Yet

Album: Still Standing (1990)
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Songfacts®:

  • The Kentucky-based Exile is best known for their #1 Hot 100 hit "Kiss You All Over," but they also had a string of country hits in the '80s and '90s, including "Yet," which reached #7 on the Country chart. The song is about a guy who is not deterred when a girl says she doesn't love him: he knows that she'll come around and will love him yet.

    It was written by Exile bass player Sonny LeMaire along with the songwriter Randy Sharp, who told us the story behind it: "The whole Exile experience, this song being one of the primary examples of it, was very interesting. My friend Tim DuBois, who was a writer at Warner Brothers when I was writing there in the early '80s, started Arista Records in Nashville, and had always been a big fan of Exile, and he decided to sign me. He had been a fan of my production work from my songwriters demos, and had promised to bring me in if he found the right project. So Exile, minus their lead singer that had done a lot of their work prior to that, shut them up in a room with me, and I met them for the first time, and Doug said, 'We'll sign you, Randy's going to produce, and Randy, you and Sonny LeMaire - who was one of their guys - 'You go write the songs.'

    So Sonny and I went off as strangers and started writing furiously for Exile. And 'Yet' was one of the early things that we came up with, which was not like Exile at all. That didn't sound like anything Exile had ever done. But for that reason, everybody liked it and got excited about it. And that really came from Sonny and I just diddling around on guitars and talking about the cool trick, if we can pull it off, of making the whole song mean something else just by adding one word to it. If you read that song, the story changes completely when you hear the word 'yet.' And that was what we were so proud of: that we were able to do it.

    That song we went back to several times. And because the writing and the production were kind of all wrapped up together, we were also really proud of the fact that in that country market at that time, to release a song that was basically an acoustic guitar, bass, and organ was unheard of. There was nothing like that on the radio. It was very simple, and it was using a B3 organ instead of a steel or something more traditionally country, which was kind of a rule breaker. And we did it knowing this would probably just be an album cut, but it would be something artistically that would stand out on the record, and we might get some interest from a different camp with it. Mostly we were just proud of the song. For it to turn out to be a single and do well was really a shocker for Sonny and I both."
  • Randy Sharp told us about the inspiration for the song: "There wasn't necessarily anything going on in my life or Sonny's that inspired this at the time, except that we had both had the experience of knowing that there was something there, someone there that you just really want to be close to that was not going along. And it was all about that persistence: I'm just determined to get them to love me, get them to respond. They don't know it yet, but they're going to go for this.

    And it was a little tricky (laughing) because you've got to be really careful, because it was borderline stalker. We kept having to finesse that song. It was so easy to get scary with this character that's kind of like the Sting song: 'Every move you make, I'll be watching you…'

    It's got that dark sort of, 'Man, leave me alone,' kind of going on. So we were really, really careful to keep it a sweet song, even though the guy clearly was borderline."

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