Friend of a Friend

Album: Two Lanes of Freedom (2013)
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Songfacts®:

  • This Mark Irwin, Josh Kear and Andrew Dorff penned piano-based ballad ends with a memorable coda. "That thing could've went on," McGraw told Billboard magazine of the outro. "We had about three full minutes of that. We were all sitting there watching (guitarist Michael) Landau play the lead on that, we had it done for like an hour, but we kept making retakes because we just wanted to hear him play. Just mesmerizing."
  • The song plays out like a movie as the narrator longs for a former girlfriend who has moved away and married, but there is a twist at the end. "People want to project themselves into the song, or project themselves onto the screen when they're in a movie," noted McGraw to The Boot. "They find a character that they can identify with and walk through this scenario with them. That's what music does when it strikes the right chord."

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