Marianas Trench’s Josh Ramsay Reveals Country Ballad ‘Best of Me’ Was Specifically Written for Dallas Smith (Exclusive)

Marianas Trench vocalist Josh Ramsey has released a handful of singles in anticipation of his new album “The Josh Ramsay Show.” He recently revealed his collaboration with country star Dallas Smith  — the vocalist of Vancouver rockers Default — was specifically written with the singer in mind. Speaking exclusively to PopCulture.com, Ramsay shared the story behind the song and explained that he and Smith have been trying to team-up on a song for years now.

“So I’m a huge Dallas fan. I love his voice. I think he’s got a beautiful voice. He’s got pipes, he’s a power singer. He’s a belter,” Ramsay said. “And we’ve known each other for a long time. We played some shows together here and there. And we had talked for years about at some point, ‘Man, we should do something together. We should sing together. I bet we would sound good together.’ And it was always like ‘Yeah…’ But nothing ever came of it.”

Ramsay then admitted that when he started working on his solo album, Smith was “one of the only singers” he had initially thought of. “‘Okay, I’m going to write a country song and I’m going to ask Dallas to sing on it and I’m going to picture his voice the whole time. I’m going to try and write it in the register that he normally sings in,’ and basically, every melody that I came up with in that song, I came up with it in my head, picturing his voice, singing it. And then I sent it to him and thank God he said yes.”

With the song written and Smith on-board, now all that had to happen was for the singer to record his vocals, which were delayed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. “It got to a point where we hadn’t recorded his lead vocals yet, but we were scheduled to record a live off the floor acoustic version, and we still hadn’t done the real version. So he came in and we did the live off the floor acoustic version. And then I was like, ‘Well dude, you know the parts, we just recorded it, we got the mic set up. Can we just record? You want to just do a couple takes while we’re here?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah, sure, man.’”

Praising Smith’s performance, Ramsay said, “He laid down that vocal in about 10 minutes and it looked like he wasn’t even f—ing trying. He’s so good. He’s so good.” The Josh Ramsay Show will be released on April 8 — it’s currently available to pre-save here — but fans can hear “Best of Me” right now by checking out the official music video above.