Billboard is celebrating the 2010s with essays on the 100 songs that we feel most define the decade that was — the songs that both shaped and reflected the music and culture of the period — with help telling their stories from some of the artists, behind-the-scenes collaborators and industry insiders involved.
Vowing to “take it slow just as fast as I can,” Sam Hunt set country and pop music on its collective ear in 2017 with “Body Like a Back Road,” an easy-going and sensuous smash that catapulted the singer-songwriter’s career, and won him a legion of new pop followers.
The song’s insinuating, sexy groove and Hunt’s laid-back, sung/spoken delivery charmed listeners, who were also pulled in by the handclaps and vibe that drew as much from DJ Mustard (check out the “hey”s in the background) as from any country production. Elements of hip-hop weren’t new in country — the were familiar from Jason Aldean’s 2011 “Dirt Road Anthem” and Florida Georgia Line and Nelly’s 2012 collaboration on “Cruise,” and even as far back as 2004 when Tim McGraw appeared on Nelly’s “Over and Over.” But never had the integration gone down as smoothly as it did on “Back Road.”
The song’s stickiness with fans led to a record-setting 34 weeks atop Hot Country Songs (a record later broken by Bebe Rexha and Florida Georgia Line’s “Meant to Be”), earning the tune Billboard’s Hot Country Song on the year-end charts, and Hunt Top Country Artist. It also became Hunt’s highest charting Hot 100 hit, peaking at No. 6, and earning two Grammy nods.
Not bad for a light-hearted song that Hunt initially didn’t want released. He knew he needed new material for his 2017 summer headlining tour, since it had been nearly three years since his 2014 breakthrough album Montevallo, which unleashed four Country Airplay No. 1s and turned him into one of the genre’s brightest new stars. But he wasn’t sold on the playful song, which he wrote with Shane McAnally, Josh Osborne and Zach Crowell, who also produced.
“To be honest, I never really wanted to put it out,” he told Billboard in 2017. “I was wanting to go in a different direction musically. Sometimes as songwriters, we take ourselves a little too seriously.”
Its sustained success even caught his label by surprise. “When I first heard ‘Body Like a Back Road,’ I thought it was a fun, laid-back hit song for Sam, but no one anticipated how much of a fingerprint it [had] on the culture at the time,” Universal Music Group Nashville president Cindy Mabe tells Billboard. “Radio embraced it immediately, but the fans owned it as their mantra — and because Sam takes his time putting out music, the fans held on to this song for a really long time.”
Hunt came in to the writing session with the title. “We loved it. It sounded like it was already a song,” McAnally says. That doesn’t mean the rest of the song, written over the course of a year, came easily. “I’m positive there are 10 verses that got scrapped,” McAnally says. “We couldn’t crack the code.”
However, once the song was finished, McAnally says he knew “100 percent” that it was a hit. “It made me think of [Mel McDaniel’s 1984 hit] ‘Baby’s Got Her Blue Jeans On’… This was a no-brainer. It feels so light in tone, but for some reason you feel it more than just a ditty.”
As far as its lasting effect, McAnally says with a laugh, “I’ve heard that melody in about 12 songs, so it certainly influenced people. Not where you’re mad, more just you’re like, ‘Oh I know what you were listening to before you went in to write that day.’”
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The greatest legacy of “Back Road” may be that it further dragged country fans, notoriously late adopters, into the streaming era. The song reached No. 16 on the all-genre Streaming Songs chart in 2017, one of only two non-holiday country songs to hit the chart that year.
For his part, in 2017, Hunt credited the song’s crossover success to open-minded listeners. “There are a lot more open ears outside of the [country] genre, thanks to artists who have come before me… And because of that, I’ve been able to take advantage of it with the song. I think there were just more people open to giving it a shot and listening to it with an open mind than maybe a few years ago.”
