I Could Use a Love Song

Album: Hero (2016)
Charted: 56
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Songfacts®:

  • The third single from Hero is a piano and guitar ballad that finds a heartbroken Maren Morris feeling jaded about love and wishing that she could go back "to a time when I wouldn't roll my eyes. At a guy and a girl. Who make it work."

    "I wanted [fans] to see a different side [of me] that they haven't heard before," Morris told Billboard magazine about her decision to release 'Love Song' as her follow up to "My Church" and "80's Mercedes." "Which is a really vulnerable, but insightful look into a heartbreak. It's not a poor, pitiful me type of song, it's my personality and it's really self-reflective... It's sort of owning up to your faults and hoping that you're not playing to that 'heartbroken girl going through a breakup' cliché."
  • Maren Morris wrote the song with:

    Jimmy Robbins who won the ASCAP country song of the year for co-penning Thomas Rhett's "It Goes Like This" in 2014. Another Robbins tune "We Were Us," performed by Keith Urban and Miranda Lambert, won Musical Event of the Year at the CMA Awards the same year.

    Laura Veltz whose other songwriting credits include Eli Young Band's "Drunk Last Night" and Chris Young's "Lonely Eyes."
  • Filmed by Canadian music video and commercial director Alon Isocianu ("80's Mercedes"), the video shows a young couple's relationship slowly unravel. The clip stars actress and model Shelley Hennig - known for her roles on MTV's Teen Wolf and the soap opera Days of Our Lives - and actor Garrett Hines of NCIS and The Big Short.

    Hennig plays an aspiring dancer who dreams of moving to Los Angeles and making it big, and Hines portrays her once loving partner who's holding her back. Morris is shown in her dressing room before a performance singing the emotional track as the couple's relationship unravels on screen.
  • The song came out of a literal need for a tune to complete Maren Morris' debut album. The singer recalled to The Boot:

    "I had already gone through a breakup, and I finished the bulk of my album. And so, I was writing with my friends Laura Veltz and Jimmy Robbins here in Nashville. We were at Midtown [Sound Studio], [Robbins'] studio at the time.

    They were asking me, literally, 'What else do you need on this album?' I said, 'You know, everything's not about love. I wasn't really going through that I guess, so everything is pretty centered, and the point of view is from my own. It's not a heartbreak record totally.' And they were like, 'But you could use a love song on the record?'

    And then we all got back and were like, 'I Could Use a Love Song' is a really cool title. We wrote it really quickly, because it was one of those, you just grab it from the sky, and you hope everything makes sense, and you don't miss anything. But it really came out of a conversation and an actual question."
  • Maren Morris's romantic life was in a bad place when she penned this song. "I wrote it, just right after I went through this breakup that really put the whole Hero album into motion, with my friends Laura Veltz and Jimmy Robbins," she recalled to ABC Radio. "I was initially going through [the breakup], but they had also been through those moments, like most of us probably have who have been through a relationship that didn't end well, that sort of cynical side that comes out when you're feeling burned, or maybe you're the cause of the breakup."

    "You know exactly how every relationship from now on is gonna go, because they're all the same," Morris added laughing. "And so it's about that feeling, but also fighting past it and realizing all good things eventually come to an end. And if you look back on it in negativity, it's not healthy for anyone, so there has to be this light at the end of the tunnel."
  • The video's empowering concept was Morris' idea. She explained to Billboard:

    "Essentially, that's my story: that you have these big dreams, but there's a person in your life that just doesn't comprehend the importance of them. So, when the video was conceptualized, we took that idea, made the lead character a dancer, and I feel it came out as great as we had hoped. My hope is that girls and women will see that story and it will inspire them in their own particular journey."

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