Zac Brown joins Today’s Country Radio with Kelleigh Bannen. In the interview, Zac Brown talks about writing “Out in the Middle” and “Old Love Song” with Luke Combs. Tune in and listen to the full episode today (July 9) at 5am LA / 7am Nashville / 8am NYC or anytime on-demand here.
Zac Brown Band on Working with Luke Combs
Getting to write with Luke Combs for the first time was great. 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. 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, and it was fun. I hope we do more together.
Zac Brown Band on “Out in the Middle”
I’ll tell you what, it was great to be out in the middle when COVID happened. 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. 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.
Zac Brown Band on Performing New Music Live
I love playing the newest stuff we’ve written live. So all of this stuff I’m super excited to get out and play. There’s going to be 15 new songs for us to play and ones that I’m really excited about. I love the arrangements on them. That’s how you know you’re kind of on the pulse of everything, when you’re creating the kind of music that you want to listen to, then you’re going to want to play it live. Yes, they will morph over time because they’ll get better. As we get comfortable and aren’t thinking about which chord, which whatever, then you can really start to put the feeling on it, lay stuff back and turn them into jams at the right moments, things like that.
