Music

The first listen to the new Lee Brice single, “Cry,” can feel confusing.
The heart-broken lyric is easy to grasp, and the hook-filled chorus is practically a celebration. But when Brice shifts into an ascendant “Baby, baby, baby” melody about 40 seconds in, it seems momentarily as if “Cry” has broken into the chorus. Instead, the production simmers back down for an additional 60 seconds before the chorus officially begins.

That “baby, baby, baby” thing falls where songwriters typically place a pre-chorus, a short segment that eases the listener from the verse into the chorus. But, since the “baby, baby, baby” moment grows in volume, then slides backward, it operates like a reverse pre-chorus, playing a bit of a head fake with the listener.

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“That kind of threw me when I first heard it,” Brice concedes. “I was like, ‘Oh, is this the chorus?’ I mean, I didn’t know, you know – is it part of the verse? It was unique. But it didn’t throw me off as far as whether I like the song or not.”

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As “Cry” continues its three-and-a-half-minute run, that “baby, baby, baby” melody appears repeatedly in the background – sometimes quietly, sometimes louder – turning that quirky, counter-intuitive piece from a stumbling block into a unifying element.

“The first time I heard it, I was like, ‘Is that the chorus?’ – the ‘Baby, baby, baby,’” producer Ben Glover (Chris Tomlin, Anne Wilson) says. “And then I was like, ‘No,’ but it was cool. And then I heard the chorus hit, and I was like, ‘Well, I love that chorus.’”

“Cry” clearly works differently than the typical country song, and much of its peculiarity was embedded by the songwriters – Dallas Davidson (“Boys ‘Round Here,” “What Makes You Country”), Ben Hayslip (“Honey Bee,” “Small Town Boy”) and David Garcia (“Meant to Be,” “Southbound”) – when they gathered in Garcia’s office in 2019. Hayslip announced at the start of the session that he wanted to throw out the rules and write something that inspired them, rather than trying to craft something for the marketplace.

Davidson hails Otis Redding as his favorite singer, and Hayslip counts “When a Man Loves a Woman” as his favorite song, and it wasn’t long before the three writers started chasing a song with pieces of soul and doo-wop laced over their country tendencies. Garcia built a musical track with a chord pattern rooted in the 1950s and ‘60s. Davidson had begun experimenting with improvisational melodies, and he positioned himself at a microphone and belted out what became the basic structure of the first verse, beginning with a keeper line, “Who says a man don’t cry?”

“I sang my heart out, and I mumbled and stumbled, and, you know, this [or that] flew out, and they’re going, ‘Hey, see try this,’” Davidson recalls. “Then we’d sit back down and we’d type up a line. I’d go back in there and I’d sing it, and it was fun, man, but that was a total freestyle.”

And part of that freestyle included the “baby, baby, baby” reverse pre-chorus. They kept it.“On normal days, if we’re trying to write a radio hit, in our minds, we don’t do that part right there,” Hayslip notes. “But on this particular day, the mindset we were in was ‘Let’s just write something cool and different and write it for us.’”

The verses played up the drama of a tormented heart, the opening “Who says a man don’t cry?” providing the theme for subsequent variations: Verse two asks, “Who says a man don’t hurt?” and verse three follows with “Who says a man don’t beg?” That latter line was a nod to The Temptations’ “Ain’t Too Proud To Beg.”

“I had a lot of Motown going on in my head,” Davidson says. “All my favorites were talking to me – from Sam & Dave, Sam Cooke to Otis. There were a lot of voices in my head that day, going, ‘Sing it like this, boy. Sing it like this.’”

Garcia intensified his playing when they arrived at the chorus, and that turned “Cry” from a ballad into more of a Motown-like party with an energetic sound masking the self-pitying story.

“When he was playing on the chorus, this whole song became what it was,” Hayslip says. “When we first started writing this song with the verses, I don’t think we envisioned this song becoming what it became. We were writing a sad song, and the more the track kept going, we’re like, ‘Hey, this feels like an uptempo, feel-good song.’”

Meanwhile, Brice – on a day that he was working with Jerrod Niemann – invited Davidson over to his studio to hear his next album. Davidson was impressed by the project, but also thought it was missing one element, which could be filled by “Cry.” He played Brice the demo, and Brice immediately asked for rights to record it and started building his own version, playing guitars and keyboards, plus offbeat percussion – he employed a washboard, and played kick drum and snare with his thumb, instead of a drumstick. Niemann chipped in on percussion, and – according to the credits – so did the Holy Spirit, who didn’t actually sign the Musician Union’s session card.

“We had the real Holy Spirit with us,” Brice says with a laugh, “and he didn’t want no money.”

Brice laid down a lead vocal within a few days, though he struggled a bit and decided to give it all he had on one final take so that he would have a guide for the rest of the recording process. “I was sick, and I just threw it down,” he says. “I had to sing through it one time because I knew I needed at least a scratch vocal on there, and that ended up being the vocal on the song, for the most part. I think I went in and I hit a couple spots, but it was so real. I had to stretch so hard because I was so sick.”

Brice turned it over to Glover, who called on other musicians to work on “Cry,” and the team would frequently keep parts of a performance, then enlist another player to do more. As a result, the final features two basses, four electric guitars and four keyboards, plus programming from four different contributors.

They used some of Davidson’s demo vocal for harmonies, and took pieces of his quirky “baby, baby, baby” pre-chorus and threw them around the track, each sounding a little different from the others. “If it’s gonna be a thing,” Brice reasons, “let’s make it a thing.”

Glover added plenty of supporting vocals, too, including a section with Beach Boys overtones, and some electronically altered voices. Glover similarly applied filtering to a Hammond B-3 around the three-minute mark. “It sounds like R2-D2,” Glover says.

Niemann played a steel guitar solo, and Glover gave that its own sonic treatment. “We wanted it to sound a little bit like John Lee Hooker or that really nasty early Stratocaster,” Glover adds. “It sounds like it’s played through a tiny little amp – that kind of charm.”

In the end, “Cry” folds in country, old-school and doo-wop, but with enough modern elements that those retro influences sound current – think Amy Winehouse or Meghan Trainor. Curb released it as a single Jan. 31 after Brice identified that sound as a potential next wave.

“I started even hearing demos coming in where more people are doing this kind of vibe,” he says. “I don’t want to be following it. I want this to come out first.”