genre country

LANCO’s 2017 No. 1 single, “Greatest Love Story,” ends with the protagonist on one knee, pleading, “Baby, say yes to me.”
The band saw it as an indication of an obvious future for the couple in question, but the group’s fans didn’t always reach the same conclusion.

“It blows my mind how many people are like, ‘Did she say yes? What happened?’ ” lead singer and songwriter Brandon Lancaster says today. “I didn’t know that needed to be answered. She did say yes. And if you’re interested, if the last thing you ever heard was the story of this guy trying to navigate love, he’s back. She did say yes, and this is the next journey that they’re on.”

“This” is “We Grew Up Together,” a father’s celebration of the child he produced and of the changes that parenting inspired in him. Those changes range from cutting back on alcohol — “7:00 a.m. with a little whiskey hangover and two babies crying is rough,” multi-instrumentalist Jared Hampton says — to improving a spiritual life.

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“You definitely realize a new depth of need and a new depth of faith in God to help get you through those really tough times,” bassist Chandler Baldwin says. “It just unlocks a whole new level of our relationship with God.”

Appropriately, “We Grew Up Together” is the result of a songwriting collaboration between four of the five LANCO members and Cory Asbury, a Christian artist whose music has encompassed worship songs and country. The band had worked diligently on its second album — We’re Gonna Make It, released Jan. 17 by Riser House — but wanted to see what else might be possible for the project.

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“We were kind of done with the record, and I think we had a week before we were going to the studio to finish recording,” drummer Tripp Howell recalls. “We called him, like, ‘Hey, man, we got the songs for this record, but you want to try to get one more? Maybe there’s something magical out there.’ ”

Asbury, it turned out, unwittingly concocted the title for the song they’d hoped to find. Working at Hampton’s studio, they spent hours chasing another idea that never quite jelled. Lancaster and Asbury got involved in a conversation about their kids, and when Asbury mentioned that the oldest of his four children was around the legal driving age, Lancaster expressed surprise that Asbury had started having kids at an earlier age than the LANCO guys.

“We grew up together,” Asbury responded.

“All right,” Lancaster said. “That’s the song we’re writing.”

From there, the work went quickly as they attacked different parts of the song. “At any given time, people would be outside working on the chorus and the other people inside would be working on the verse,” Howell recalls. “I felt like this entire song was kind of piecing it together separately. I can remember Brandon walking out and coming back with half the chorus and being like, ‘What do y’all think about this?’ And it was like, ‘Oh, yeah. Let’s go.’ ”

The first two lines of that chorus — “You learned to walk/ I learned to walk in my faith” — set up the song’s central device, addressing the parallel ways in which father and child grew together. The core message — “God made you, you made me better” — appeared midway through that chorus, propelling the story toward the “grew up” hook.

“It’s this revelation that as someone is being born, there’s a new version of yourself that’s also being born,” Lancaster says. “There’s this process that’s happening with this new person coming in the world. You’re kind of becoming a new person as well.” They inserted a second parallel, based around “You learned to talk,” in the chorus, and employed a third — “You’ll learn to drive, I’ll drive you crazy” — for the bridge.

LANCO was set to fly out of Nashville that night, and the group was mentally exhausted after pushing through two songs, so there was some talk of waiting a day or two to develop a demo. But a couple of the guys feared they might forget it, so Hampton played acoustic guitar while Baldwin put down a vocal. The band turned in that recording to the Riser House A&R team, which forwarded it to producer Jared Conrad (Ian Munsick, Randall King) the night before the first of two days of recording sessions.

Conrad thought it was the best new song they had available, and he gave the group — including guitarist Tim Aven — his opinion during the first session on Aug. 30. As it happened, Asbury posted a piano/vocal video performance that same day and the public responded positively, reinforcing Conrad’s position. Conrad called steel guitarist Justin Schipper in to augment the band the next day at The Smoakstack, a studio loaded with guitars — and ceramic figures — in Nashville’s Berry Hill neighborhood.

“The [saying] ‘Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil’ — everywhere you look, there’s some kind of trinket or statue that’s doing that,” Baldwin says. “Whether it’s monkeys doing it, or frogs, [owner Paul Moak] obviously collects them, because they’re everywhere. Like, the second day, I realized, ‘Oh, there’s a lot of these.’ ”

Since they hadn’t had enough time to create an arrangement, they built it on the studio floor. Baldwin played acoustic guitar, Lancaster developed a melody for the opening instrumental riff, and Howell played a light train beat with brushes to propel the track forward. They loaded up the front end of the chorus with a bundle of instruments — most playing solid, long notes — to make the “We Grew Up Together” message bigger than the verses’ narrative.

“There’s a crazy amount of layers in the chorus,” Conrad says. “There’s maybe three different acoustic guitars, a mandolin, a banjo, two or three electrics and then three keyboards. But some of them are kind of keeping the rhythm. The banjo and mandolin are kind of moving stuff along.”

Roughly a week later, Lancaster cut his final vocal part at Conrad’s home studio, The Dining Room, though he struggled with it initially. They decided to move on to a different song, then came back at the end of the session to work again on “We Grew Up Together,” with Lancaster focused more on communicating the song’s emotion.

“He did two, maybe three passes,” Conrad remembers. “I don’t know what he tapped into, but it was just like this immediate energy shift of, ‘Oh, he’s just telling the story now. He’s not trying to sing it to us.’ ”

Riser House released “We Grew Up Together,” featuring Asbury on harmonies, to country radio on Jan. 27 through PlayMPE. It captures LANCO in a more adult phase than when “Greatest Love Story” won over listeners, but likely reflects changes in the audience just as much as in the band.

“It’s about where we’re at in life,” Hampton says. “Maybe that’s also where some of our fans are. Maybe they’ve kind of grown up with us and they’re also experiencing the same things that we’re experiencing. It’s those moments in between the chaos that these songs poke out and make an impact in people’s lives.”