Lauren Alaina joins Today’s Country Radio for an interview with Kelleigh Bannen to chat about her past relationships and friendship with Jon Pardi, all of which have inspired the music on her new album ‘Sitting Pretty On Top Of The World.’ Tune in and listen to the episode in-full this Friday (Oct. 1) at 11am PT / 1pm CT / 2pm ET or anytime on-demand here.
Lauren Alaina on Writing “It Was Me”
[My publisher Alicia Pruitt] said to me, “I think we need a song where you’re the bad guy.” She said that to me and it kind of stopped me in my tracks. I was like, “oh, well, I’m going to have to go into the archives for this” because the last time I was “the bad guy” was when I was engaged and I walked away. When Alicia said that to me, I thought, “okay, I need to go back because this is probably something that I’ve thought about before and I just didn’t write it.” I found, in my notes, on my phone, from two and a half years ago, “It Wasn’t You I didn’t Love, It Was Me.” I saw it and I was like, “how did I have this all this time and never write it” because I have thousands of ideas on my phone.
Lauren Alaina on Why She Believes “It Was Me” is the Best Song She’s Ever Written
Lauren Alaina: For whatever reason, I told Hillary [Lindsey] the idea that day. I was like, “Can you sing on Zoom?” Mind you, we also wrote it on Zoom, which is a whole other-
Kelleigh Bannen: I can’t believe how intimate it is considering that too.
Kelleigh Bannen: We were both at our houses writing it. Maybe that helped with the intimacy, I’m not sure. Hillary Lindsey is Hillary Lindsey, so you could write with her in the bathroom and you would come out with a masterpiece. I said this idea to her and she was like, “are you kidding me?” I just started saying these are the kinds of things that I’m like thinking and before I knew it, she was like, “well, you wrote the chorus, so here we are. We’ve arrived at the chorus.” We actually paused there because she’s a mom, she had to go take care of her sweet baby girl. I think the next week we got back together and we ended up writing it and I literally believe it’s the best song I’ve ever written.
Lauren Alaina on What ‘Sitting Pretty On Top Of The World’ Represents for Her
I’m about to be 27 and so this album really represents the woman I am now and I wrote it in the last eight months, so it really represents the woman I am now. I’ve been through two pretty big breakups, not pretty big. Explosive breakups, very publicly. It was like this season of my life, tested everything I said on [the ‘Road Less Traveled’] album. To love myself, to believe in myself, to love others, to be kind, this album was like, “hey, here are all of these explosive things happening and how are you going to be on the other side of it? What is the woman on the other side of all of this stuff going to look like?” Yeah, here I am and I’m really proud of it, but it is an album about overcoming. I think that will forever be what I do as an artist, is just overcoming, being kind, loving others, loving yourself.
Lauren Alaina on Who Inspired “Getting Over Him”
This idea came from someone else, like directly from someone’s mouth to me. It was after those two breakups that we talked about and I went through a season of nobody and then I was kind of seeing this new guy and I realized pretty early on that it wasn’t going to work out. I was talking to my friend about it and I was like, “this is just not gonna work.” And I was kind of bummed, but not so much about the person, just about another relationship failure. She said, “Well, let me tell you. If all he did was show you that you could get over that last guy, that he served his purpose in your life, don’t see it as a failure. Remember when you were crying, saying you were never going to get over that last guy? You did it.”
Lauren Alaina on How Jon Pardi Became Part of “Getting Over Him”
I said, “I don’t want to just look like this person that’s using this guy.” Because that was not the intention at all. I actually really liked the guy. He also had been through a breakup, this guy, so we were kind of in the same boat and he went more of the, “I’m going to party and do whatever I want for a really long time” thing and I was like, “That’s not my journey.” So, that’s how I knew it was going to work out, but it was pretty mutual as far as we decided, deuces, so we told the male perspective. We described the guy that the song was actually about and then when we listened back to it, I was like, “Sounds like Jon Pardi!” The denim on denim and all of the characteristics of this character that we’ve described, it’s obviously not Jon Pardi, but it just fit him so well. And so we got a demo made of it and I sent it to Jon… I just texted it to him and he said yes. It was like the easiest collaboration of all time. He was like, “This song’s badass!” Sorry, mom and I was like, “thanks.” He came in and sang it and that was it and then it became the single.
