Lady Antebellum: Selecting ‘You Look Good’ as a Single Was a Community Effort

Lady Antebellum recently released a new single, "You Look Good," the first from their upcoming album, Heart Break. The song is the country trio's first since "Long Stretch of Love" in 2015, and in the two years since then, Charles Kelley, Hillary Scott and Dave Haywood, took a hiatus, worked on their own projects and came back more determined than ever to make music that their fans will love.

"The energy in the song represents the energy we’ve been feeling for the past four months, four to six months," Haywood explains to The Boot and other reporters; adds Scott, "The sound even makes me feel like we felt making the record ... [I]t’s uptempo. It’s groovy. It just felt so cohesive for us as a band."

"You Look Good" includes a blaring horn section, which Scott has been fighting for since Lady Antebellum's eponymous debut album was released in 2008.

"Growing up as a little girl, one of my favorite songs that, my parents told me, would get me dancing in the living room was "Sir Duke" by Stevie Wonder. That horn section, it’s so iconic," Scott explains. "There’s just something so cool about horns and how they transport you to this other place. We just felt the energy of this song lended itself to them."

Continues Kelley, "It has a ‘70s funk thing to it. It needed horns."

"There used to be horns all over country: Johnny Cash, Ronnie Milsap, even Brooks & Dunn, Kenny Chesney, have some horns on some of their earlier records," Kelley adds. "It just felt like something we had never done before. Hillary has been begging for horns for a long time, and we always kind of resisted it; it kind of scared us a little bit. And now, we want to take a horn section on the road."

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When trying to decide their first single from Heart Break, Lady Antebellum played several songs for their record label, but it was quickly clear that "You Look Good" was the best choice.

"We had talked about a couple other songs," Kelley shares, specifically mentioning the project's title track. "We loved the entire record; we really and truly can say that. We usually fight for things pretty hard, and this is the one time that, I will say, I went into it with the label and said, ‘Guys, y’all know better than us. We love it all.’ And from the first 10 seconds of hearing "You Look Good," they were like, ‘Oh my gosh, this sounds so fresh and different,’ and we said, ‘Well, we love it.’"

"We played three songs, and, even at our management, we started keeping a tally of what people’s responses were," continues Scott. "It became so obvious, "You Look Good" was so far ahead of any of the other songs. And it wasn’t that they didn’t love the other songs -- it just felt fresh."

Heart Break is scheduled for a June 9 release; "You Look Good" is available for download on iTunes now. Lady A will kick off their You Look Good World Tour on May 26, with Kelsea Ballerini and Brett Young serving as their opening acts; a list of all of their upcoming shows is available on their website.

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