00:00It's likening that throwing a pair of Chuck Taylors up over the power line
00:05and those two shoes being like the couple and after all these years they're still hanging in
00:09there like Chuck Taylors on a power line. It was just such a good rural street everywhere
00:13metaphor that I felt it was so relatable. And I've seen plenty of those scenes,
00:18even in Australia. People throw shoes over the power lines in Australia, you know.
00:22I was driving to the studio to write with a couple of guys. I love writing with Chase
00:33McGill, Jerry Flowers and Greg Wells. And in my head I just heard this flailing bass note and
00:38the... So I had this whole melody formed, but zero idea what the song was about. And Chase
00:52McGill had this lyric for this song called Chuck Taylors and he had no melody. I said,
00:58let me see if that works on this and the two just did that. It was crazy.
01:09It's got a beautiful, very rural setting already. Just the opening line of we were holding hands,
01:20barefoot in the grass for me sets up an innocence. There's a timelessness about it. It's not really
01:25of a time. It's not really of a place. It's just an innocence. Chase is very poetic. He's got a
01:29great way of painting a feeling in his lyrics.
01:38There's something larger than the little town that the couple is in, starting with the sky
01:49looking like an ocean. It's just infinite. Obviously this town's nowhere near the ocean.
01:53It's probably on a lake, but the sky look like an ocean and the water look like glass.
01:57And forever meant tomorrow, which is what it feels like. I mean, I remember that feeling
02:01very vividly. Like, God, if we can last till tomorrow, that's like forever.
02:05It's one of the only quick, fastest ways to explain the intensity of how I feel about
02:09something is to go, this is forever. It's forever, man. We're going to last forever.
02:14That's how intense it is. I know that feeling so well.
02:17The rhythm was so imperative for setting up the energy that could launch us into the chorus.
02:38The section also has a tension to it, because that's what's happening in the conversation.
02:44The chords go from a four chord to a minor, so the minor has tension. So there's release and
02:50possibility, and then there's tension. And then it launches into the chorus,
02:53which is what they're doing with the shoes. We're launching them up.
02:56I believe Chase said,
03:10my size 12 and your size 7, we threw them straight up to heaven. I think that's all he had.
03:15There wasn't a high. The melody I had was...
03:19So I needed an open vowel. Heaven wasn't as good as high, so it's a better vowel.
03:25That's where you get songwriter craft coming into something,
03:29where it's got to be singable, but also make sense.
03:49The metaphor of the Chuck Taylors representing the couple was just beautiful and so relatable,
03:54and I hadn't heard that before. I remember every time I used to see those hanging up on a power
03:58line, I'd be like, I was thinking about somebody walking away with bare feet, maybe regretting that.
04:25I loved writing with Chase because he does come with a realism in a way that felt very fresh to
04:31me. When he said, in between the silence, you and me talked all night, when he first said it to me,
04:35I was like, what do you mean? If you talked all night, there wouldn't be any silence. And he's
04:39like, well, nobody talks all night. If you have a conversation with someone for hours and hours
04:44and hours and hours and hours, there's always these periods of just nothing being said.
04:47And that nothing being said was the thing that this couple didn't want to deal with,
04:53which was her having to leave.
05:08My first thought was that the car was bright red, like the flowers on her dress, but it's actually
05:14part of the next line. Bright as the red on your flower dress pattern, a light went off.
05:19I've got an idea of how to express my utter devotion to you. We're going to throw these
05:25sneakers up over the power line and hope that that represents us.
05:28I love that we name checked a satin because it's such an obscure model, mate. What
05:36hell is a satin? And there's a Southern thing about it, which I really love too. When I moved
05:42to Nashville, I saw satins everywhere and now I don't see them anywhere. I don't know what
05:45happened to them. They all just disappeared. It's like sitting right there on the hood of
05:48your Chevy. I've heard that a million times and it wouldn't have registered to me. I wouldn't
05:54have seen a car. It would have just flown by as like 101 car choice. But to be sitting right
06:00there on the hood of your satin, I'm like, oh, I'm back in. I'm in the song.
06:04The very ending of Chuck Taylor's has a recurring background part that says,
06:15we're going to make it. Yes, we're going to make it now. Going to make it. Yes,
06:18we're going to make it now. Going to make it. Yes, we're going to make it now. Going to make
06:21it now. Going to make it out. It doesn't say now. The last time is just going to make it out.
06:26It sounds like now every time, but there's intent for the very last word being we're
06:32going to make it out. I really liked that deceptive little moment at the very end of the song.
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