Maddie & Tae just dropped their latest EP, Everywhere I’m Goin’, which has five songs, including a duet with Dierks Bentley, on a song called “Lay Here With Me.” The duo, made up of Madison Marlow and Taylor Dye, previously toured with Bentley, on his 2015 Sounds of Summer Tour, but were still nervous to ask Bentley to sing with them on the romantic tune.
“What happened was we went into the studio to go record with our producers, I think it was like five songs we were trying to get done in a day,” Marlow recalled to PopCulture.com and other media. “So we started on ‘Lay Here With Me,’ and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, how are we going to ask Dierks? Maybe I’ll call him tomorrow.’ Even though we toured with him for a year and we still are really close to him. it’s still just like he’s one of our favorite artists so it’s nerve-racking to ask someone to do that.”
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Marlow wanted to have everything ready before calling Bentley, but things didn’t go quite as planned.
“That night I was like, ‘I’m going to call Dierks’s number and make sure it’s still a number, because celebrities change their numbers all the time.’ So I call it and it rings, and I’m like, ‘Perfect, dink,’” Marlow recounted, pretending to hang up a phone. “And when I was a kid you could call and it would ring one time and they wouldn’t get the call, and I don’t know when that changed. I guess iPhones don’t do that. I feel like an idiot, but anyway.
“The next day we’re recording ‘Lay Here With Me,’ finishing up the track,” she continued. “And Dierks Bentley is calling. I’m like, ‘No! Oh my gosh the call went through and I don’t know what I’m going to say!’”
“You were freaking out,” interjected Dye.
“I was looking at Tae and I was like, ‘Well I can’t not answer it,’” Marlow continued. “I was so panicked and so I take the call and I’m like, ‘Hey this is super random but we’re recording this song’ and I was just shaking, so nervous. I was like, ‘We’re recording this song and I think your voice would be so great telling this story.’”
Perhaps surprisingly, Bentley didn’t say yes right away, which suited Maddie & Tae just fine.
“His response was my favorite though,” Dye said. “He wasn’t just like, ‘Of course I’ll do it.’ He said, ‘Send me the song. I want to make sure I’m the right person to do this for you. This song, I’m sure, is great. I just want to make sure I do it justice.’ We were like, ‘Okay, great.’ We knew he was going to be the one but I just love that he thought about it that much and cared.
“He came in I guess maybe a month or two after we asked him and put vocals down, and it was just awesome,” Marlow added. “I was like, ‘This is unreal. How crazy that we get to have Dierks Bentley on this album? I did screw it up, but it did work out in the end.”
Download or stream all of the songs on Everywhere I’m Goin’ at MaddieandTae.com.
Photo Credit: Getty / John Shearer
