How Country Feels

Album: How Country Feels (2012)
Charted: 42
Play Video

Songfacts®:

  • The lead single from Randy Houser's third album was penned by the Nashville hitmakers Vicky McGehee, Wendell Mobley and Neal Thrasher. It was his first full release since leaving Show-Dog Universal in 2011 and signing with Broken Bow Records' Stoney Creek division. The song was sent to radio May 7, 2012 and to iTunes the following day.

    It was Stoney Creek owner Benny Brown who brought Houser the song. "I didn't even know who wrote when I heard it," the singer admitted to The Boot. "The first time I heard it go, 'hair down, hair down,' I was like, 'Bam! I've got to have that.' I thought it was a hit. I loved it; it was hip and cool. It's very relatable, too, because everybody who listens to country music is not in the country. One thing we have to remember as songwriters is that we have to consider that country music is the country's music. That doesn't mean that everybody's rural."
  • Houser said of this song: "It really reminded me of being a kid growing up in Mississippi and the times I would spend with my buddies. We would hang out in the woods a lot, take the dirt roads. We didn't have anything in the cities to do, we had to create our own fun. That's the way it is growing up how I did, and that's what 'How Country Feels' means to me."
  • This was the first song played on Nash FM 94, which became New York City's first Country radio station in 17 years when it launched on January 21, 2013.
  • The song became Houser's first #1 single, when it topped the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart dated February 2, 2013.
  • Wes Edwards directed the video, which was filmed at Glen Leven Farm in Nashville, Tennessee, and follows the beginning of a romance that would continue in the videos for "Runnin' Outta Moonlight" and "Goodnight Kiss." But it didn't start out that way. Edwards told Songfacts: "When we shot 'How Country Feels,' the first edit of the video wasn't working. It was much more of a free-form. I concentrated not on that one couple but on several people at the party. They were so good together, and the label didn't think that the video quite worked, so my suggestion was, what if we went back and we filmed some more stuff just with these two kids, and they were nice enough to say yes. We got a little bit of extra money and we went back and we broadened the storyline to concentrate on these two kids."

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