“I had the lick,” says Bill Lloyd. “Radney [Foster] had the title, and then we worked out all the kind of internal rhymes and stuff.” Lloyd is thinking back along with American Songwriter on writing “Crazy over You,” his first country hit with the duo Foster and Lloyd, which reached No. 4 on Billboard‘s Hot Country Chart in 1987.
Videos by American Songwriter
Can’t you tell by the spell that I’m under
This fella’s wondering if you’ll let me get next to you
Is there a chance of getting through
Well, you never seem to notice me, no matter what I do
And everybody in town knows I’m crazy over you
The duo had signed with RCA Records and recorded an album at Treasure Isle Recorders in Nashville. Lloyd continues, “They used to call it beach music. You know, in the Carolinas. Some of the clubs there started playing it, and it was apparently something good for people to dance to, so it picked up kind of unexpectedly. So RCA had to rush to get the album out.”
The duo came together as songwriters who were both hired by MTM Productions, the company started in 1969 by Mary Tyler Moore and her husband, Grant Tinker. “I was signed as a pop writer, and Radney was signed as a country writer by two different people. But we were two of the younger guys there and gravitated towards each other. It was kind of a mix of style, and that’s what I guess made it, you know, just a little different.”
Does it show there’s no cure for your kissing
Doctor says this is the last thing I’ll ever do
My heart will break right in two
Well, you never seem to notice me, no matter what I do
And everybody in town knows I’m crazy over you
The duo came out strong at a time when country music was looking for a new direction. Ricky Skaggs, Randy Travis, and George Strait were taking it back to its roots, while artists like Jason & the Scorchers, The O’Kanes, and Webb Wilder were branching out with new approaches to the genre.
[RELATED: 5 Songs You Didn’t Know Were Written by Radney Foster]
Lloyd remembers, “We had gone over to Vanderbilt and kind of played hooky for the afternoon. We went to see Webb Wilder play. So it was sort of the late afternoon when we got back to the MTM offices and just started playing, you know, bluesy rockabilly kind of shuffles. It’s got a bunch of cool internal rhymes, and the lick itself has a very big-band kind of feel to it.”
The song was released before the album. “The album was recorded, but it wasn’t ready yet, you know, they had to rush because the single picked up faster than they anticipated. It was all done. It just wasn’t in stores.”
The self-titled debut album by Foster and Lloyd would go on to have four singles. “Sure Thing” and “What Do You Want from Me This Time” also hit the country Top 10, while “Texas in 1880” reached the Top 20. But you couldn’t go anywhere back in 1987 without hearing the duo’s debut single. “I remember talking to Trace Adkins once,” Lloyd says, “and he told me he thought he’d played ‘Crazy over You’ more times than I did.”
Ricky Van Shelton included the song on his platinum-selling debut album, Wild Eyed Dream, and Keith Anderson had both Foster and Lloyd guest on his version of the hit on the 2008 album C’mon!
Foster and Lloyd went on to release two more albums, Faster and Llouder and Version of the Truth, before they went their separate ways. Both have enjoyed successful solo careers. In 2011, the duo reunited to release It’s Already Tomorrow.
When asked if he remembered hearing the song on the radio for the first time, Lloyd says, “Yeah, we were in Baltimore, and there was a DJ there, Johnny Dark, who played it. We were out doing the radio promotion thing for it, where we bring our acoustic guitars and play for the radio people. And I remember we were in a car. It was the very thing we were promoting. That was why we were there. So cool.”
Photo by David Redfern/Redferns
