on NBC.

Or rather, it was an appetite rekindled. His aspiration to be a country artist was what first brought the Texas native to Nashville, at age 19 in 1993. But when that dream fizzled, he eventually redefined himself solely as a songwriter.

“I kind of just said, this is better,” he explains. “The anonymity is better. I can work my own hours. I don’t have to be on a bus. I can have a family. And all those things were true, but there was still a little voice going: ‘That’s not the reason you’re not a performer. You stopped chasing it.'”

Yet, he knew, singing was no longer what he wanted to do. For one thing, he couldn’t. He’s suffered for some time from dysphonia, a chronic vocal condition that limits his abilities: “It’s not that I don’t have a singing voice. It’s that I don’t have the control I used to have.”

But that hasn’t inhibited him from telling stories, as he has for years in songwriters’ rounds, where he’s taken turns singing four or five songs in an evening. His song introductions, delivered with impeccable comedic timing, have always been high points of the shows.

So many of McAnally’s song ideas have been mined from his knack for finding stories in everyday life. But over the years, he’s also collected so many more stories that haven’t fit so neatly into music yet have yearned to be told.

All the pieces finally merged into one irresistibly clear picture: He needed to try stand-up comedy. One day he sat down and began the task of writing an entire show. It came together quickly, says McAnally: “I say it took me a few weeks — and 50 years.”

When he shared his “crazy idea” with his husband, Baum offered immediate support. “He told me, ‘I was wondering when you would figure this out,’” McAnally recalls.

The one-hour show, entitled “You Never Know,” debuted in May at the Nashville songwriters’ mecca, the Bluebird Café.

“Oh my God, I was so nervous I could have passed out,” McAnally says with a laugh, but he adds, “I had a ball.”

He’s since been entertaining sold-out crowds at clubs in Nashville, New York, Los Angeles, and Huntsville, Ala. A natural showman, McAnally keeps his audiences smiling and laughing for a solid hour with his stories about song inspirations, about his life as a gay dad, and about growing up in tiny Mineral Wells, Texas, in a single-parent household headed by his larger-than-life mom. Sprinkled throughout are snippets of some of his biggest hits, as well as a song or two, such as the epically titled “Going No. 2 in a Canoe,” that will probably never be recorded.

After attending the Bluebird show, Walker Hayes impulsively invited McAnally to join him on his fall tour. For almost a decade, McAnally has served as Hayes’ mentor, collaborator and producer, and the fledgling comedian couldn’t help but be delighted by the full-circle moment.

“It’s a 20-minute opening slot,” McAnally points out, “for a person who credits me with their success.”

After those 10 dates, McAnally has no idea where this new foray will take him. His years steeped in the relentless competitiveness of Nashville tempt him to think big (a Netflix special perhaps?), but he knows that’s what can steal so much creative joy.

Now, starting over, McAnally says, he’s experiencing the same delicious sense of discovery that he felt in his first years as a songwriter: “It’s still so new that I’m doing my own thing, and that was what songwriting was like in the beginning for me.”

A new career move, a new baby: McAnally knows it’s a lot. “The first show is 10 days after the due date!” he notes with no small amount of incredulity.

But he’s up for it all. He knows he has to take risks, he says, to feel the joy — and to have the joy to spread around.

“Somebody said the other day, ‘You’re fearless,’ because I’ve been doing this standup thing,” says McAnally, “and I said, ‘Oh, it’s not fearless. It’s with a lot of fear.’ But I have to do it. I have to walk through it, and it’s the same with having a baby. I don’t want to not do things because I’m afraid.”