Girl Crush

A "girl crush" is a feeling of envy one woman has for another. In this song, Karen Fairchild takes the lead, singing about her crush on the girl her ex boyfriend is now seeing. "It's written like a good old country jealousy story," she explained to Radio.com. "I think we've all felt that, where we've lost a relationship and been rejected and we look at, 'What did he want that I didn't have?' I think it's a really easy thing to relate to, and yet you've never heard it said in that way."

The title came from a hashtag. Lori McKenna, who wrote the song with Liz Rose and Hillary Lindsey, saw #girlcrush on Instagram and put it in her phone as an idea. She didn't know what it meant, but Lindsey did, and when McKenna floated the title she came up with the first four lines on the spot. "I was like, 'Oh my god, what was that?' It just flowed out of her," McKenna told Billboard. Lindsey's fruitful freestyling highlighted the need sometimes for songwriters to stay in the moment sometimes and resist the urge to self-edit. "You have to trust the song and trust the flow, because otherwise that song would have ended up being thrown away," said McKenna. "That's one of the million things I've learned from co-writers is just trust the song. Don't go back the next day and piece it apart. It won't work, it lives and breathe in that moment, you're creating it and you gotta follow it."

Jimi Westbrook told Taste of Country about the first time he heard the song. "It took our breath," he said. "We were like, 'Wow, I've never heard that lyric before.' And that's not easy to do these days, because you feel like everything's been done at some point or another. The first time we heard it, we were like, 'Wow, we've got to cut that.'"