Music

The new Darius Rucker single “Never Been Over,” featuring a convincing appearance by Jennifer Nettles, is easily heard as a celebration of a long-term relationship. The chorus employs a series of separation images – splitting up the household items, burning old letters or waving goodbye – that often appear in songs about a breakup, but it notes in the process that the couple has no experience with that stuff: “We’ve never been over.”

It’s also possible, knowing Rucker’s history, to focus on the song’s road images and see it as a nod to his ongoing membership in the sometimes-active/sometimes-not Hootie + the Blowfish.

Those interpretations are legit in Rucker’s mind, though it’s not how the song ended up playing for him. “When I started it, I think it was a love song,” he remembers. “But then as we kept writing it, I just realized that wasn’t a love song for me. It was more of a breakup song, and it was so therapeutic.”

People needed therapy at the time. It was May 21, 2020 – barely two months into the pandemic, days after the U.S. death toll passed 90,000. Songwriters were just getting used to composing via Zoom, and Rucker had a session that day with Brothers Osborne guitarist John Osborne and songwriter Lee Thomas Miller (“It Ain’t My Fault,” “You’re Gonna Miss This”). The process was clunky – if they sang, talked or played guitar, it muted the other participants and made it difficult to coordinate well.

Fortunately, Miller showed up with the “Never Been Over” title, and then some. “He walks into a room with a title that he knows can easily be written,” Osborne says of Miller. “He’s just really good at coming up with things like that, and he just said the title and threw out some concepts around the idea.”

“I had the trick, ‘We’ve been a lot of things, but we’ve never been over,’” Miller reflects. “It’s my favorite kind of song. It’s just the laundry list to make a point, you know, and so it was, ‘Okay, how do we do these contrasts?’: ‘We’ve been apples, we’ve been oranges,’ you know, ‘hot and cold’ and all the stuff.”

Osborne eased into a descending chord progression – not just a short one, but one that takes a long, leisurely journey.

“It starts up high, and it just walks down and keeps walking down and keeps walking, keeps going down,” Rucker says. “You rarely hear a song like this, that’s just descending the whole time. And then you get to the second verse, and it goes back and descends again.”

“I can’t remember who called it this, but it’s been dubbed the Bluebird walk-down,” Osborne says. “If you go to The Bluebird [Café Songwriters in the] Round, you’re going to hear somebody play those chords … And it feels emotional and evokes a feeling. And at the end of the day, that’s all we’re trying to do, is just evoke emotion.”

Miller’s initial structure included the song’s first two contrasts, “good and bad, hot and cold,” simple pairings that clued the listener in before they grew increasingly complex: “Desert quiet and rockstar loud,” “up and down like we’re built on springs.” By verse two, the images include “two pink lines, up all night” at the open and “18 years around the sun” at the end.

“We got pregnant, and we sent them to college in four lines,” Miller says.

Since the Zoom setup prevented them from doing a collective work tape, Osborne did a vocal/guitar recording on his own and sent it to Rucker. Barely 50 days later, Rucker and Beth Leonard announced their separation. Miller figured it was a bad omen for the song. “I thought we just lost our shot,” he says. “I felt like, ‘Wow, maybe this [will be] pushed on the back burner for personal reasons.’ I didn’t know, I didn’t ask.”

But he also didn’t realize that Rucker was viewing it as a breakup song, rather than a love ballad. “It was the first song I wrote about [the divorce],” he says. “There was no way I wasn’t gonna cut it. It was such a great song.”

When Rucker eventually recorded it, he made an acoustic version at the Blackbird Studios with producer Ross Copperman (Dierks Bentley, Gabby Barrett) and just three or four musicians. Ilya Toshinskiy turned the signature riff that Osborne had originated on acoustic guitar into a mandolin hook. “It just cuts better as a mandolin,” Copperman says. “It feels more signature, and it kind of fits his ‘Wagon Wheel’ vibe, that rootsy thing. It really fits him.”

Rucker needed no more than three takes to nail the final vocal, which sounds almost as if it were being delivered in a quiet moment in front of a fireplace.

“John Osborne sang the demo,” Rucker says. “I toured with John. John’s a real good friend. I didn’t know John could sing like that, because John’s a guitar player, you know. He sings background, and you can’t really hear because T.J. is so great and so loud. John sang the demo, and I still listen to his demo, and every time I sing, that’s all I’m trying to do, is sound like John does on the demo, because it’s so great.”

During the first round of sessions, they discussed turning “Never Been Over” into a duet – “There was initial talk of Kacey Musgraves doing it,” Copperman remembers – though it remained a solo cut on the Carolyn’s Boy album, released by Capitol Nashville on Oct. 6, 2023. Despite his reticence to pick singles, Rucker lobbied for “Never Been Over,” and the label consented, even before management suggested they reach out to Nettles. After they added bass, drums and electric guitar, she overdubbed her part on her own — though Rucker’s team gave some loose suggestions, particularly asking for her to enter with the “two pink lines” phrase.

“Adding Jennifer Nettles’ second verse kind of elevates the thing to a whole new level,” Copperman notes. “Hearing the female side of the story here – like, I always wanted this song to be a duet, man. I was so happy when we finally found out it was gonna be Jennifer.”

Capitol released it to country radio on May 6, and while it can be viewed as a love song, a breakup song or even a Hootie song, it also works as a statement about his ongoing relationship with his ex-wife. Even after they split, they’ve never been over.

“We love our kids very much, and we’re gonna be in each other’s lives the rest of our lives,” he says. “I hope we’re both being adults. I think after you get through all the stuff you have to get through, you can be friends. You have to.”

