happening. Tyler looked at me and said, “Man,
this is crazy meeting you, this is full circle in my
life”, and he started telling me about how my
music was such an influence on him all through
high school and how he used to play my
songs. I’ll never forget, he said he could tell me
exactly when, he said he came to Belmont as
a freshman and he could tell me exactly where
he was standing in the Bridgestone arena at
this conference called Passion. He was one of
those students in that arena and he thought,
“This is what I want to do for the rest of my life.”
He said the week after that he went to the
college study at Belmont and there was this
guy Brian leading worship, he said he went
up to Brian and said, “Hey, I feel like were
supposed to do something together, I think
we’re maybe supposed to do music together.”
And they started leading worship together. He
said they were making about a hundred dollars
a week at these churches on Wednesday
nights in northern Nashville. So, they would go
play at these church’s Bible studies, and they
would write Christian songs as well, and he told
me how their Country songs exploded and they
changed their name to Florida Georgia Line.
He said God’s done so much in his life, and
then he walked into this gym and it made him
say again that he thinks there is a reason and
that we should get together, write some songs
together, smash up the genres and see what
happens. Never thinking that we were going to
make an album together, we’d just met, but it
was this spark.
Soon enough, shortly after that we started
writing together and the songs came so easy. It
was such a different style, my style and his style
together and joining those just really started to
create something special. And it wasn’t long
before we thought that we had something
here, something that I hadn’t heard before. And
something that I didn’t even know how much I
would love and that other people would love.
It just started taking a life of its own into what
is now this record we just released with all of
these artists.
But it started in this little workout gym, and
I love how it started in this way. We didn’t
even tell managers or labels about this for the
longest time while we were writing these songs
and making demos, we just did it out of fun and
for friendship. Then we thought people needed
to hear this, we had to figure out how to do this
in a bigger way and started finding others to be
a part of it. It really is a collaboration because
it is all of us in there together doing this. There
is not one thing where a label is like, “I think
it’d be really smart if…” Or a manager is like,
“What if we can get our artist in on this…” it
was not that, it was all out of friendship and all
of these back stories that started happening of
everybody being connected… and its incredible
to me.
8 September 2020
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