Break Up with Him

Album: Old Dominion (2014)
Charted: 44
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Songfacts®:

  • Old Dominion is a five-member country music band comprising lead singer Matthew Ramsey, guitarist and keyboardist Trevor Rosen, guitarist Brad Tursi, drummer Whit Sellers and bassist Geoff Sprung. The group was assembled in Nashville, but four-fifth of the members were born in Virginia, (Rosen is from Woodhaven, Michigan).

    Matthew Ramsey and Trevor Rosen have already a number of hit songs on their resumes. Separately or jointly, they've penned successful tunes for the likes of Chris Young ("Neon"), Craig Morgan ("Wake Up Lovin' You") and Band Perry ("Chainsaw").
  • This is a track from their debut self-titled EP. The song began when Old Dominion were on the road. "It was, like, two in the morning, and we were headed to Myrtle Beach to do a show, and we were sitting in the back of the van just working on it," Ramsey recalled to Country Weekly. "The one thing that makes that song special to us is that's the first song that all five [band members] have written together."
  • The song's music video pays tribute to the movie Back to the Future, with Matthew Ramsey playing a part inspired by the film's Marty McFly, and each of the One Dominion band members taking on various other roles.

    Much like the inspiration for the song, the idea for the clip began when Old Dominion were on the road. "It's this crazy reconstruction of all our favorite scenes," Ramsey told Taste of Country. "We're constantly on the bus talking about the movie. We're all huge fans, so we wanted to do something different and not just kind of interpret the song."

    "This is a way that we could do it because it's got a girl and it's got a bully," Ramsey added. "The girl is with the bully and the main character wants to get his girl. It works with the song and it allows us to relive our childhood with a movie we grew up loving."
  • The song was later included on Old Dominion's Meat and Candy album. For the record's cover, the band found Michael Elins, the photographer behind the artwork for Katy Perry's One of the Boys CD. He created an image of a woman in a Fifties soda-jerk outfit surrounded by a table covered by meat products and candy.

    "We got lucky that [Elins] was interested," Ramsey told Rolling Stone. "He said, 'You're a country band, why do you want to do this?' But there's a lot of places, with social media, where people can find out what you look like. You don't really have to be on the cover."
  • "It's a song about getting what you want, going after what you want when you see it," the band explained in a track-by-track commentary. "We think that's important even, especially, when it's a girl."
  • In an Entertainment Weekly interview, Rosen explained how the song came together: "It started at soundcheck. Whit started playing the beat, I started playing, and we dropped into a groove. When that happens, a lot of times I'll grab my phone and start recording it - so I recorded the groove and we put it aside. We were driving that night - and this was back when we had a van, not a tour bus - and everyone was pretty much asleep but Matt popped up and was like, 'Man, I was thinking about that groove, I had this idea…' We were trying to be quiet, not to wake everyone up so he started whispering about what if it was a one-sided phone conversation – so one of the first things he said was, 'Hey girl, what's up?' just trying to be quiet, but that started the whole thing. So we worked on it quite a bit there and then we were rehearsing in Texas a couple years ago and we brought it back to the band and we all hammered it out together."

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