Story Behind the Song: Florida Georgia Line, ‘Simple’
Country superstar duo Florida Georgia Line's folksy, feel-good No. 1 hit "Simple" is all about appreciating all the little things that make up a great relationship. When they came up with the song -- with co-writers Mark Holman and Michael Hardy -- the writing process was all about keeping things as easy and simple as possible, both musically and in terms of subject matter.
Read on as co-writer Hardy -- also an artist in his own right, who released his debut EP, This Ole Boy, in October of 2018 -- recalls the day that the four songwriters wrote "Simple," and explains why it immediately stood out to them as a special track.
I remember the [exact] day, because "Simple" came out a year to the day from when we wrote it. So, we wrote it on June 1, [2017], in Austin, on the first day of the Smooth Tour. It was a rehearsal day; they weren't even playing a show that night, they'd just been doing rehearsals and stuff. It was the first song they got written.
I remember Mark [Holman] had a little bit of the track, the beat, and we just knew we had something cool. Tyler [Hubbard] had the idea of "simple," and we just started rolling with it.
With one-word titles like "Simple," it's fun to just dial back and think, "Okay, how simple can we make this lyric?" That's [how we got] the "One, two, three ... I met you and you met me" kind of stuff. It's just simple. It's fun to dig into those sorts of things when you have a title like that.
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