“Hate How You Look” has Boardman native Nicholas Sainato loving what he sees when looking at Billboard’s Country Airplay chart.

The 2006 Boardman High School graduate co-wrote the Josh Ross single, which is No. 1 on the Country Airplay chart. It is compiled by Billboard, the music trade publication whose charts in various genres have been the industry standard for decades.

It’s the first No. 1 single for Ross as an artist as well as Sainato who penned the track with Jessica Farren, Chris McKenna and Christian Yancey. And success didn’t come quickly. They wrote the song in 2024, Ross released it on his “Later Tonight” album last September, and the song spent 40 weeks on the chart before reaching the pinnacle.

“It’s sometimes good, sometimes bad for your mental health,” Sainato said during a telephone interview from Nashville. “You’re watching and you’re like, ‘Oh, it’s at 38.’ And then the next week, you’re like, ‘Oh, crap, it’s at 41’ … Everyone was super stoked on it, and you’ve just got to trust the song and trust the team that’s working on it to take it all the way. And in the meantime, you’re trying to write more songs, so you’ve got to put it in the back of your mind.”

Sainato’s musical journey started in middle school when he started playing the drums, an instrument he picked because he couldn’t make a sound come out of a trumpet or any other wind instrument. He met Mark Catalano in Boardman’s jazz band, and they formed their first rock band together called Another Found Self. That group won the high school rock-off presented by the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and started Sainato’s path as a songwriter.

“We rarely played covers,” he said “I don’t know why. Maybe we thought it wasn’t cool or something.”

Sainato went to Berklee College of Music in Boston for a semester before moving to Los Angeles for a year to pursue music until coming back home and finishing his studies at Youngstown State University.

Before moving to Nashville a decade ago, Sainato played drums for Dennis Drummond, the Warren native who appeared on NBC’s reality competition series “The Voice” and is now based in Nashville. Sainato also was the drummer for the original lineup of The Vindys and produced the group’s first EP, “Red Wine,” in 2014.

“I recorded that at my mom’s house in the basement, and then some on the back porch,” he said. “That was my first time ever really producing anything, at least anything that actually came out and was released.”

He went to Nashville with plans to become a touring drummer or a backing musician for national acts. He did that for a while before meeting Jonathan Capeci and Joey Beretta and forming the alternative pop band Nightly.

The trio has a couple of songs on Spotify with more than 20 million streams, and Nightly has toured with such acts as Ke$ha, The Struts and All-American Rejects in addition to doing its own headlining tours.

Sainato said Nightly usually tours once a year and has played Newport Music Hall in Columbus and the Roxian and Thunderbird Music Hall in greater Pittsburgh.

“We’ve never really played Youngstown yet, but we often stop through there and get White House (Fruit Farm) doughnuts,” he said.

Writing songs with his bandmates in Nightly led to Sainato’s first publishing deal with Combustion Music. And in a city where one of the leading industries is songwriting, it only made sense to pursue those available opportunities.

“There’s just such a big country community here, it’s just kind of natural that a lot of the sessions I was doing were country,” he said. “It just kind of happened. I didn’t come down here to write country music.”

“Hate How You Look” collaborators Farren and McKenna also are with Combustion Music while Yancey is a songwriter he hadn’t worked with much before.

Sainato said they all loved “Hate How You Look” when it was written, but that doesn’t mean they were expecting a chart-topping hit.

“As a songwriter, you’ve just got to move on to the next day and write another song,” he said. “We wrote it pretty quick. It wasn’t one of those ones that we were banging our heads over trying to figure it out. It just came out super naturally.”

Until “Hate How You Look,” Sainato’s most-successful song for another artist was “Body Talk,” which Kane Brown released on his 2024 album “The High Road.”

Brown has released a few songs with more than a half billion streams. Since the money a songwriter makes is dependent upon how many people buy physical copies or listen on streaming services, getting recorded by a top-selling act like Brown is the goal for many songwriters.

Ross didn’t have that status, at least when he opted to record “Hate to See You Look.”

“We actually wrote the song in 2024, so he only had a few songs out by then,” Sainato said. “But especially around Nashville, there are artists that are buzzing, that a lot of people are really excited about, and I feel like he was one of those guys.

“The bigger artists (who) already have their hits, it’d be great to get one of those, but there’s also something special about working with an artist earlier. Getting one of their first hits is pretty exciting, a special moment for everyone.”

Getting his first number one single should help Ross in many ways, and it could have the same impact for the people who wrote it.

“It’s still too soon to tell, I guess, but hopefully it gets me in some bigger rooms and gets my name out there to the people listening to the songs that I’m turning in,” Sainato said.