How we wrote Little Big Town’s ‘Girl Crush’ by Lori McKenna

Lori McKenna on Girl Crush: “The song was really in charge that morning.” Photo: Becky Fluke

A Grammy-winning and six times Platinum tale of jealousy written by The Love Junkies and championed by the songwriting community

Already great songwriters, when Lori McKenna, Hillary Lindsey, and Liz Rose join forces they’re able to tease out that extra sprinkle of magic. Together, the trio known as The Love Junkies have written songs for country music heavyweights such as Carrie Underwood, Miranda Lambert, Tim McGraw and Faith Hill, and Maren Morris. One of the most formidable of all their creations, Girl Crush was made famous by Alabaman country vocal group Little Big Town who recorded it for their sixth studio album Painkiller.

The song’s impact is undeniable. Now certified as six times Platinum in the US, it topped Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart and cleaned up during the 2015/6 award season, most notably winning both Song of the Year and Single of the Year at the CMA Awards and Best Country Duo/Group Performance and Best Country Song at the Grammys. A favourite among other artists too, Kelly Clarkson, Miranda Lambert & Gwen Sebastian, Adam Lambert & Leona Lewis, and Harry Styles have all performed it live. Not bad for a song that grew out of a title Lori McKenna had stored on her phone…

First published in Songwriting Magazine Autumn 2023

Released: 15 December 2014
Artist: Little Big Town
Label: Capitol Nashville
Songwriters: Lori McKenna, Hillary Lindsey, Liz Rose
Producer: Jay Joyce
UK Chart Position: –
US Chart Position: 18

“I was in Nashville writing with Liz Rose and Hillary Lindsey. We call ourselves The Love Junkies because we fell in love with each other writing songs. I live in Boston, I don’t live in Nashville, so I’ll fly in for three days and we’ll sleep at Liz’s house. We write songs from the minute we wake up until the minute we fall asleep.

“I always wake up a little earlier and Liz is a morning person. So Liz and I are awake and Hillary still hasn’t come out of her room. We were writing with Karen Fairchild and Kimberly Schlapman from Little Big Town, they were coming over at 11. It was about 8:30 in the morning. Liz is making breakfast, she had her back to me, and I’m sitting in the kitchen looking at my phone in my list of song titles.

“Liz said, ‘Well, what should we do this morning? Should we write or should we talk about our husbands?’ You know, ‘Should we just take it easy this morning or try to write something before the girls get there?’

“I was going through titles and one was Girl Crush. Liz was like, ‘What does that mean?’ I’m like, ‘I don’t know but I see it all the time.’ I’d see it as a hashtag meaning, ‘I love this girl, she’s my favourite.’ I’d no real idea but thought it could be an uptempo fun thing. Liz was like, ‘It seems too hard and we only have two hours. Let’s move on.’

“Hillary came down a few minutes later and we were sitting in the living room. Hillary had one of Liz’s guitars sitting on her lap, we’re drinking coffee. She said, ‘Do you want to write?’ and I said that I’d told Liz that I had this title, Girl Crush. She didn’t even ask me what I meant, she just sang the first four lines of the song. She plays guitar by ear, and she plays a lot of bar chords, just following the guitar. She started singing, ‘I got a girl crush/hate to admit it but/I got a heart rush/ain’t slowing down.’”

“She played it in 6/8 with that chord progression that’s a little different. We were like, ‘What is that!’ And she’s like, ‘I don’t know.’ I looked at Liz and Liz looked at me, and she got her famous notebook out. That means she’s ready to go, and we just followed it. We thought it was the weirdest song and we didn’t know if it even made sense. We wrote it within the hour.

“When you’re writing a song that you don’t think anybody’s ever going to cut, you can really go there. You’re not thinking, ‘What about trying to get a pitch?’ or, ‘What about radio?’ We just followed the song. That is a great lesson for any songwriter, because sometimes those are the ones that work.

“Hillary sang it into the phone, still fumbling and figuring it out. We sent it to Liz’s son Scott, a publisher, with nothing other than, ‘Does this make sense?’ and then put it aside. We weren’t sure if you could tell it’s a girl wanting this guy but he’s got another girl, it’s a jealousy thing. We never imagined it being a song about a woman wanting a woman. He came right back and said, ‘Of course this makes sense.’ Then we forgot about it. We put breakfast away and cleaned the house before Karen and Kimberly showed up with brownies and wine.

