With today’s New Music Friday, Zac Brown Band release a double-dose of singles. “Out in the Middle” and “Old Love Song,” both co-written with Jonathan Singleton, Ben Simonetti, and fellow country star Luke Combs, prime the listener for a groovy, road-trip-kind-of-weekend.
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During a stop on Today’s Country Radio with Kelleigh Bannen, Brown opened up about co-writing with Combs for the first time. “He’s got great sensibility for parts and then singing along—man, what a voice. He’s got an incredible voice. So making a demo was very easy,” he tells host Kelleigh Bannen. “It was really nice not to have to sing everything on the demo. And just little inflections on how he would do melody or how he would do things, it made a nice soup for all of our input together. Luke’s a great writer, and of course, he’s an amazing singer. I hope we do more together.”
Quite the barn-burner, “Out in the Middle” details exactly what life was like over the last 15 months, as Brown lives smack dab in the middle of nowhere. “It was great to be able to provide our own food, if we needed to; it was great to be able to have capable people around us that knew how to do it, to help us live off the land,” he says. “I mean, it pretty much says it all right there in the song. Through my experience, when city folk come out to the country, they absolutely love it. And they’ve got different kinds of wisdom, different things, different street smarts and different things that are happening. So, we all got a lot to learn from each other, but I’m super happy to live out in the middle where I can wake up in the morning and pee outside.”
On writing “Old Love Song,” Brown combed his love of classic country love songs, referencing titles from Tom Petty, Al Green, Randy Travis, and others. “This is all the songs that you fell in love to. It was like a puzzle trying to put together all the song titles we really love,” Brown says in a press statement, “and making that into a love song. I grew up listening to oldies—songs a lot older than I was. And this song has that feel to it.”
The double-single release follows “Same Boat,” now currently a Top 30 hit.
Listen to the entire conversation here.
