Chris Lane on Tackling the Hard Stuff in His New Love Song ‘If I Die Before You’

When people think about love, they frequently focus on expensive weddings, flowery poetry or heavy kissing sessions. But the ultimate act of love is arguably less romantic: paperwork.

Making out a will, filling out the beneficiary lines on insurance forms or assigning someone for that “Payable on Death” section of a checking account are boring details that require uncomfortable thoughts about dying. But those actions smooth the passage of assets and can simplify life for survivors at a time when they’re torn by grief. Few things say “I love you” more than demonstrating it when the recipient can’t show appreciation.

“My wife says to me all the time, ‘If something ever happens to me, please be sure the boys know how much their mom loved them,’” Chris Lane says. “I’m like, ‘Honey, please do not ever say that to me again.’ I can’t even bear the thought of that.”

Lane’s newest release — “If I Die Before You,” which Red Street issued to digital service providers on Oct. 11 — re-creates that kind of conversation with the singer contemplating his own passage. It’s similar to the approach in two high-impact predecessors, Garth Brooks’ “If Tomorrow Never Comes” and The Band Perry’s “If I Die Young,” but leans even closer to those awkward discussions about estates and advance directives. And it manages to transform a difficult moment into an ascendant one.

“I’ve never heard this topic talked about in a song before,” Lane says. “It felt like a really fresh and really cool idea, and they did it in a very emotional way.”

“They” are songwriters Emily Weisband (“Looking for You,” “Dance Like No One’s Watching”), James McNair (“Guy for That,” “Lovin’ On You”) and Seth Mosley (“Make You Mine,” “Build a Boat”). The three met at a second-floor office Mosley was renting at the Starstruck building on Nashville’s Music Row in 2022.

McNair brought up the title, “If I Die Before You,” which he had recently logged into his phone, most likely after hearing the phrase on a TV show. He didn’t know what kind of story it might create, but it led them to acknowledge that they’ve all had conversations with their spouses about how to handle an unexpected passing. “It’s the worst conversation in the world,” Weisband says.

But it had some powerful possibilities, too, if they could find the right balance, even with the word “die” in the hook. “You have to write it just completely bare and honest,” McNair says. “You can’t be cheesy, and it can’t be too morbid. It’s definitely delicate when you have that word in the title.”

They launched with the title in the opening line — “If I die before you/I hope you buy that Mustang” — with Weisband, who had a pop recording deal, leading the melodic charge. They toggled between the verses and chorus as they proceeded, Mosley girding the top line with more minor chords and sevenths than typically emerge in Nashville writing rooms.

“It’s not like a jazz record or anything,” Mosley says. “There are far more complicated songs and chord progressions out there, but I think as Nashville writers often forget, there are other options. And so if I can be a small part of helping just create stuff that’s slightly different, that’s something I like to do.”

The chorus lived primarily in unresolved chordal territory, creating a sweet tension as it recognized that “all our names end up on a rock.” Near the end, it almost came to a halt, imagining that God takes the singer first. “Baby, forgive Him,” the text read, “and keep living if I die before you.”

Imagining Weisband’s future family, verse two referenced “our hypothetical kids” as the weighty conversation continued. By the time they reached the bridge, the song eased into conversational syncopation, the story’s couple refocusing on the current moment. And on a bottle.

“We tried to lighten it up, in that sense of where it was kind of like a couch conversation over wine,” McNair says, “which I think helps it, you know. They weren’t in the lawyer’s office or something like that.”
They wrote it in a scant two hours, prioritizing the song itself rather than how it might be received in the marketplace. Mosley produced a demo with an airy tone, Weisband singing lead.

“It was very low pressure,” she says. “It was not the typical Nashville grind it out till every word is perfect and every melody’s a smash-sounding melody. It’s just like, ‘Let’s let the song write itself, and we’re just kind of here to help birth it,’ if you will. We were the song’s midwives.”

Lane heard “If I Die Before You” when a publisher sent him a batch of songs. He was particularly curious about the title and made it one of the first he played from that group. He took the opening “mustang” reference to mean a horse, which fit his wife’s interests, and the rest of the song worked, too. He wanted it.

“I’m not a super-emotional guy at all, nor do I really love slow songs,” he says. “But when I heard this song, it struck an emotional chord in me — probably because I’m married and have kids now, so I look at life differently.”

He responded to the publisher, who apologized: Another artist — Jordan Davis, it turned out — had the song, and Lane shouldn’t have heard it. While Davis debated whether to release it, McNair played it for Luke Combs, who pressured Davis to put it out or let it go. Combs toyed with it, too, but decided it didn’t fit the project he was recording and passed. “We just kept laughing that for how pop-girl of a demo this was, all these guys were wanting to cut it,” Weisband says.

Ultimately, Lane checked in every few months about it, and his persistence won the day. He so revered it that he insisted on using two of the song’s writers — he got Mosley to produce it and asked Weisband to sing harmonies. And Lane was present for almost all the work as Mosley cut new parts — played primarily by multi-instrumentalist Jonny Fung and drummer Phil Lawson — over pieces of the original demo, shifting it to a country production.

Lane made one lyrical change: “Our hypothetical kids” became “our crazy, beautiful kids,” acknowledging his two boys. He worked tirelessly on his lead vocal, singing perhaps 20 or 30 takes to get every part right.

Mosley called on Gideon Klein and Carl Larson to overdub a string section. “I make string arrangements that are just me singing into a mic,” Mosley says, “and I’ll do 10, 15 tracks of me just humming parts, like, ‘This is a cello, part one,’ ‘Cello, part two,’ and then I’ll pass it off to Gideon. He’ll put it on sheet music so it actually makes sense. But then we go in and just stack it a bunch of times.”

Red Street continues to work Lane’s current single, “Find Another Bar,” currently at No. 28 on Country Airplay after 51 weeks. But “If I Die Before You” is the likely follow-up, assuming it generates the reaction they expect.

“Everything in my gut tells me that this is a career song,” Lane says. “I’m praying and hoping that people react to it in the same way that I did, and if they do, then it feels like the next one up.”

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