Sheryl Crow Sang the Demo on This Massive Hit for Brad Paisley and Carrie Underwood

In 2011, Brad Paisley and Carrie Underwood had a massive hit with “Remind Me“. On Paisley’s This Is Country Music album, the song is written by Paisley, along with Kelley Lovelace and Chris DuBois.

Although Paisley thought of Carrie Underwood immediately for the song, it was Sheryl Crow who actually sang on the demo.

“His son actually had a play date with Sheryl Crow’s son, and he asks her, totally puts her on the spot, I’m sure, to sing the female part,” Underwood reveals (via Songfacts). “I have this work tape demo with Sheryl Crow singing my part. There’s mumbling, a few lines here and there.”

Even when Underwood went in to record “Remind Me”, the song was still unfinished.

“It was the most unorganized thing I had ever been a part of,” she remembers. “I had never done anything like that before. It all worked out so perfectly. I was so happy; I felt like that was given to us. I was so excited about the song once the words became established. … It kept it in the moment, just doing it off the cuff. It wouldn’t have been the same song had we recorded it and recorded it.”

What Brad Paisley Says About Writing “Remind Me”

“Remind Me” has Paisley and Underwood taking turns singing lines in the chorus, which says, “Been so long that you’d forget the way I used to kiss your neck / Remind me, remind me / So on fire so in love, way back when we couldn’t get enough / Remind me, remind me.“

“It’s about the conversation a couple would have. It could be seven months into the relationship, or it could be seven years, but everybody’s been there,” Paisley tells The Boot.

Paisley knew when he was working on This Is Country Music that he wanted a duet, although he admits the idea for “Remind Me” was not his own.

“One of them had this idea,” Paisley tells Smooth Radio. “And the idea was more about, like, ‘Remind me of the things that I almost forgot,’ or something. And I just said, ‘No … I think that it’s a song that’s this’. It’s a conversation; it’s physical. It’s like, ‘Remember how that felt early on when we would make out before the plane took off,’ and those things.

“And it’s just such a cool hook to say ‘remind me’ as opposed to ‘remind me, I need to do the dishes,’” he adds. “And the song became this really cool physical manifestation of the things that you forget as time goes on.”

Photo by Jason Kempin/WireImage