Like I Loved You

Album: Brett Young (2017)
Charted: 46
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Songfacts®:

  • Co-written by the singer and Jesse Lee (Kelsea Ballerini's "Peter Pan"), this song finds Brett Young getting dumped.

    Trying to tell me we can still be friends
    Hanging on the weekend
    You're gonna be okay if I start seeing somebody new
    You hope that I do


    At least the girl who's breaking up with Young is trying to let him down easy.
  • The music video follows the song's storyline as we see Young going through a break-up, then dealing with it. The clip was shot in the singer's home state of California, on the first weekend of Lady Antellbellum's You Look Good World Tour, back in late May 2017:

    "I stayed over… and we shot it in the Hollywood Hills," Young recalled to ABC Radio. "It was kind of an older, $23 million home that they rented out… If you look at it, you can't believe what this place is worth. There's a family living in one part of the house, but they're renting out the front, and it was just the very top of Sunset Plaza. So we got up there at sunset. It was a very grey, gloomy, like stereotypical May/June L.A. morning."

    "It's just focused in two spaces," he added regarding the video's locations. "It's in that one home up in the hills, and with views of the city, and very dark and grey. And then in a very small… it almost feels like one of those bars that would be dark, smoky, old, like kinda crooner bar called the Roger Room in Los Angeles."
  • The video was directed by Phillip Lopez (Cold War Kids' "Love Is Mystical"), the same guy who shot Young's very first music video, more than a decade previously.

    "I always wanted to throw his name back in the hat, and we did this time, and his treatment was just absolutely our favorite, and he's so good with visuals," Young said. "I'm excited about it. I think it turned out really cool."
  • Brett Young's songwriting partnership with Jesse Lee that produced this song didn't actually start well. The pair found themselves stuck in a fruitless writing session for two-and-a-half hours before taking a meal break in an attempt to break out of the rut. Young recalled to The Boot:

    "We did the ceremonial, 'Let's go to lunch to try and get out of the room.' We're sitting at lunch, and she started telling one of her - we all have our horror stories in relationships. Within the conversation, she said something like, 'And then, at the end of it, he asked me if we could still be friends.' She got so fired up; she's like, 'Who thinks that that's ever a good idea?' She started flipping out about it.

    I'm normally the passionate, crazy one in a conversation, so when I heard the kind of passion she had for that - I had been so excited to get out of the write and get to lunch and be done with it, because it was a rough write before that, but when I saw that, I was like, 'You know, we've got to back. We've gotta write that song.'

    It's similar to 'In Case You Didn't Know.' I think that's with most songs: Once you identify exactly what it is you want to say, it falls out fast. It's figuring out what you want to say that takes a while. Once I heard her story and I was able to go back in my history and find a good experience of mine that I felt like attached to hers, we went back and we wrote it really quick."

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