David Adam Byrnes Turns the Traditional Country Love Ballad Upside Down With ‘She Don’t’ [Exclusive Premiere]
It’s been a bit of a chaotic week for David Adam Byrnes.
“We literally just got done getting everything out of the house last night,” he tells Taste of Country in a new interview, talking about his move with his fiancée to a brand new home. “If we sit still too long, we get bored.”
The Texas country music hitmaker laughs, but the man seems to be speaking the truth. This is a hectic and exciting moment in both his personal and professional life, and he couldn’t imagine it any other way.
“There is no rest for the weary,” explains Byrnes, who scored his seventh straight No. 1 single, “One Honky Tonk Town," last year. “I waited a long time to be this busy.”
He also waited a long time to find his fiancée Amanda, who helps put passion into Byrnes’ new single "She Don’t." But the song came along long before she came along.
“I'm pretty sure I wrote it about her before I knew her,” he says of the song, which is premiering exclusively on Taste of Country on Friday. He wrote "She Don't" at the "tail end of 2017" alongside Frank Myers and Billy Montana.
“I thought it was a great song back when we wrote it," he says.
But as some songs do, “She Don’t” got lost in the shuffle for a little while, until Byrnes eventually came across an old demo of it last year. “It literally screamed Amanda to me, and with that, I knew it was time to put it out."
"It may not have been written for her, but it's a hundred percent about her," he assures.
A love song at its core, "She Don’t" tells the story in a different way than most.
"You can only say ‘I love you’ or ‘you broke my heart,’ so many ways,” Byrnes points out. “It's kind of funny that I wrote it during the time of my life where love was not part of anything I was part of. It was as if I was saving it for this moment when I was here engaged and getting married and getting our dream property. It’s perfect timing that it comes out right as we move out to move into our future forever home."
There was, however, another reason why it took a while for “I Don’t” to find its way to the light.
“Back when we recorded that demo, we were still in the heart of the bro country era and Sam Hunt and all that,” the singer recalls. “The demo of that song really catered to that, which I think is why I never really connected with it at that time.”
But now, Byrnes has made the song his own.
“I've really figured out my sound and how to take a song and make it mine,” he explains. “We threw fiddle all over it and a lot of steel guitar. I think that's a lot of why I wanted to record now as well. I knew how to make this song me and that definitely made a big difference.”
Expect a new David Adam Byrnes album to come later this year.