We Were Us

Album: Fuse (2013)
Charted: 26
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Songfacts®:

  • This Nicolle Galyon, Jimmy Robbins and Jon Nite penned song tells the story of two former lovers looking back on their lost romance. The song was produced by frequent Taylor Smith collaborator Nathan Chapman, and released as the second single from Urban's Fuse album. It was made available to radio on September 10, 2013.
  • The song is a duet with Miranda Lambert, whom Urban has known since the mid 2000s, when she was his opening act during his Alive in '05 tour. Urban said that choosing Lambert to collaborate on the track was a no-brainer: "She's just the real deal. I just love her. I love her artistry. Her voice is awesome. She would get up and play with us when we were touring with her, and I just felt like our voices went together really well. So, it was another person that I always had in the back of my mind and was hoping I could find a song for us one day."

    "The song called 'We Were Us' came along," he continued, "and it's actually written as a duet, but the girl sings first, so I thought 'Let's do it! Let's call Miranda up.' She liked the song, came and sang it, and various people were going 'Well you can't have her singing first!' Why not? It sounds fine! Again, it was always just about how the song works best. The song just works best that way. It's a duet. She's not a backing vocalist."
  • Urban has a thing for cars, which often finds its way into his music. This song, for instance, includes mentions of "low beam lights" and a time when "money was gas and dreams were dust." There's even a "backseat promise" and a "floorboard feeling." And if you don't believe that motor vehicles are always turning up in Urban's music, check out Fuse's lead single, "Little Bit Of Everything," where Urban sings the line "Now I don't need a garage full of cars."

    "The car thing features heavily in a lot of my songs because I just love – I love cars," he said. "And I love listening to music in cars. I love all the 'moments' – all kinds of moments – that we humans experience only in cars, you know…as couples and arguments and makeup sessions and make-out sessions and everything. I just love everything to do with cars!"
  • The video was directed by Becky Fluke (Pistol Annies, Little Big Town) and Reid Long (Lady Antebellum, Dierks Bentley). It was filmed at Edna's, a neighborhood bar in Oklahoma City.
  • The way Urban and Lambert approached the recording of the final part of the song made the engineer nervous. "At the end, I wanted us to just vamp a little bit on the outro, just ad lib things and be in the moment," recalled Urban. "I said 'Is it cool if we just both stand at the same mic and sing?' And she was like, 'Yea.' So, we put the head phones on and stood at one mic and just sang, and that's what's on the record. The engineers afterwards were complaining that they couldn't change our voice levels [laughs], but I went, 'It is what it is, whatever levels they are is what it is.'"
  • The song topped the Country chart. It marked Urban's 15th #1 and the first male/female duet to reach the peak position in more than two years. Carrie Underwood and Brad Paisley's "Remind Me" was the previous multi-gender duet to do so.
  • Jimmy Robbins told Radio.com about the writing session for this story of two former flames looking back on their lost love. The chorus was their starting point. "The front half of the chorus we were just singing, and the words phonetically sounded like something," he explained. "A lot of times when you write a song, you have a hook or a title, and you write from there. This was one of those times where we didn't have anything. We didn't know what the hook was until we got there."

    Robbins said it was Nicolle Galyon who came up with what he called the "disconnected images" that mark the verses of the song. "I remember Nicolle got really into it," he said. "She's from a small town in Kansas, and so I think we were really channeling her home town in this song."

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