The Story Behind the Song That Changed Everything for Lady A

Everything changed for Lady A in 2009, with a song they never predicted would be such a massive hit. In 2009, the trio released “Need You Now”, a song band members Charles Kelley, Hillary Scott, and Dave Haywood wrote with Josh Kear.

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When “Need You Now” was released, Lady A was beginning their ascent into superstar status. Lady A had just celebrated their first No. 1 hit with “Run To You”, the final single from their self-titled debut album. Not only did they not think “Need You Now” would be a single, but they never imagined how much the song would change everything for them.

“‘Love Don’t Live Here’ was a hit,” Kelley recalls on SiriusXM’s The Highway. “Then we had ‘Looking for Good Time,’ [a] semi-hit. ‘Run To You’ was our first big No. 1. We knew we were onto something. I mean, we were building, but we definitely didn’t know it was gonna be that song.”

Lady A was excited about their sophomore album when they went in to record it. But they now admit it was another song they thought would be the massive hit, not “Need You Now”.

“I remember when we went in the studio, one of the songs that ended up being another single of ours, ‘Our Kind of Love’, I mean, we were juiced about this song,” Kelley remembers. “We were like, ‘This is the song off the record.’ And we played the record for the label, and literally every one of them was just like, ‘That’s the one. That’s the one. ‘Need You Now’. And I was like, ‘Really? Let’s do it. You never know.’

How “Need You Now” Transformed Lady A’s Career

“Need You Now” not only became a multi-week, Diamond-certified, No. 1 hit for Lady A, but it won them four Grammy Awards, including one for the all-genre Song of the Year. It also became their first No. 1 hit on the pop charts.

“That’s probably the easiest song where it was like, you didn’t have to convince anybody,” Kelley now says. “It was just one of those, and you never know which one that’s gonna be. Because if you really look at the lyrics, it’s a really simply-written song, highly simple. And sometimes those are the best.”

Ironically, while “Need You Now” was continuing its reign at the country charts, Kelley and Haywood had another hit song at radio, with “Do I”, a Luke Bryan song that they had written with Bryan. After several weeks at No. 1, Kelley and Haywood asked their label to kill their song, so Bryan’s could go to No. 1. It was a request that the head of the label at the time, Mike Dungan, declined.

“He goes, ‘Charles, I couldn’t kill this if I tried,’” Kelley recounts. “And I was like, ‘All right.’ Luckily, it did end up going No. 1. But that was one of those things where, looking back, I was like, ‘Oh, this is just the way it’s gonna go. Oh, I can’t wait for another one of these.’ We’ll just have a ‘Need You Now’ every year.

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