Songfacts®:

• If country music has an unwritten rule, it's that men don't cry. They might pine, they might ache, they might stare mournfully at an old truck while nursing a beer, but actual, full-blown tears? Unheard of. Then along comes Lee Brice with "Cry," a song that throws a wrench into that age-old stereotype and dares to suggest that - brace yourself - men have feelings too.
• Written by Dallas Davidson ("I Don't Want This Night To End," "Boys 'Round Here"), Ben Hayslip ("Honey Bee," "Small Town Boy") and frequent Carrie Underwood collaborator David Garcia, "Cry" isn't the sorrowful ballad you might expect from the title. Brice, a man who looks like he could rebuild an engine with one hand while holding a baby in the other, was instantly drawn to it.
  
  "There was just really something about it," he told Country Now. "It says 'cry' - so you think you're about to hear some devastating, slow thing - but it's not. It's so Dallas. It's so us guys - tough old rednecks with hearts."
• Brice had asked Davidson, who has penned hits for the likes of Luke Bryan and Blake Shelton, to help him sort through the 25 or 30 tracks he'd recorded for a new record. Somewhere in the mix, Davidson mentioned a new song he'd written, one that he'd been considering cutting with Teddy Swims.
  
  "So he played me the song, and it was him singing the demo," Brice recalled to Taste Of Country Nights. "I was like, 'You sure you don't want me to record that?'"
  
  Brice suggested doing it as a duet with Swims, but conflicting schedules nixed that idea. So, left to his own devices, he took the song and made it his own, adding a modern spin while keeping the demo's distinctive '50s doo-wop groove intact.
• Jerrod Niemann and Ben Glover produced the track. Niemann is no stranger to such sounds - his 2010 cover of the soul tune "Lover Lover" oozed retro cool.
• Brice sees "Cry" as part of his ongoing mission to help people - especially men - express emotions they might not otherwise have the words for. It's a theme that runs through his catalog, from "Hard to Love" to "I Don't Dance," the latter has become something of a wedding anthem. "The girls will be like, 'Oh my God, it's my wedding song,'" Brice said, before adding, with some amusement, "And the guys are like, 'Yeah, man, it's my wedding song, too.'"
• The "Cry" music video, directed by Chase Lauer, follows Brice stepping in to help a heartbroken man mend a fractured relationship, something Brice found unexpected but compelling. Normally, he likes to be involved in conceptualizing his videos, but this time Lauer came to him with a fully formed idea. "I would've never dreamed of something like that," Brice admitted. "I just wouldn't. That's not where my brain goes."
• "Cry" doesn't play by the usual country rulebook. Dallas Davidson, Ben Hayslip and David Garcia set out to write something that simply felt good - no marketplace calculations, no radio-friendly formulas. Hayslip made that clear right from the start of their 2019 writing session in Garcia's office: "Let's forget the rules and just write something cool."
  
  Davidson, a lifelong Otis Redding fan, and Hayslip, who calls "When A Man Loves A Woman" his all-time favorite song, naturally gravitated toward a sound steeped in soul and doo-wop. Garcia laid down a track with a chord progression that felt straight out of the '50s and '60s, and Davidson took to the mic, improvising his way through what would become the first verse. Out tumbled the line, "Who says a man don't cry?" - a keeper from the get-go.
  
  "I sang my heart out, mumbled through some stuff, and next thing I know, they're throwing ideas at me - 'Hey, try this,'" Davidson recalled to Billboard. "We'd jot down a line, I'd go back in there and sing it. It was total freestyle, man. Just pure fun."
• "Cry" builds on its central theme with each verse: "Who says a man don't cry?" leads to "Who says a man don't hurt?" and then to "Who says a man don't beg?" - the last one a nod to The Temptations' "Ain't Too Proud To Beg." Davidson, deep in his Motown mindset, felt like he had the ghosts of Sam Cooke, Sam & Dave, and Otis Redding all whispering in his ear, guiding his delivery.
• Garcia amped up the energy when they hit the chorus, flipping "Cry" from a sorrowful ballad into something unexpected - a Motown-infused, almost celebratory track where the groove disguises the heartbreak. "At first, we thought we were writing a sad song," Hayslip said. "But the more the track kept going, we were like, 'Wait a second - this feels like an uptempo, feel-good song.'"