Nearly three years after he and Carly Pearce divorced, following less than a year of marriage, Michael Ray wants to set the record straight on their relationship with the new single “Get Her Back.”
Videos by American Songwriter
Off Ray’s upcoming six-track EP, Dive Bars & Broken Hearts, the brooding, mid-tempo track explores peoples’ emotions after a breakup, their actions, and how they can overstep the lines with gossip, referenced by Ray snipping back Lucky for her, I wasn’t raised like that.
Even if the title is misleading at first, the song isn’t about vying to get a former love back but more about getting revenge for what she did to him — Now, I just wanna get her back / For everything that she did behind closed doors / All the lies and the signs that I ignored / ‘Cause I swore that I loved her, but now that it’s over / I just wanna get her back.
Penned by Dallas Wilson, Jordan James, Lalo, and Michael Tyler and produced by Michael Knox, “Get Her Back” immediately resonated with Ray.
“I was raised on country songs that turn what you think on its head,” said Ray in a statement. “You think you know what the song’s all about, then you hear the hook, and it’s something completely else. That’s what the greats like Haggard, Cash, or Conway were all about, so, when I heard this, the way it flipped the script twice, I knew I had to cut ‘Get Her Back.’”
He added, “The way it’s written is so tight, and then what Michael Knox did in the studio. The track is so sexy, he really intensifies that sense of what’s going on here. And it made me wonder, how could we do a video that has that same kind of ‘think it’s one thing, but it’s actually something else’ kind of appeal? It wouldn’t be easy.”
Directed by Spidey Smith (Eminem, Duran Duran), who also helmed Ray’s 2021 video for “Holy Water,” the visuals around “Get Her Back” set a dimly lit, grimmer scene capturing the uglier side of love.
The darkened scenes cut from detectives at a crime scene and Ray in an interrogation room balanced by shots of him with a woman who closely resembles Pearce at different points in their relationship. Ray is spelling out all the details of his song to the cops in the debriefing room.
“Leave it to Spidey to find the edge and the mystery,” laughed Ray of the video. “He understands that place where you want to snap, but then you settle down and you just move on, to be able to find a way of showing how far you can stand from the fire and still get burned, [and] how you can do the right thing, which sometimes is nothing, and just keep moving.
Ray continued, “It’s a tough line to walk, but he did. And for everyone who’s ever been in a position of not wanting to look back, well, this clip’s for you.”
Photo by Spidey Smith / Warner Music Nashville
