Exclusive: Trent Harmon Opens Up About Heartache That Inspired ‘You Got ‘Em All’

Trent Harmon’s long-awaited freshman album, You Got ‘Em All, will be out on Friday, May 18. The Season 15 American Idol winner wrote eight of the 11 songs on his new record, including the title track.

“You Got ‘Em All” had been written at the point that I kind of started thinking about having a new single,” Harmon tells PopCulture.com. “It came about after a phone call that I received. I was walking on stage some time last year, towards the end of the year, and I got information sent to me that I’d be able to put a single out. I didn’t know what it was going to be, didn’t know what was going to happen, but until that point I had no reason to think I’d be able to. I called my girlfriend; I’m excited. I’m saying, ‘Hey, guys, hold the stage.’

“We’re literally walking on stage, and I said, ‘I just got word I’m going to be able to put a single out. Don’t know what it’s going to be,’” Harmon continues. “And she said, ‘Well, I was going to wait until after your show. I just got word that I might be able to move for my job, get the job I wanted.’ She said some other things. I quit listening to be honest. I knew what she was talking about. She was talking about moving to Thailand to teach English. It’s what she’d always wanted to do. I wrote the song two days later, and the lyric makes sense if you know that backstory behind it.”

“You Got ‘Em All,” which says, “Cause I’m still waiting on life to begin again / Still waiting on love to give a second chance / To stop me and steal my breath the way you did / I’m still looking for your Jeep in every parking lot / Still taste your lips with every whiskey shot / I hope you found whatever I ain’t found yet / ‘Cause I feel like all my better days are gone / And I think you got ’em all,” was written with Justin Ebach and Jordan Minton, while Harmon was still sorting through his feelings about the end of his relationship.

“I came back to Nashville, had a co-write, and I didn’t want to write,” Harmon recounts. “I actually canceled the write. I called in, and I told the truth. I’m friends with the guys that I wrote the song with, and I told them, one of them, I said, ‘I don’t really know what just happened two days ago, but I think I may have lost somebody really special to me, and I don’t feel like writing. I don’t think I would be productive, I would hold you guys up.’

“They said, ‘Today of all days, you have to write. You have to come in, we have to capture whatever’s going on in your brain. We’ll get there, and we’ll work it out,’” Harmon recounts. “We wrote the song in probably the quickest write I’ve ever had. It was less than an hour, and the song was finished.”

The 27-year-old relives the emotions of the break-up every time he takes the stage, something he is willing to do, if only to help others going through their own heartache.

“I think if you ever have a single and it does well, then you should be OK with having to sing that song every night for the rest of your life,” explains Harmon. “But the thing about a song like this is for the authenticity to shine through, you have to go to that place that you went to whenever you wrote the song. And that’s tough, but I want this song to be bigger than just me and my story.

“I want other people to hear it and help them heal whatever’s going on with them,” he adds. “You can find my story wherever you want to find it, but everybody’s lost somebody. Everybody’s had somebody and then lost that person. So it’s hard for me to go there, but at the same time to know that it helps me and it’ll help them at the same time, that’s a good thing.”

Download “You Got ‘Em All” on iTunes.

Photo Credit: Instagram/officialtrentharmon