Chris Young Shares the Story Behind Mitchell Tenpenny Duet 'At the End of a Bar'

Chris Young's latest single is his team-up with Mitchell Tenpenny, "At the End of a Bar," a concert-ready track about all the things you can find at the end of a bar, whether it be true love, a party crowd or a simple conversation. Young wrote the song with Tenpenny and Chris DeStefano, and Young told PopCulture.com that he didn't even realize he had given the trio a title to work with.

"Normally I'm really good about overhearing things said in conversation and go 'That's a song title,'" he shared, adding that the trio was in a writing session when Young told the others, "Yeah, you, me and Mitchell sitting at the of a bar." "And DeStefano goes, 'Say that again?' Because Mitchell had pointed at him," he recalled. "Mitchell goes, 'I think that's what we're writing today.' Mitchell caught it before I did. Like, 'Oh yeah, I mean, that could be a title.' And he's like, 'Yeah, sometimes it's where it all starts is at the end of a bar.' And I was like, 'Hell yeah. That's what we're going to write today.' That was really cool. Us stacking vocals and everything happened while we were just kind of sitting there at the studio and felt really awesome."

Young added that making the song a duet wasn't something he initially planned on and had asked Tenpenny to sing the demo to allow Young to see if he liked the song.

"And yeah, I like this song a lot. And I was like, 'Well, it's sort of got Mitchell's voice,'" he said. "I didn't say anything at the time, but I'd run into him about a week later, we were all hanging out. Like, 'Let me ask you a question. Are you against us having that be a duet, both of us on it?' He's like, 'Absolutely not. I'd love that.' So we mock up a version of it and sent it around and everybody fell in love with the song and they're like, 'This is great.' So just a very organic way for that kind of thing to happen. And yeah, it just kind of jumped off the page, all on its own."

The song's music video was filmed at multiple bars in Nashville and on an outside stage on Broadway downtown, where thousands of people gathered to watch the duo perform. "It was nuts," Young said of the shoot. "It was really funny because this is going to be like the largest scope video that I've ever done. Multi-day shoot. We were like, 'Hey, we're just going to invite whoever wants to come.'"

"In the afternoon we were doing some filming and there was seven, eight hundred people there," he continued. "I'm like, 'Huh, cool. Like we figure out how to shoot this where it looks cool, I guess.' And then by the time we got the band shots and me and Mitchell got ready to get up on stage, there was probably fifteen thousand people about. So it was a pretty wild and absolutely fantastic."