Maddie & Tae‘s new album, Start Here, is out this week. If you’ve heard it, you’ll notice the high-octane production on the lead single, “Girl in a Country Song,” isn’t carried out through the rest of the album. In fact, most of the tracks sound more like the acoustic, harmony-driven second single, “Fly.” Maddie & Tae only adopted that heavier sound on “Girl in a Country Song” as a vehicle for the lyrics, which make fun of the way women are portrayed in a lot of male country singers’ recent hits.
“Production-wise, we had to keep up with the boys,” Maddie Marlow tells ABC Radio. “We were like, ‘If we’re gonna start throwing balls, it has to be baseball. We’re not playing the softball. We’re right in it with them. We’ve got to keep up with them.’ So, the production matched what was kind of current.”
Maddie & Tae hoped listeners would be drawn in by the modern country sounds and then listen to the lyrics of “Girl in a Country Song.” That track ended up going to #1 at country radio, but the duo stuck to their guns with the rest of Start Here. You hear evidence of that on “Fly.”
Says Maddie, “With ‘Fly,’ we really got to show, musically, what we’re about. We are all about the acoustic feel. The steel, the fiddle, all those instruments that really, really help you carry that message out and evoke those emotions that the song has.”
While “Girl in a Country Song” isn’t exactly the sound Maddie & Tae wanted to chase for their album, Start Here, Maddie is happy they have that song in their catalog.
“I’m so happy that we did do “Girl in a Country Song,” because there’s not one sound,” Maddie explains. “We kind of made a spectrum for ourselves that we could go whichever way, and it all be cohesive and it would all make sense.”
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