Story Behind the Song: Danielle Bradbery, ‘Sway’
"Sway" is Danielle Bradbery's debut single from her sophomore album, I Don't Believe We've Met, which dropped in December of 2017. The tune, which Bradbery co-wrote with Johan Fansson and Emily Weisband, came to be during her very first meeting with one of the song's co-writers; fortunately, not knowing each other didn't keep them from writing a catchy hit.
Below, Bradbery recalls to The Boot the day she and her fellow tunesmiths wrote "Sway."
"Sway" was one of those songs where the write didn’t have to take hours; it came to us naturally ...
I wrote it in Nashville with two writers, Emily Weisband and Johan Fansson, and Johan’s actually based in Sweden. He was in town for a couple of weeks writing with a bunch of artist-writers. It was my first time meeting him, not my first time meeting Emily; she’s one of my really good friends. It was just a day of getting to know each other: have fun, just talk about life and, just, normal stuff before we actually dig deep into a song.
They asked me, "You’re in the middle of your sophomore record -- What are you looking for? Are you missing anything? Have you written too much of something that we need to stay away from? What is it?" And I said, "You know, the more I think about it, I want -- or I need -- a song that’s laid back and fun and can be a 'crowd participation' song. I’ve never had one of those."
And they’re like, “Okay. That’s awesome. I like that idea.” And Johan, being so amazing at tracks and making the music, he started out with this really cool piano sound and then just added on from there, and me and Emily were going back and forth with the lyrics. I told her, "I don’t want to think too much about the lyrics either, because we’ll get lost, and it will take too long, and it won’t come natural." And so we did just that. We had fun, just threw out lyrics to each other and narrowed that down.
It didn’t even take longer than an hour, I don’t think, and “Sway” came along, and it ended up being the first single off the new record, which is exactly what I wanted, because it’s a song that tells people to take a break from reality for a second, set the phone down, stop looking at the news, or whatever; take your shoes off and have fun. So I’m glad the song came into this world.
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