Jason Aldean (Featuring Eric Church and Luke Bryan), ‘The Only Way I Know’ – Lyrics Uncovered
When you've written many hits, it's easy to forget where some ideas came from, just as David Lee Murphy did with 'The Only Way I Know' lyrics -- the latest single from Jason Aldean -- which he co-wrote with Ben Hayslip.
"David Lee Murphy came into the write with me that day with a full chorus, maybe minus one line, but it was pretty much a full chorus," Hayslip tells Taste of Country of the new Aldean single, which features fellow co-stars Eric Church and Luke Bryan.
"It was just one of those ideas," adds Murphy. "I don't know where any of that stuff comes from. Sometimes it's something somebody has said. Ben and I always have a good time writing together. That just popped into my head."
"That’s the only way I know / Don’t stop till everything’s gone / Straight ahead never turn round / Don’t back up, don’t back down / Full throttle, wide open / You get tired, you don’t show it / Dig a little deeper when you think you can’t dig no more / That’s the only way I know," Murphy wrote in the chorus.
"I got the idea, as far as how to do the verses, I said maybe we should just rap these verses... do something crazy," Hayslip recalls. "We got talking about it. Jason had just come off 'Dirt Road Anthem,' which was a rap, so we thought we would put a little more melody to it than a rap. We kind of met in the middle. He's not singing and he's not rapping, he's just kind of halfway talking the verses. We turned it into a really cool song."
"Well I grew up in one of them old farm towns / Where they hit it hard till the sun goes down / Nobody really seemed to care that we were living in the middle of nowhere / We just figured that’s how it was / And everyone else was just like us / Soaking in the rain baking in the sun / Don’t quit till the job gets done," they wrote in the opening 'The Only Way I Know' lyrics.
"That was a song nobody else heard," says Hayslip. "That song went one place, and that was Jason Aldean, and he cut it. A lot of songs we write, they bounce around for two or three years to find a home. That song found its home with the first artist who heard it. That is a songwriter's dream. We don't always do that, but that day we were sitting down to write a song for Jason Aldean."
"One of my biggest goals coming into this year was to get a Jason Aldean cut," continues Hayslip, who was recently named ASCAP's Songwriter of the Year for the second year in a row. "I'm just a huge fan of what he does. I think what he does and what I do are very similar as far as lyrically. That was a big goal of mine. I was telling everybody I know... I am going to get on the Jason Aldean record somehow, and we ended up getting on there two times. It's really cool."
"It was fun to write," Murphy says. "I remember when we demoed it, I listened to it like 100 times, over and over. The demo was so cool. This record is the same way. I still put it on and listen to it a bunch of times."
He adds, "I like all three of those guys, and it's just a great opportunity to have three of the hottest guys right now on one song."
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