House Party

Album: Montevallo (2014)
Charted: 26
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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.

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