Life is lived in duality. We drift between the sun and moon, grapple with right and wrong, walk the thin line between love and hate.

Brothers Osborne is likewise built on duality. John Osborne and T.J. Osborne use two different primary instruments – guitar and voice, respectively – to channel a sound that’s primarily country and rock, and the duo’s new single, “Break Mine,” similarly runs on two tracks. The basic premise, “If you’re looking for a heart to break… break mine,” wreaks on one hand of classic codependence.

“I spent many therapy sessions talking about my codependency,” John says with a fair amount of sarcasm. “I’ll write about it.”

But, T.J. suggests, the protagonist could on the other hand be looking quite realistically at a potential relationship, willing to accept its inherent risk of success or failure. “You can take it either way,” T.J. allows.

“Break Mine” appropriately required two writing sessions. The first took place with co-writer Shane McAnally (“I Was On A Boat That Day,” “Body Like A Back Road”) at the home studio of Pete Good (“We Don’t Fight Anymore,” “I Tried A Ring On”) pre-COVID, circa 2019. McAnally, most likely, brought the “Break Mine” idea, Good introduced a foundational groove, and John landed on an almost-haunting chord progression. T.J. started singing a melancholy melody that peaked on successive lines on a different, unexpected beat.

“When he started singing that melody, I was like, ‘Oh, here we go,’” Good recalls.

With that start, they began working on the opening verse, rather than the chorus. “Which is, honestly, the kiss of death,” John says. It started fairly well. They fashioned that first verse as an invitation for a sleepover. As the singer waits for a response, he ends that stanza in limbo: “Baby, bring it on and on and on and on and on and on.”

“For me, it feels like another hook, as simple as that is,” Good says. “It kind of sets you up for the chorus, I think, in a beautiful way.”

That chorus comes in with a change in phrasing, the melody moving forward with the emphasis at the front of each line. But before finishing, and the four writers seemed to run out of gas. “We got about halfway through the song and just couldn’t get through it,” John says.

That might say less about the song than it says about the Osbornes’ compatibility with McAnally, who they typically see only once or twice a year. “A lot of times when we get together, because he’s so fucking funny, we end up just spending a lot of time catching up with each other and just shooting the shit,” T.J. says. “We probably just ran out of time because we couldn’t shut up.”

They made a work tape of their progress and called it a day, which left “Break Mine” in limbo, where it remained for perhaps two years. But it came up again when McAnally proposed a second writing session. Going through unfinished songs, he came across the work tape and sent a text to T.J., who found it sounded better than he remembered. “When I write, there’s sometimes – I call it my checkout lines, where I’ll hear a lyric, and I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’m over this,’” T.J. says. “I remember this song having one or two of those.”

One of them – the “on and on” section – was fixable by simply changing a lyric at the front of that line the second time it appeared, at the end of verse two. Meanwhile, the set-up line at the end of the chorus, “Get here in a straight line,” seemed fresh.

They met up again at Good’s studio in a new house and buttoned up the remaining issues with “Break Mine.” Good produced a demo, and the Osbornes decided it should be the first song they attacked when they wanted to test recording with producer Mike Elizondo (Twenty One Pilots, Eminem), who’d moved to Middle Tennessee from Los Angeles. Elizondo played bass and pulled together two more players the Osbornes hadn’t worked with previously, drummer Nate Smith and keyboardist Phil Towns, for a session at his Phantom Studio.

Elizondo’s bass, in particular, had such power that it felt like it could rattle the amplifier cabinet, though it never quite overpowers the rest of the performance. The bass’ weight came in part when Elizondo doubled it with a synth bass. “Quincy [Jones] would do that a lot on Michael Jackson records,” Elizondo says. “It’s something that, when it seems appropriate, I’ll try it out.”

John developed a cheery signature guitar riff for the intro, and it got doubled as well, with T.J. doing a vocal on top of it. John also took off on a guitar solo after the second chorus that worked like a scenic detour, changing the chords and creating a sense of fresh forward motion. “It’s a weird part,” he says. “It’s one of the hardest solos I play in our set, because it doesn’t physically feel the best on the guitar. There are certain things that just didn’t work out physically, but when I change the solo up, I miss it. So I’m always trying to adhere to that solo as much as I can.”

They tagged it with a one-minute instrumental finale, though Elizondo also had them cut an ending that capped it without the extended minute, knowing it would require an edit if it became a single. “That wasn’t hard to guess,” he says.

A day later, Elizondo threw on some bell-like keyboard parts – “twinkly things,” as T.J. refers to them. Those high notes form a subtle contrast with those deep bass lines, mirroring the duality of sweet surrender and darkness in the “Break Mine” lyric.

“That’s one of the things I love about Brothers Osbourne,” Elizondo says. “There are a handful of songs where there’s this mix of dark and light, whether the melody is brighter, but then the undertone of the music and the chord changes can be a little darker, or vice versa. I feel like ‘Break Mine’ really encapsulates that as far as the lyric, and even though it’s kind of got this sort of bounce, there’s this undertone of a mood that we wanted to make sure was always going to be there.”

The Osbornes originally planned to make “Break Mine” the first single from their self-titled 2023 album, but it didn’t quite fit sonically with the rest of the project. They eventually made it the title track of a four-song EP, released by EMI Nashville on March 21. The edited version of “Break Mine” was issued to country radio on April 15, finally rewarding the duo for sticking with the song through two writing sessions and a five-year journey.

“It’s still one of our favorite songs,” John says. “We’ll see what happens.”