Matt Stell Reveals Story Behind Debut Single, ‘Prayed for You’ (Exclusive)

Matt Stell’s debut single, “Prayed for You,” is already in the Top 15, and still climbing. Stell knew the song, which he co-wrote with Ash Bowers and Allison Veltz, was special, although he had no idea how quickly fans would latch on to the emotional tune.

“Ash and I were waiting on Allison to get to the write,” Stell recalled to PopCulture.com. “She called, and said, ‘Hey I’m running a little late, but I got this idea.’ She had just met [the man] who’s now her husband; she had met him about a week before. She was kind of in that head space, and she came in with pretty much what’s the end of the chorus: ‘Didn’t know you from Adam / It was more than I could fathom, but I prayed for you.’ That was our point of departure.

“We took off from there, and kind of infused it with our own relationship experiences, and not only relationships; the song is about a relationship, but it’s also about persevering, in anything, whether it’s school, work, family, just hanging in there long enough to allow good things to happen,” he continued. “And that was kind of our muse, and we chased it down. It took us two days to finish the song, but when we did, we thought we had something cool.”

Stell know “Prayed for You” was what they hoped to write, but could not have imagined that the song would so rapidly make its way up the charts.

“You have enough of those feelings of, ‘This is it,’ and when it’s not it, you kind of get a little gun shy on thinking it that this is it,” Stell admitted. “But we knew when we left that room that day, we did we what we set out to do, and that’s like kind of how I have to judge every day in terms of writing songs. Did we accomplish what we meant to? Wwe thought we did that day.”

Stell, who almost went to medical school instead of pursuing music, knows that “Prayed for You” could easily become a No. 1 hit. But if it does, someone will have to tell Stell, since he rarely even checks chart positions.

“I’m the worst chart watcher that there is,” Stell conceded. “Once you sort of turn it out into the wild, it’s like you push the bird out of the nest and it either flies or it gets eaten by a cat. So, hopefully the wings got to flapping a little bit.”

“I’ll get a text or a call from somebody, and they’ll let me know,” he continued. “It’s my first rodeo, so I don’t really know what to expect. I don’t know what numbers are good or bad, so I just judge my reaction on the smiles, or the frowns on the faces that are giving me the news. And we’re fortunate to have some smiles here lately.”

“Prayed for You” is from Stell’s debut Everywhere But On EP, which is available for purchase on his website.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Monarch Publicity/Matthew Berinato