House Party

Album: Montevallo (2014)
Charted: 26
Play Video

Songfacts®:

  • Sam Hunt penned this with songwriter Zach Crowell and Jerry Flowers, who plays bass in Keith Urban's band. Despite its title, the song is actually more about an intimate night for two. "We didn't want to write a party song. We wanted to try to write it from a different angle, and that's when the girl came into play, and the homebody thing, I guess, came in after that," said Hunt. "With a song called 'House Party,' you'd expect it to be more about a big party, not as much about a relationship, so we tried to put a little bit of a unique twist on it."
  • Jerry Flowers told Taste of Country about the writing of this song. "The first day we kinda fooled around with it, we had a little bit of a different groove," he recalled. "I had a different guitar riff, a little bit more uptempo kinda straight-ahead kinda riff, and what we do, me and his producer, Zach [Crowell], we'll start building a groove and building a track, and then he'll just start feeling ideas."

    Hunt then shaped those musical ideas with some improvised lyrics. "He's amazing. He's one of the best songwriters I've ever worked with," Flowers noted. "He'll just walk into the vocal booth and start spitting out ideas quickly, and then we start weeding through them. I think that was the first day, he hit upon that 'House Party' idea, and then the next time we got together to work on it again, we changed the groove, and I came up with that riff that's Jackson 5-ish, and that's when it just really started coming together."
  • This was Sam Hunt's third country #1 following "Leave the Night On" and "Take Your Time."
  • The song came from an idea that Hunt had put in his phone one day. He recalled: "(Jerry Flowers) was playing a groove on either the guitar or the bass – he plays bass obviously with Keith Urban, but he's also a great guitar player. He came up with this fun riff, and I was going through my phone and looking at those ideas and saw that little note that I had put in my phone notes and we just started talking about it and writing it."

    "It came out pretty easy compared to how a lot of the other songs on the album that took a lot more time to dig into and write, but it's just a fun idea and a fun concept, and I think that's why it was so easy and fun to write."
  • This song launched Hunt's career, which in an odd twist, effectively ended his house party days. "I haven't really been to many house parties since I put out the record," he told Entertainment Weekly.

Comments

Be the first to comment...

Editor's Picks

Gary Lewis

Gary LewisSongwriter Interviews

Gary Lewis and the Playboys had seven Top 10 hits despite competition from The Beatles. Gary talks about the hits, his famous father, and getting drafted.

Loudon Wainwright III

Loudon Wainwright IIISongwriter Interviews

"Dead Skunk" became a stinker for Loudon when he felt pressure to make another hit - his latest songs deal with mortality, his son Rufus, and picking up poop.

Songs Discussed in Movies

Songs Discussed in MoviesSong Writing

Bridesmaids, Reservoir Dogs, Willy Wonka - just a few of the flicks where characters discuss specific songs, sometimes as a prelude to murder.

George Harrison

George HarrisonFact or Fiction

Did Eric Clapton really steal George's wife? What's the George Harrison-Monty Python connection? Set the record straight with our Fact or Fiction quiz.

Vanessa Carlton

Vanessa CarltonSongwriter Interviews

The "A Thousand Miles" singer on what she thinks of her song being used in White Chicks and how she captured a song from a dream.

Maria Muldaur

Maria MuldaurSongwriter Interviews

The "Midnight At The Oasis" singer is an Old Time gal. She talks about her jug band beginnings and shares a Dylan story.