Kelsey Hart Looks to Cash In on New Radio Single ‘Love to Be That Guy’: ‘That Was a Standout’
Categoria: Musica
Billboard's Makin' Tracks column looks at the writing and recording process behind Kelsey Hart's "Love to Be That Guy."
Por Billboard | 02/09/2026
Everybody’s selling. The car dealer, the grocer, the cable company, the radio station and the record company’s radio promotion team are all hawking a product — be it a physical item or an inanimate construct such as air time or access. Curb recording artist Kelsey Hart discovered two years ago that songwriters make sales, too. Taylor Phillips (“Been by Now,” “Woman”) called him about “Love to Be That Guy,” a song he and three co-writers had just finished. He wanted Hart to be the guy to sing it, but it was a hit song and they weren’t going to wait. Hart needed to come out to the home of Ashley Gorley (“I Had Some Help,” “World on Fire”) before the night was over and record his voice on the demo. Otherwise, they would pitch it to someone else. Hart was obviously sold. “I listened to it a couple times,” he remembers, “and then went out there and re-sang it.” It was an unplanned trip — roughly 40 miles each way, plus the time it would take to record the part. Hart showed some strong commitment to a song he’d just heard. But Phillips demonstrated his own belief in the song by applying conditions to the transaction. “It was a classic sales pitch,” says co-writer Brad Clawson (“Up Down,” “Wannabe”). “Put a deadline on it.” “Love to Be That Guy” emerged during a 2024 Tape Room Music writing retreat hosted by Gorley, who owns the company. The writers broke into small groups, worked on a song, then when that one was completed, reassembled in different groups and started over again. During one of those attempts, Phillips worked with Clawson and Casey Brown (“I Am Not Okay,” “Blue Tacoma”), who came up with a guitar groove that felt upbeat and inspiring. As Brown built the track, one of them found the “Love to Be That Guy” title in a list on their phone, and the two pieces seemed to fit. Around that point, Gorley stuck his head in the room, just to see if they had anything going. Gorley liked what he heard and stayed. The title had anthemic possibilities, so they used it to start a chorus, the male protagonist giving his best sales pitch as a permanent partner. As it wound to an obvious conclusion, where they almost repeated the full title again, a new section bubbled up with different, quicker phrasing before the chorus finally reached the conclusion it had teased before. “Ashley’s made a career out of doing that for a long time,” Phillips notes. That chorus’ pledge was a pitch for a potential new relationship, though it didn’t have a setting. People can meet in all sorts of places — picnics, church, dances — and the chorus left the options open. “Everything’s [placed] in a bar, so sometimes it’s fun to just get out of the neon and write a song that could happen at a grocery store, or at a party, or in line at the gas station,” Clawson says. “A lot of love stories do start like that, just randomly out in your day-to-day life, not necessarily in a bar.” But as they dug into the first verse, they set it… in a bar. “Yeah, we did,” Clawson allows. “Sometimes i