Songfacts®:

• The Eli Young Band followed up their first gold-selling digital single, "Crazy Girl" with this song about living your dream. "We've had this band for eleven years now and all four of us have dreamed about making music for a living since we were kids," vocalist Mike Eli told The Boot. "We still say it every day: 'live your dream' ... This is that song for us. It tells that story for the fans who are just discovering us, and for the ones who have been with us for a long time."
• Songwriting credits here go to Nashville singer-songwriter Will Hoge and Texas songsmith Eric Paslay; Hoge has opened for such acts as Needtobreathe, Sugarland, Shinedown and Michelle Branch and featured on David Nail's The Sound of a Million Dreams track "Catherine." Paslay's other credits include a couple of cuts with a nocturnal theme. He had a hand in penning both Jake Owen's hit single "Barefoot Blue Jean Night" and Lady Antebellum's Own the Night track "Friday Night."
• The song was the Eli Young Band's second consecutive Country #1, taking 26 weeks to reach the peak position. "It means the world to us to have back to back #1s," said bass guitarist Jon Jones. "This one is especially meaningful to us because the song resonated with us like nothing before. The song is our story and that it has been embraced by country fans and country radio is proof that dreams really do come true."
• Hoge and Paslay wrote the song in April 2009, and Hoge originally recorded it on his seventh studio album, The Wreckage. "When we talked about making the next record, that song just popped up," Mike Eli told Radio.com. "We knew right away that we wanted to put it on [our] record. Once it crossed our mind, we couldn't get our brain off of it."
• Eric Paslay said of this song: "I think the majority of the people that tell me they love it are the musicians or the entertainers, because it's so much about what we do. It's like, 'Keep on dreaming, even if it breaks your heart.' If you let it, it could break your heart every day from the yeses and the nos and the 'you're not good enough, and now you are and you should've done,' whatever it is. I think being in the entertainment industry, you make it more vulnerable. You just make sure you put your heart and soul into it, but make sure you realize it's just music too. It IS music, but it's just music."
• Eric Paslay offered his own rendition of the song for his 2022 Even If It Breaks Your Barefoot Friday Night album. The record finds him revisiting several songs he's penned for other artists, including "Barefoot Blue Jean Night" and "Rewind." Paslay also re-recorded some of his own hits, such as, yep, "Friday Night."
• The inspiration for "Even If It Breaks Your Heart" came from a conversation between Eric Paslay and songwriter Marla Cannon-Goodman. She shared a personal story about telling her father - legendary songwriter and producer Buddy Cannon - that she was leaving her nursing job to pursue songwriting full-time.
  
  "She said her dad looked at her and said, 'You can do this, but this business will break your heart every day,'" Paslay recalled to The Tennessean. At the time, Paslay was just 23 and new to the music industry. That line stuck with him - especially coming from someone as seasoned as Cannon, speaking to his own daughter.
  
  "It made me think, 'What a crazy business,'" Paslay said. "I don't think we had a title when we walked into the room to write, but maybe we were just talking about that moment - and it showed up."
• Will Hoge, who co-wrote the song with Paslay, remembers the writing session unfolding quickly. "It wasn't a long process," he said. "So much of it was just telling the story of how we fell in love with music - like standing outside the Exit/In listening to bands when I was too young to get in."
  
  The verses came easily, but at one point Hoge turned to Paslay and said, "We need a chorus." When they landed on the line "even if it breaks your heart" - despite its length and seemingly downbeat tone - it immediately felt right.
  
  "I bet we were done in an hour," Hoge said. "We were young and green enough not to overthink it."