“They said, ‘What have you been doing? You wrote all day yesterday?’ Liz said, ‘Play them the song,’ and Hillary was mad because we wrote it, she sang it and we put it away. Hillary was like, ‘Oh my god, it’s terrible. I gotta re-sing it.’ But Karen and Kimberly were like, ‘Do not play that for anyone else. You have to hold that for us.’ They got it right away.

“It wasn’t supposed to be a single, but the songwriters all rallied saying this was a different way to write about jealousy. Then Bobby Bones, a DJ in Nashville, played it and people were interested and it took on a life of its own. It really brought the songwriters together.

“The songwriters really got behind it being like, ‘You have to listen to the whole song. You can’t just listen to a chorus and think you know what a song is talking about!’ Songwriters always want you to listen to the whole song. You can’t just listen to a verse or a chorus. Like He Stopped Loving Her Today [the country song by Bobby Braddock/Curly Putman made famous by George Jones]. If you don’t listen to that whole song, you miss the point.

“There were so many magical things about that song but mostly the magic was Liz and I watching the song fall out of Hillary. And then us being smart enough to not get in the song’s way; the song was really in charge that morning. I love that we let it be.

“There was no demo, it was just Hillary singing it the first time into her iPhone, a voice recording. She was probably reading lyrics off of my computer that weren’t even right. There was just newness in that voice recording and they took it in.

The Love Junkies. Lori McKenna on Girl Crush: “Every time we’re together, we’ll sing it in a writers’ round.”

“The amount of restraint in that track… they could have really done quite a lot, instead they pulled back. It’s so magic that they did that. I love Jay Joyce as a producer, and I love Little Big Town as humans and as a band. I know that Karen sang that vocal with people in the studio, almost to an audience. It couldn’t have been better. When we heard it, we were all just like, ‘Oh my god!’ We’re always like that with Little Big Town because everything they do is magic.

“The other crazy thing about this story… Karen and Kimberly showed up and we wrote three songs with them that day. We wrote Tumble And Fall, a song called Something Strong, which they just cut on their new record, and a song called Truck Bed that nobody’s heard. So we wrote three other songs that day, the Girl Crush thing was like, ‘Okay, that happened. Let’s move on.’

“I often find myself in this position where I’ll look around a room and be like, ‘I don’t know how I got here. I don’t know how I’m lucky enough to be in this room.’ Like, ‘Look at these people I get to work with!’ So I’m looking at Hillary, and Liz, and Karen, and Kimberly, and I realised I was the only one who had never won a Grammy Award in that room. I was teasing like, ‘I’m the only one here that doesn’t have a Grammy.’ I was trying to be funny, saying it out loud. It was more like, ‘How did I get here with these badass women?’ Karen looked at me and she said, ‘Lori McKenna, we’re gonna get you a Grammy.’ By that point, we were on the third song of the day and nobody was thinking about Girl Crush.

“She said it that day, and she was teasing me back, but then we got to chase that song around for a year; because when you have a song like that it becomes so much of your week. ‘Where is it on the chart?’ ‘Who said something about it?’ Kelly Clarkson had sung it on a TV show… so you get to experience the song’s life cycle. It has its own big journey. Then going to the Grammys for the first time with my best friends Liz Rose and Hillary Lindsey and having that experience together, it makes the song so much more special. It shared so much with us after it made its way out into the world.

“Every time we’re together, we’ll sing it in a writers’ round. I love Liz and Hillary for a million reasons, but the fact that we get to be songwriters together and the fact that I literally got to sit right beside somebody as they had the magic come out… a song is bigger than us and it will flow through you… It wasn’t overthought, she just let it in. Hillary is one of the best songwriters I’ve ever worked with, in my entire career. I can’t imagine a song that she couldn’t write. I cannot not love songwriting when I get to sit beside somebody and watch something like that happen. Amazing!”

Lori McKenna’s album 1988 is out now via CN Records/Thirty Tigers. You can find music and upcoming tour dates at lorimckenna.com

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