Aaron Goodvin joins The Ty Bentli Show on Apple Music Country to talk about being this week’s Canada’s Country cover artist, his new single “Boy Like Me” and why his song “Bars And Churches” continues to resonate with listeners. Tune in and listen to the episode in-full on-demand here.
Aaron Goodvin on being the cover of the Canada’s Country playlist
It’s literally the most flattering thing. It reminds me of the feeling that you get when somebody records your song. I had a Luke Bryan cut years ago, and that was so validating. It made all the years of stress and worry just kind of disappear. It was like, “Oh, this was all for something.”
Aaron Goodvin on “Bars and Churches”
I wrote that with Ben Stennis, and that title was a title that he, oddly enough, saved for me. Because he was like, “I know this is … ” I’m a kind of a reformed drinker. I don’t do it anymore, but I did it a lot. But I had these two sides of me. My wife introduced me to church and God in a different way than I was raised in Canada, and it was like this whole new thing. And then I had this whole other side that was so used to just going to bars. And when I moved to Nashville, that’s all I did. I mean, you struggle in this town when you first get here, and there’s this sense of community when you can go out and kind of be with other people that are going through the same thing that you’re going through, which is oddly enough, just like church, which is kind of that seesaw thing that I was doing at that time. Ben can kind of say that for me. He knew what I was going through, and he’s like, “I got this title called ‘Bars and Churches.’ ” And I was like, “Well, I don’t know what it means yet, but I love that.”
Aaron Goodvin on “Boy Like Me”
The reason I love “Boy Like Me” so much is because it’s like a 10 or 20-year period in a three-minute song… And it just kind of brings up this whole thing about it’s really when you know that you know, and then you kind of just have to get through all the stuff to get to where you eventually end up. But I think it’s a hard thing to do. I’ve definitely never written another song like that. For whatever reason, it kind of fell into place that day. And the interesting thing about “Boy Like Me” is I wrote it before I knew COVID was going to happen. But we had just finished a tour with Rascal Flatts in Canada and really felt like we’ve got a really great group of people together that were all kind of vibing and just feeling really good. Literally, my goal was I’m going to go in and write a bunch of uptempo bangers, like show songs, that people could sing along to, of course, not knowing that COVID was coming. So, that’s why we kind of wrote “Boy Like Me.” And then, it’s really funny because then COVID happened, and it kind of put a stop to a lot of things. But this song just kind of kept hitting us in the back of the head all the time. It was like, “Hey, we need to do something with this.” I generally know right after I write something whether it’s like, “Oh, this is my song, and it’s going to be great.” And even after playing it for my wife… She’s in publishing here in Nashville, and she’s like, “Yeah, it’s cool.” And then once we finished it up in studio and we were done, she’s like, “Man, you should listen to your gut more often because that’s a smash, and you knew it right off the bat.”
