Nashville — The only problem with Shane McAnally’s cozy new office on Music Row is the infestation of plaques.

He’s running out of wall space, so gold and platinum records line the floors, obscuring the baseboards. “I used to want these so bad,” he says, surveying the clutter. “Now we’re getting, like, four a day.”

Nashville is a city that loves to give itself awards, and McAnally wouldn’t mind snatching a few more when the industry hands out its most coveted trophies at Wednesday’s 47th Annual CMA Awards. The 39-year-old song­writer co-wrote Miranda Lambert’s punchy “Mama’s Broken Heart” and Kacey Musgraves’s paralyzing “Merry Go ’Round,” making him the only guy on the block with two nominations for song of the year.

This stretch of Music Row — a storied songwriting salt mine that looks like any old leafy residential boulevard in town — is quiet on Sunday afternoon. But this neighborhood is still entrenched in a conflict that’s been raging for generations — the war between real country music and the commercial stuff.

McAnally’s songs are brilliantly, unabashedly both.

“Look, I’m a commercial-minded songwriter. I’m here to make a living and be on the radio. But radio is still really dominated by something else,” he says. “I just think there’s more. . . . I’d like for the top 20 songs to not only be that.”

He’s talking about the feel-great party anthems that have dominated the charts this year — songs where the beers are always frosty, the trucks are always muddy, everyone is 19 and the singer is always a dude.

McAnally isn’t trying to shut down the party with his ballads about longing, vulnerability and bad-idea booty calls — he just wants to coexist. And having co-written seven No. 1 country singles in the past three years, he is.

He didn’t do it alone. Rising alongside a tight clique of co-writers — including Brandy Clark, who released her stunning solo debut last month — McAnally has helped write monster hits (Lady Antebellum’s “Downtown,” the Band Perry’s “Better Dig Two”) and superlative sleeper cuts (Ashley Monroe’s “Two Weeks Late,” Randy Rogers Band’s “Fuzzy”) — all very different songs with varying degrees of bittersweetness.

“That internal ache is the starting point of country music,” McAnally says. “If it’s a happy song and I can still feel sad in it? That’s my favorite. Pop does that a lot right now. Both of Miley Cyrus’s singles, “We Can’t Stop” and “Wrecking Ball.” [Katy Perry’s] “Teenage Dream.” . . . Those songs are sad to me, even though they’re, like, UNGH-UNGH-UNGH!” (He pumps his fist overhead like Arsenio Hall.)

McAnally is sharp-witted, shrewd, smart. Just the right amount of cocky. He’s also gay and out, but feels that the reductive “gay country songwriter” tag that’s been pinned to his lapel says more about the media’s perception of Nashville than it does about him.

After a New York Times headline declared that McAnally was “Out and Riding High in Nashville” in May, a young, gay songwriter told McAnally he’d never dreamed of coming out in this town.