When Jerrod Niemann first heard “God Made a Woman,” which would become the first single from his This Ride album, he knew it was a hit. What surprised him was that more people didn’t think so. Below, Niemann recalls to The Boot the day he heard — and decided to record — the song, written by Jeff Hyde, Michael Ray and Joel Shewmake.
I was asked to be in this thing called Crazy Eights — it’s just a pitch meeting where they take eight different publishers and you sit in a room and everyone plays you a couple songs. For me, I get anxiety in that scenario because I know we’re among peers; I’ve known a lot of these people for years. [If I go], “Pass, pass, pass,” I know they’re playing some of their favorite songs, so I hate doing that in front of friends. So I just take every song and live with it, even if I’m excited or not.
When it got to “When God Made a Woman,” everyone’s looking at their phones, visiting. I’m looking around the room, and no one’s paying attention to the song, and it blew my mind. And that’s, for me, extremely rare.
I was like, “Did everybody else just not hear that?” I loved it going in, and I just thought about where I’m at in my life. I could have written the song to say 100-percent how I felt about that. It’s like a multi-dimensional Hallmark card for me, in a way.
So in the studio I thought, “Let’s put our stamp on it.” We just tried to let the lyrics stand on their own.
This Article Was Originally Posted at www.TheBoot.com
