Thomas Rhett is sitting at the top of both the Billboard and Country Aircheck/Mediabase Airplay charts this week with his latest single, “Remember You Young.” Written by Rhett alongside Jesse Frasure and Ashley Gorley, the track marks the superstar’s 14th chart-topping single.
The emotional tune has resonated with fans far and wide, but what many don’t know is that it was originally written as an entirely different song.
“The first way we wrote it was strictly about the person that you’re with,” the superstar recently revealed. “We wrote an entire song about, you know, I’ll always remember you, even when you’re in a black cocktail dress, I remember you in your pink prom dress. It’s like you always envision who you’re with when you met that person because those images are just ingrained in your head, and you’re always young together even if you’re old, at least you hope you are.”
After the song was complete, Rhett decided it didn’t come out the way he wanted it to, so he and his co-writers soon got back together to re-write the song.
“I think all of us were kind of like, ‘I think we just missed where we should’ve gone with the song,’” he explained. “So a couple of weeks later – this never happens – usually when you write a song you’re just like, ‘Okay, well we kind of missed that one, we’ll move on.’ We all really felt like ‘Remember You Young’ was too cool of a title to just let a song kind of go by the wayside. And so we were like, ‘Let’s get back together and really just re-approach these verses.’”
That’s when the song became what it is today.
“Then we started to really just relate it to life as a whole like it’s really just about those people in your life that you love, always just seeing them in their youth,” he said. “And God, this song, like even just talking about it makes me want to cry, and this is definitely one of my favorite tracks on the record.”
“Remember You Young” is the second single from Rhett’s latest album, Center Point Road, which debuted atop the Billboard 200 upon its release in May. The album also made history when it was released, earning the biggest streaming debut for a country album ever. Center Point Road is currently nominated for Best Country Album for the 62nd Grammy Awards.
In 2020, Rhett will embark on his Center Point Road Tour with special guests Cole Swindell and HARDY.
