“It was a perfect day for the end of May, they say a record high…”
If you’re as big of a fan of Eric Church as I am, then there’s probably one song in particular you always have stuck in your head on May 31st, which of course is “Cold One.”
Chief included it as the third single from his 2014 fan-favorite album The Outsiders, and though it failed to perform very well at country radio, has since been Certified Platinum by the RIAA (meaning it has moved over one million units since it was released a decade ago).
Written by Church, along with Jeff Hyde, and Lynn Hutton, it’s certainly a lighthearted, funny, tongue-in-cheek moment on the album that I always find myself going back to not only on this date, but all summer long, really.
The easy humor makes it a crowd pleaser, and in a press release at the time the song came out 10 years ago now, Eric says that making it fun and light was the goal.
While The Outsiders is still one of my favorites in the Eric Church catalog, it’s definitely heavier in terms of the production and sentiment on a lot of songs like “A Man Who Was Gonna Die Young,” which comes right before “Cold One” on the tracklist.
So this was exactly what the doctor ordered, so to speak:
“It’s light-hearted, and I feel like when you hear ‘The Outsiders’ and ‘A Man Who Was Gonna Die Young,’ it can come across as, ‘This guy’s taking himself really seriously.’
And I think you need ‘Cold One’ to kind of have a chuckle and go, ‘Oh, it’s okay. This is music. We’re having a good time. Let’s laugh.’ It’s not so focused on the art part that you lose having a good time, and that’s what that song to me sets up is it’s fun.”
And the music video is pretty great too… featuring Eric as a beer delivery guy and some of his band members, you see a (kind of) heartbroken Chief who is clearly more sad about only having 11 beers now that this girl left him…
But honestly, I’ve always admired her exit strategy and would love to pull off something similar one day. If you’ve never seen the music video before, it’s high time to change that on this end of May day:
