Hey Mama

Lyrically, the song describes Kearney's first meeting with his wife Annie at the Anthropologie store in Tennessee that she was working at. After courting Annie for a few months, he stole her heart and they married on June 5, 2010. "I don't really call her Mama that much," Kearney revealed in our interview. "Maybe joking around the house, but not regularly. I think she thinks the song is cute."

A fan of Hip-Hop since childhood, Kearney turned to the genre for inspiration when recording his fourth studio album, Young Love. "I approached Young Love like a singer-songwriter would approach a Hip-Hop record," he said. "We would start with beats or grooves that your body already responds to. It was a fun and fulfilling experiment." This was the song that ignited that experiment. Kearney said: "The album really began with 'Hey Mama.' After clapping into my laptop and programming this beat, I was dancing around the room actually freestyling words. This wasn't me sitting around with some friends and an acoustic guitar. It was this visceral writing experience. I tried to find a way to write stories to these beats." The song was released as the album's lead single on May 10, 2011.

Kearney says that he didn't set out to write a song about his wife, but somehow it came out that way. He told us: "It's so funny, in the creation of songs, I'm not thinking of necessarily what it'll mean later. If it's good and it resonates with you and it's gripping, then it's cool with me. And then later you're like, Wait a second. I'm writing a song about how we met and our marriage. Well that's going to be a point of discussion now with every interview I do, and are we okay with that? (laughing) And oh yeah, I'm talking about this – I'm hard to please, you're hard to get. You start realizing that's going out into the world."