Morgan Wallen and Ernest are dropping an official studio version of the fan-favorite “Flower Shops” in just a couple weeks.
And, ahead of the release, Morgan recently sat down with his friend on the Just Being ERNEST podcast to talk about how they played each other in the Tennessee baseball state championship game a couple years in a row back in high school, how they became friends when Morgan first moved to Nashville, as well as how Morgan’s record-breaking double album, Dangerous, came to be.
Ernest, who’s featured on several of the tracks as a co-writer, asked Morgan about his favorite song on the record:
“I would say ‘Wasted On You’ is probably my favorite song I wrote on the record. That we wrote, too.”
It was a co-write by Morgan, Ernest, Ryan Vojtesak and Josh Thompson during quarantine while they were sitting around in Morgan’s kitchen and sippin’ a little bourbon one day:
“He sent us that track and we just kinda got the chords and wrote it on guitar. We lived it that day.
And my my buddy Lucas was just sittin’ on the couch, and I started singing ‘I don’t always…’ and he turned around and he was like ‘Oh, yeah…’ and I’m like, alright, we got a nod, we’re good.”
Ernest also told the story of how they wrote “Wonderin’ Bout The Wind” when Morgan called him while he was at the checkout line at Whole Foods:
“A lot of the way those songs came about, different than any other session. Like ‘Wonderin’ Bout The Wind’, I was in line at Whole Foods and you called me and you’re like ‘Hey, man, real quick, I got this idea.’
And we finished that song on the phone. I talked to him all the way in the car on my way to the house, and then just paced down the hallway and bedroom. We finished it. That doesn’t happen.
And ‘Dangerous’, gettin’ ready to go fishin’, waiting on Bean. Picked up a guitar, wrote a song in like 45 minutes. Decided to cut it before the bridge existed.”
And out of the 30 songs on the tracklist, according to the intricate, hard data from Big Loud (their label), 28 of the songs could technically be singles and do really well at country radio. Right now, Morgan’s current single, “Sand in My Boots”, is cracking the top 10 at radio, and he’s said before he thinks “Wasted On You” will likely be the next single they send.
All of that is really no surprise, considering Dangerous was named the top-selling album of any genre for 2021 by Billboard.
And although “Silverado For Sale” didn’t quite have the reception he expected, Morgan broke it down a little bit in terms of the numbers:
“There’s not really any song on the album, if I can get into the analytics, the label, they got all these numbers and ways of telling if this is a hit, or whatever.
There’s not really a song, there’s a couple on there that wouldn’t be a single, but other than that, there’s 28 songs that could be a single.
And that’s factual numbers that they go off of. I never would’ve thought that. I thought maybe, you know, 6, 7, 8 maybe 10… not 28.
With Morgan set to go on a massive tour starting next February after selling over 700,000 tickets and counting, I have a feeling whatever song they pick for future singles from the double album will be successful on country radio.
Their conversation about Dangerous and the writing process starts around the 1 hour mark:
Here’s the studio version of “Wasted On You,” but for my money, the acoustic version from his Dangerous Sessions series is better.
“Wasted On You”
