Luke Bryan is back on top. The Georgia native scored his 19th No.1 hit with “Light It Up,” the debut single from his recent What Makes You Country album. The song, written by Bryan, along with Old Dominion’s Brad Tursi, was inspired by how many times Bryan sees people looking at their cell phones.
“You look at everybody, everybody is locked into their cell phones these days, their screen,” Bryan shares. “They’re constantly jockeying between a million things on their phone, and so when you’re in limbo with your significant other and you’re fighting – so many people break up, get back together, fight, argue, fall in love via text message, and this guy is just waiting to see if this girl wants his love, and if she wants it, just say, ‘Hey, just light it up.’ When your screen is dark and you see it light up and it’s got that text message you want on it, it’s a big deal.
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“I think we were able to really capture that anxiousness, that anxiety, going to bed with it by your pillow, lying there if it buzzes,” he adds. “You want it to be that text message and you can’t rest, and finally you have to just put the phone on the floor or get it away from you because you’re in limbo.”
Bryan, who has been married to his wife Caroline since 2006, didn’t have any trouble conveying the emotions of someone in the beginning of a relationship. With lines like, “I get so neurotic about it baby / Cause I know you’re reading your phone / I can’t help from going crazy / Thinking you might not be all alone,” Bryan and Tursi intentionally captured the emotional roller coaster new couples face.
“When we sat down to write it, we thought about it in those terms,” Bryan says, “and used a word like, ‘neurotic,’ which, it is what you become — so neurotic about everything that’s going on until you hear back from that person.”
“Light It Up” is just one of 15 songs on What Makes You Country, which Bryan says is “countrier” than any of his previous albums.
“The bottom line with me is, it’ll always be [to] just find those songs that truly inspire me, move me,” Bryan notes. “Songs that take me somewhere, and I feel like I’ve done that with this album. I feel like I’ve touched on being a father, touched on still being kind of a partier. I’ve touched on being a country boy, and being in love and out of love and all of that.”
Download “Light It Up” on iTunes.
