Three Strangers Have Three Hours to Write a Hit: The Making of ‘Drive’
When you've got a very short amount of time to write a great song, you pick an idea and run with it, right? Krysta Nick, Amber DeLaCruz and Hailey Steele tried that, and then with less than 60 minutes remaining in their YouTube popup session, they decided to go in a totally different direction.
The result is an acoustic love song called “Drive.” The trio sing about using love to get away from the burden of small-town living. “Cause it’s been a long week and I wanna feel your skin on mine / And I hate this place, do you wanna run away tonight / Don’t tell nobody that we’re gonna get out, gotta go now, don’t need a reason why / I’ll let you drive,” they sing at the chorus.
Different groups of #LetTheGirlsPlay artists were all challenged with writing a song with strangers in under three hours during this Nashville gathering. Nick, DeLaCruz and Steele had literally never met. At first they started working on a hip-hop beat, but couldn't get past a chorus. All agreed that after two hours of being stuck you go braindead, so they decided to try a new approach.
“A lot of time when you co-write it’s like three people trying to water it down,” Steele — Taste of Country’s featured #LetTheGirlsPlay artist of the month for February 2016 — says. “When you’re like ‘Oh my gosh, we have an hour, it makes it easier to be like let’s just agree on this.”
Watch the performance of the song below. At the beginning the group jokes that they didn’t waste the first two hours, they were just warming up. The resulting song proves they were right. It’s an intimate look into the modern songwriting room, where iPads replace notebooks. Days later Nick performed the song solo at a Monday night Song Suffragettes show at the Listening Room in Nashville. She was the June 2016, artist of the month.
Watch Krysta, Hailey and Amber Sing "Drive"