Brett Young just celebrated his latest #1 song “Like I Loved You,” which he co-wrote with Jesse Lee. Brett explains how their writing session was going nowhere, but then quickly turned around when they went to lunch and started talking about life. “We’re sitting at lunch and she started telling one of her – we all have our horror stories in relationships, and within the conversation she said something like. ‘And then at the end of it he asked me if we could still be friends.’ And she got so fired up. She’s like, ‘Who thinks that that’s ever a good idea?’”
Brett admits that he’s usually the passionate crazy one when it comes to expressing his emotions, so when he heard how worked up Jesse was getting about her experience, he knew they had found the inspiration for their song. He says, “When I heard the kind of passion she had for that I had been so excited to get out of the write and get to lunch and be done with it because it was a rough write before that. But when I saw that, I went, ‘You know, we gotta go back. We’ve gotta write that song.’”
Luckily they did, because it ended up becoming a three week #1 song for Brett. He will soon follow it up with his next single, “Mercy.”
Brett Young – writing Like I Loved You :47
“So I wrote that with Jesse Lee. It’s one of the first songs I wrote when I moved to Nashville, so no record deal, no meetings with labels or anything and I just felt very fortunate to get in the room with her. But then we had one of those stall outs where like two, two and a half hours in we weren’t writing anything and we did like the ceremonial ‘let’s go to lunch’ to try to get out of the room. And we’re sitting at lunch and she started telling one of her, we all have our horror stories in relationships, and within the conversation she said something like. ‘And then at the end of it he asked me if we could still be friends.’ And she got so fired up. She’s like, ‘Who thinks that that’s ever a good idea?’ She started flipping out about it and I was like, I’m normally the passionate crazy one in the conversation. So when I heard the kind of passion she had for that I had been so excited to get out of the write and get to lunch and be done with it because it was a rough write before that. But when I saw that, I went, ‘You know, we gotta go back. We’ve gotta write that song.”