“It’s just quintessential Lee Brice,” says Jacobs. Once Brice and his band developed a demo, co-producers Kyle Jacobs and Ben Glover recognized “Memory” as an ideal song for him, though that initial version was more aggressive than necessary. “It needed a tangible, like you can reach-out-and-touch-it, moment.” “The memory that I don’t mess with, to me, was this abstract thing,” explains Brice. That was the song’s biggest issue: Why was he strolling down a memory lane that he didn’t feel safe to visit? They decided to answer that question in a two-line bridge: “It’s good running into you like this/But, girl, I’m close as I can get.” Makin' Tracks: Michael Ray Blends Multiple Retro Eras Into New Country Single 'Whiskey… The irony of it is that he’s going there in his mind.” And so we just did this laundry list of images with the assumption that they were together, and these are places that can’t go in his mind anymore.
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“When it got to the hook, we wanted a dagger to be sunk in the heart of the listener, like we were feeling. “We intended to be a little elusive and have the chorus make the point,” says Montana. They dropped a Bruce Springsteen radio reference - “Girl, I’m on fire” - into that frame and concluded it with an oblique nod to one of Brice’s biggest singles: “I still can’t dance around.” The pictures didn’t say much on their own, though they all built toward the hook.
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A “sun up by the lake” reference gave that opening stanza a daytime vibe, while “moonlight on the back seat” moved the memories into the evening in the second verse. Montana offered a few poetic images for the first verse - “Red leaves on the river/Footprints in the sand” - creating a serene, cinematic setting. “And so I said to myself, ‘Man, you better bring it, because this one’s on the rails and we don’t want it to come off the rails.’ ” “I like to feel like I contributed in a write,” he says. Montana agreed, though he felt some pressure about crashing the party. After they finished a couple of other songs, Brice played the “Memory” chorus for Montana and asked if he wanted to help finish it. In September 2019, Brice brought Davis and songwriter Billy Montana (“Night Shift,” “Suds in the Bucket”) along to do some writing on a weekend tour. Lee Brice Lands New Career Best on Country Airplay Chart With 'One of Them Girls' “It was just a broke-down, kind of crap work tape, but it had the groove and it had that melody and it had that chorus,” he says. When he listened to new songs, particularly on airplane flights, he invariably played “Memory” again, even though it was incomplete. Then it sat for roughly a year, though Brice kept gravitating toward it. They made a work tape that captured the chorus and created a musical bed for potential verses, using the same chord structure. I, ‘Obsessed with,’ you know, ‘the best with.’ I mean, it was really that quickly the chorus came together.” “He just, ‘A memory I don’t mess with,’ and that’s all he had. “He didn’t tell me the title,” recalls Brice. In just a few minutes, they expanded that basic hook into a whole chorus with an easy-going rhyme scheme. He had finished writing another song, likely in 2018, and as he and co-writer Brian Davis (“One Hell of an Amen”) packed up, Davis dropped an undeveloped idea on Brice. The bones of “Memory I Don’t Mess With” hail not from the beach, but from a studio in Brice’s Middle Tennessee farmhouse with a panoramic view of a cornfield. I just wasn’t necessarily thinking it was going to be the single after ‘One of Them Girls.'” In fact, this song was 100% in my mind going to be a single. “This song is the most Lee Brice song, probably, on the whole record - it’s not like I disagreed with them at all. “The label really loved this song, and they were like, ‘This is quintessential Lee Brice,’ ” he notes. Pulled from the album Hey World (due Nov. 20), it’s hardly an homage to the beach-music genre (Brice was a tad surprised to hear the comparison), though the song’s journey to a bittersweet past would naturally trigger that sonic approach.
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Thanks to the spiky guitar chords, the nostalgic soul and Brice’s liquid vocal performance, “Memory I Don’t Mess With” - which Curb released to country radio via PlayMPE on Oct. 15 as the follow-up to his chart-topping “One of Them Girls” - has just enough of a beach music imprint to feel like the singer is digging into his regional roots. It’s a happy, nostalgic sound that embraces the good times and youthful memories associated with spring break and sandy vacations. The bars in that area gave rise to a regional genre, beach music, that centers on R&B and pop from the ’50s and ’60s. From Lee Brice‘s hometown of Sumter, S.C., it’s a short, uneventful drive to the Grand Strand along the Atlantic Ocean.