ABC/Image Group LA Granger Smith was on the road with Florida Georgia Line when he wrote his latest top fifteen hit. But he admits there was no master plan behind “Happens Like That.”
“We didn’t start out writing the song saying, ‘Okay, here’s the hook, and here’s the story, and let’s go for it,’” Granger explains. “It was more just some guys in a room, on the bus, strumming guitars — like it used to be.”
“We feel out a groove that feels right,” he continues, “and then a line comes out: ‘You order a drink.’ And then another line: ‘It goes down smooth. Before you can blink, it turns into two.’ These lines are just kind of falling out, with no direction yet.”
The “Backroad Song” hitmaker says he’s invigorated by the spontaneity of the process.
“I love it when songs do that,” Granger tells ABC Radio. “It’s like, ‘Oooh, where’s this going?’ You know, ‘What road is this taking us on? … The creative road is going somewhere, let’s follow it!’ … And that’s what this song was.”
Once “Happens Like That” started to take shape, Granger recognized a universal theme.
“We realized ‘Oh, this is our story. This is my story. And maybe this is a lot of people’s story,’” he recalls. “There’s one moment in time, [in] a relationship, at the very beginning, where if she had turned left and you had turned right, you never would’ve met. And it all was based on that one moment where it happened.”
“Happens Like That” is just one of the current top 40 hits was co-written by FGL’s Tyler Hubbard. He also had a hand in writing FGL’s collabo with Bebe Rexha, “Meant to Be” and Jason Aldean’s “You Make It Easy.”
Copyright © 2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
