2017Released
3:36

Did You Know?

Interesting facts and trivia about Road Less Traveled. By Songfacts®.

Lauren Alaina sends a message to her fans through this uplifting country rocker that it's OK to follow your own path. "It's a song to encourage people to just be who they are and don't apologize for it," said the singer. "I think that's a hard thing to do because it feels like there's so much pressure to fit this mold that everyone has like made for us which is ridiculous, because last time I checked if we were all the exact same, it would be pretty boring."

Alaina publicly revealed she struggled from bulimia for four years following her successful run on the 2011 series of American Idol (she finished as runner-up to Scotty McCreery). The singer crafted the song with Jesse Frasure and Meghan Trainor during the time she was battling her eating disorder. However, the trio didn't really talk about what she was going through at the time. "I don't even know really if they knew when we wrote this song that it was kind of about [my eating disorder]," said Alaina. "I mean, I think, sure, during the day, I was talking about how much pressure it was for me and how I feel like this needs to be a certain way and look a certain way." "But I don't know that I went into detail about, because I was really struggling with an eating disorder at the time, so I was really at the time kind of like me knowing that I needed to believe what I was writing, but it took me a while to really get there," she continued. "I had to listen to this song. I had to write a million songs with this theme to kind of grow in that. So, I think maybe Meghan kind of knew, because she's a really good friend of mine, but I don't think we talked about it in the write. I just think we all felt this feeling to write this theme, and now I get to share it."

The song was written by Lauren Alaina with Jesse Frasure and Meghan Trainor during a 2013 co-writing session at Major Bob Music on 17th Avenue in Nashville. Alaina thinks it was Frasure who provided the title, during a discussion about the Robert Frost poem "The Road Not Taken," in which the writer chooses the road "less traveled by." The songwriters tackled the chorus first. "It's nice to have the chorus, because it sets up phrasing, it sets up the storyline, and then you work backward from there," Frasure told Billboard magazine. The trio then kicked into the body-image issues in the first verse, which was plaguing Alaina at the time. "Even before I was in the spotlight, I really worried about my weight," she conceded. "Then I think just being on national television and people saying not-nice things online really haunted me and made it 10 times worse. I had the eating disorder when I went on Idol, and it really got worse after that."

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Song Analysis

Key, BPM (tempo) and time signature of Road Less Traveled.
CKey
MajorMode
4/4Time Signature
113BPM

Album

The album Road Less Traveled is released on.

Released By

The record label that has released Road Less Traveled.
Lauren Alaina
© 2017 19 Recordings, Inc.
℗ 2017 19 Recordings, Inc.

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