Story Behind the Song: Aaron Watson, ‘Run Wild Horses’
With 14 years of marriage under his belt, country singer Aaron Watson knows a thing or two about how to write a real-life love song. In January of 2018, he released as a single from his 2017 album Vaquero the song "Run Wild Horses," which was inspired, in part, the singer says, by a desire to teach some other country artists how it's done. Read on to learn more about the story behind "Run Wild Horses," as well as what Watson's wife Kim had to say when she heard the song for the first time.
I wrote ["Run Wild Horses"] after becoming annoyed -- I won't name the couple of songs I heard on the radio, but I was annoyed with those songs. I was like, "Really? You just met some girl at a party, and you're gonna take her out to the bonfire. That's not love."
First of all, if any country boy tries to sing my daughter one of those songs about how fine she looks and how he wants to take her out to the middle of nowhere, that guy will not ever be singing again. I might go to jail for a couple of months because of it, but whatever, you know? That's my baby girl. I think every father feels that way.
And then, secondly, I wanted to write a song that put my wife on a pedestal, that says, "Hey, we've been together for forever, and, girl, you still got it. In fact, you've got it more now than you had it when we met. You're sexier than ever." I just wanted to write a sexy song that made her feel special.
It's funny: The first time I played it for her, I had just taken the kids to school, and she had just made breakfast. I'm sitting there on that barstool singing it to her, and after I'm done singing it to her, she goes, "Oh my goodness, that's kind of graphic." And I was like, "Well, you know, that's how it gets sometimes." And she said, "But you don't have to write a song to sing to the whole world about that," and I said, "No, I do."
It's been a fun song, because I wasn't chasing after a hit; I was chasing after my heart. It's really special when you get to release a song with a genuine background to it. It's just a song I wrote for my girl.