You Lie

This upbeat, acoustic-guitar anchored anthem is the third single by American country music group The Band Perry from their self-titled debut album. The song finds lead singer Kimberly Perry, finding a whole lot of ways to call a no good cheater who broke her heart a liar. She sings: You lie like a priceless Persian rug on a rich man's floor You lie like a coon dog basking in the sunshine on my porch You lie like a penny in the parking lot at the grocery store It just comes way too natural to you The way you lie

The song was written by family songwriting team Aaron, Brian and Clara Henningsen, who also penned or co-penned several other tracks on The Band Perry. Bass guitarist Reid Perry explained in an interview with Yahoo Music's Chris Willman how they hooked up with the little known Henningsens trio: "They're a fifth generation farm family from Illinois. We've written about one third of the album with them. They came to (manager) Bob Doyle's office one day. They didn't even have demos for the songs. They had to come personally and sit down and play all their songs. 'You Lie' was the first song that they played for us. One of our favorite lines off the whole album is 'I never liked the taste of crow, but baby, I ate it.' It was like, we have to have that song."

Brian Henningsen and his daughter Clara told The Boot the story behind the song:
Brian: The song started out as a Clara song. She had the basic vocal lick and the basic theme of the song, and she had started the chorus. We were sitting around at my house and I said, 'It needs something a little more jazzy.' I blurted out, 'You lie like a priceless Persian rug on a rich man's floor/ and you lie like a coon dog basking in the sunshine on my porch / Well, you lie like a penny in a parking lot at the grocery store.'Normally, you have to slug out the lines but those just fell out. The dog and the rug, those are old sayings. They're country colloquialisms. A lot of the lyrics are a bit of a pun. One true line is in the second verse when we threw in 'lie like the man with the slicked-back hair who sold me that Ford.' Now, that's true [laughs]. We had to get that one in there.

Clara: I started writing it in 2008. I remember writing the chorus because I just wanted a song where a girl is tired of this dude lying to her all the time. When my dad started blurting out that stuff, [especially] 'I never liked the taste of crow but baby, I ate it,' [Aaron] and I looked at him and said, 'What? What do those things mean?' At first, we didn't think those would work but they all ended up in the song!

Brian: When we finished the chorus of the song, we just loved it. At that time, we didn't have a publishing deal but we were talking to Paul Worley [co-producer of the Band Perry's debut album] and played him the chorus. He just flipped. We knew we had something really cool. After that, we went to Aaron's house in Franklin, Tenn., and proceeded to slug through the verses. Writing the song took most of the day. We wanted it to be a very concentrated story. We want our songs to paint a movie in your head. The whole song is basically wordplay, slightly tongue-in-cheek and a little dark humor to try to make it conversational. We played the whole thing for Paul Worley and his [colleagues] and it became one of our standards.