“As songwriters, we spend a lot of our lives trying to bottle up a feeling into a song,” says JP Saxe. “Often, the biggest feelings, the best ones—the complicated, detailed, messy, incredible ones—just aren’t going to fit.”
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The newly-minted Grammy Award nominee speaks honestly about his song “Line by Line,” an Amazon Original, a collaboration and co-write with country juggernaut Maren Morris. “[This] is our recognition of that, of how one song just isn’t enough to capture it all, but how we’re just going to keep writing, futilely and lovingly, anyway.”
A few hours after writing “Line by Line,” the singer-songwriters “texted each other and said some version of, ‘wait….I think I love this?'” Saxe recalls in a press statement. With a brand new acoustic version, out today (March 26), the stripped iteration captures “what we heard that first night, and we wanted you to hear it, too.”
Morris adds, “Writing this song with JP was so inspirational. We started messing around with the idea, and lyrics just poured out of him. I was blown away. He threw out the line ‘immortalizing my sincerity,’ and it blew my mind. I think all in all, we wrote the whole song in an hour and immediately recorded it.”
Earlier this month, Morris and Saxe took to The Late Late Show with James Corden to debut the track. During their appearance, Saxe revealed how the collaboration came to be. “I tweeted out how much I loved Maren’s songs. I didn’t really see her seeing that tweet as a possibility,” he said. “But she did. And she reciprocated that she liked my songs, too. So, I got on a flight to Nashville, and we got in a room together. We spent two days writing songs. This was the second one we wrote.”
At the 63rd Grammy Awards, JP Saxe received an unexpected nomination for Song of the Year for the undeniable smash “If The World Was Ending,” featuring Julia Michaels. Meanwhile, Maren Morris boasted a nod for Best Country Song for “The Bones.”
