INTERVIEW: Thomas Rhett on Where We Started

It’d be easy to make a record that did really well and be like, “Well that works, so let’s just do that again.” I feel like as artists, we’re always soaking in information from all over the place and listening to all these new things that come out. And you go, “God, that’s really cool. That’s really cool. How could we take a lot of this stuff and kind of morph it into what I do?” And so every record is a challenging process between me and my producers… But I think at the end of the day, if I can just continue to lead with a fresh story and a new way to say I love you, and always trust my producers to take that production to the next level, that’s all we can do. And I’m pretty dang proud of it.

As you know, every single year of marriage brings a different layer to the love. When I wrote “Die A Happy Man,” me and Lauren had been married maybe four or five years, so still kind of on the riding the honeymoon phase or whatever. But when you start to add kids into it, life just changes. Like on this record, I think like “The Hill” and songs like “Angels” are new ways to say I love you while saying, “How in the world have you put up with my crap for the last 10 years?” You know what I’m saying?

I think for a long time, people looked at my love songs as, “God, their relationship is just rainbows and butterflies.” And I think that’s a way to say I love you, for sure. But as we’ve been married for 10 years, there’s not one marriage in the world that’s not rocky at certain points. There’s not one marriage in the world that you don’t start arguing about dumb stuff or have really big fights. And so, I think when you have been married this long, you have to continue to find ways to like reignite that fire. There’s always that spark, but how do you make it blow up again?

[Allison Jones from Big Machine] called me and said, “Hey, how would you feel about making this song a feature?” And I was like, “Well, who do you have in mind?” And she was like, “Well, I was thinking about sending this song to Katie Perry.” And I kind of laughed because I was like, “First of all, she doesn’t know who I am. And second of all, she probably gets sent millions of songs a day and she’s never done a country collaboration before.” And the next day she literally hit us back and said, “I resonate with this song so much. Please send me the files. I want to put my vocal on it.” And a week later, I’m in the kitchen and my wife’s standing there and I get a FaceTime from a LA number. And it’s just Katie Perry shows up on my screen. And my wife’s like, “What are you doing?” I was like, “I don’t know.”

Next thing you know, me and Tyler [Hubbard} and Russell [Dickerson] are literally in full on normal conversation with men serving a sentence on death row. And then we started playing some songs. There was a guy up top who they had unchained to bring down to the bottom to sing, in my opinion, the most beautiful version of Amazing Grace I’d ever heard. And then you leave and you’re like, “What just happened?”… At the end of the day, it was kind of like, I don’t know, it just reminded me of Christ on the cross and that dude that was hanging next to him. And he was just like, “Can I come to heaven with you?” And he was like, “I promise you’ll be there with me in paradise.” And so I just kept being reminded of that. And I think it’s just kind of proof that no matter what you’ve done in your life, I mean I also can’t imagine what it would be like to be the parent of someone who had been killed by one of these men. And I understand that the song was controversial. I understand that there are people that completely disagree with my point of view. But at the same time, I was there and I experienced it. And it is something that reminded me that we all kind of suck, just in different ways and realizing that you can’t just write everybody off for a mistake.