It’s the song that changed the entire course of their career, yet Lady Antebellum were precariously close to not even including it on their sophomore album. “Need You Now,” written by band members Hillary Scott, Dave Haywood and Charles Kelley, along with songwriter Josh Kear, was the second song written in a writing session, when Lady A was trying to complete enough songs for their second record.
“It was the first time we’d ever written with Josh Kear,” Kelley recalled to Billboard. “We wrote a song called ‘Young Love’ and we finished it and I said, ‘Man, that feels awesome. It feels like a big ol’ hit.’ We finished that song in an hour and a half. I was like, ‘Well, shoot, man. We just got started.’
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“I started playing around on guitar with a couple chords that Dave and my brother Josh taught me, and I had a little bit of the first verse of ‘Need You Now.’ [Sings] “Picture perfect memories scattered all around the floor … And I wonder if I ever cross your mind.’ That’s all I had. I passed the guitar back over to Dave and Josh Kear.”
The foursome finished the song and recorded a demo, unaware of how much Lady Antebellum’s career would explode from that one song.
“It was really just a pretty bad phone recording [where] it’s hard to find the chords, and we were still figuring out the right melodies and who’s actually going to sing which parts,” Haywood recounted. “All the parts weren’t hammered out yet.”
“We were all thrilled to have two songs we loved writing, and with the usual hugs and ‘great-to-meet-you’ they were out the door,” Kear continued. “I wandered downstairs and talked to [my publisher Big Yellow Dog Music co-founder/CEO] Carla Wallace. She asked how it went and I told her we got two songs – the first one was an uptempo like we were told they wanted, and I said I thought it would make their next record. She asked about the other one and I told her not to worry about that one – it was mid-tempo, dark and it would probably never see the light of day.
“I turned in a rough demo for the first song and never played the ‘Need You Now’ work tape for anyone,” he added. “Not my publisher. Not my wife.”
“Need You Now” might have stayed in obscurity if not for Kelley remembering the song when they were meeting with their then-label, Capitol Records, to choose songs for the upcoming project.
“It was literally the last song we played in our A&R meeting for this record,” said Scott. “We had written so many songs, and we were sitting with A&R at Capitol Nashville with [label head] Mike Dungan and [producer] Paul Worley. At the end of our meeting, Charles was like, ‘OK, there’s one more and it might be crap but I’m going to play it.’ We played [the simple work tape] and they heard something in it. They said, ‘You have to at least go in and try this.’”
“Need You Now,” which was released in 2009, went on to be certified platinum nine times, selling in excess of nine million copies, and won five Grammy Awards, including Record of the Year and Song of the Year. Download the song on iTunes.
Photo Credit: Getty images/Rick Diamond
