When Bebe Rexha agreed to meet Florida Georgia Line‘s Tyler Hubbard, along with David Garcia and Josh Miller in a studio, she never imagined she’d walk out with one of the biggest hits of her career. The pop star thought she was just meeting to hang out and get to know the three writers, and instead ended up with a record-breaking single.
“We were just out in LA writing,” Hubbard recalls. “[We] reached out to some different artists and she hit us back at last minute and said, ‘Yeah I’ll come to the studio tonight.’ I don’t even think she knew we were going to write a song. I think she just thought we were going to hang out and meet and maybe schedule time to write. But me and the boys were ready to write.
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“So we wrote that song in a couple of hours and she sang down the demo,” continues Hubbard. “We left with the song pretty much the way it is on the radio, so it was a pretty awesome night. I think as songwriters that’s kind of what you live for. You know, there’s a lot of days that don’t unfold that way and don’t come that easy and sometimes the songs sort of falls out of the sky and it’s those writes that you kind of live for.”
“Meant to Be” toppled Taylor Swift’s record of longest No. 1 song on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart, staying in the top spot for 23 weeks. It also exploded on the pop charts, earning multi-platinum status, and introducing FGL to an entirely new audience.
“All of a sudden we’re getting streams all over the world,” says Hubbard. “She has a huge fan base globally, and the song just naturally blew up. It’s fun to see this naturally happen, without it being pushed to work …That’s the beauty of it, just getting out of the box and seeing what happens. And when it works, it works.”
Hubbard and Brian Kelley are hard at work on a new studio album, the follow-up to their 2016 Dig Your Roots.
“I think with every album we do we just try to evolve as our life has,” Hubbard explains. “[We] try to write the best songs that we possibly can and find the best songs that we possibly can between the last album and the current album, and just record the best songs that we can find and songs that we connect with and songs that we think our fans will.
“And I think we got to do that more with this album than with any album because we’ve been able to write so much, on and off the road this time,” he adds. “So I think we both feel more confident in this album than any previous album. And I think you should feel that way about every record or you’re not doing your job right.”
Florida Georgia Line hint that there might be a few collaborations on their next set of tunes, especially some unexpected ones.
“Sort of towards the end, [we] put it out there and said ‘You want to come to the studio and get on this song?’” Hubbard reveals. “So we’re still kind of dreaming and scheming, but we’re definitely going to do some kind of collaboration.”
Download “Meant to Be” on iTunes.
Photo Credit: Instagram/floridageorgialine
