Doin' Fine

This is the opening track from Lauren Alaina's sophomore album Road Less Traveled, which was produced by busbee (Keith Urban, Maren Morris, Lady Antebellum). During the five year period between the singer's first and second records, Alaina's parents divorced, her father entered alcohol rehab and got sober, and her mom married one of her dad's best friends. Alaina met busbee for the first time at a songwriting appointment, just as she was beginning to open up and shared with him all her issues. "He pretty much took me under his arm, gave me a big hug and said, 'We're going to write about it,'" she recalled to Billboard magazine, "I cried the whole writing session." "Doin' Fine," the song they crafted, lays all that family business out in the lyrics and puts them in an optimistic framework, setting a tone for the rest of album.

Lauren Alaina discussed the upbeat, optimistic tune with Sounds Like Nashville: "I say at my shows, 'Who in the crowd has a crazy family?' One person every night doesn't raise their hand. The only people who don't are because they're with their crazy family and they don't want them to know. My family is normal compared to some of the stories that I hear now. But that's great because none of us are alone, and the message of that song is pretty much … We all have different paths, and we all have different perspectives and families and different things that we have to overcome, and accepting that is key."

Lauren Alaina said: "'Doing Fine' is a really special song because it's super uplifting, but really honest at the same time. It's almost like, 'What is going on?' If you don't know me and you don't know that that's actually what I went through, you would almost be like, 'Oh my gosh, she really tried to write a country song.' But the truth is I really live a country song! My mom married a family friend. My mom's husband now, and my dad, and my mom were all friends in high school. I think they lost touch along the way somewhere, and when I was like 11 or 12 they reconnected and we were all friends. My parents and all of them were friends. And my dad's alcoholism was really tough, and so I think he was a friend to my mom. I don't really know what happened. He's now her husband. My dad has a new wife, and he's sober because my mom asked for the divorce. She said, 'I can't do this anymore,' which I can see both sides. It's really hard when you're in the middle. I was kind of in the middle because I'm their child. I was like, 'I can't take this anymore.' My parents are people and they're making mistakes, and I didn't know they could do that! It was this weird realization that my parents are human beings that make mistakes, so that was hard. So, I was trying to write that and trying to say that, but I hadn't even come to that conclusion yet."