Canaan Smith wanted Brent Cobb on his new album come hell or high water — or, perhaps more appropriately, come snow or ice. The pair’s new collaboration, “Catch Me If You Can” — premiering exclusively on The Boot — is a full-throttle shot of energy that they just barely completed in time.
Smith had never met Cobb personally when he dreamed up the idea of having the Georgia-based singer-songwriter as a special guest on this new song; however, Smith is a big fan of Cobb’s — “He’s in the space that I want to live in, musically,” Smith says — so he worked through their teams to get the song to his fellow artist. The two were, in a twist of fate, set up to write together soon after, and when a miscommunication caused Cobb to miss the Zoom session, he reached out to Smith personally to apologize.
“I’m like, ‘Dude, don’t sweat it — no big deal,'” Smith remembers, but he also asked Cobb to make sure he heard “Catch Me If You Can.”
“He called me the next day and said he loved the song and would love to do it,” Smith recounts. “So, I was jacked …”
They didn’t have much time to get Cobb’s part recorded, though, and Cobb didn’t have a suitable place to lay down his lines at home. He decided, though, that he could swing by Smith’s house on his way into Nashville for a different project … on the same night a snow and ice storm rolled into Music City in mid-February.
“He’s racing to get here. He gets here in the evening, and it’s already snowing, and the roads are already getting bad,” Smith recalls, but just a few takes later in an “unconventional as s–t” recording session, they had just what they needed. “… And then he was gone as soon as he came, just trying to beat the weather,” Smith adds.
“All the odds were stacked against us for it to happen. We were up against time, we were up against a snowstorm … The fact that it happened at all was so hit or miss, and I just love that about it,” Smith admits. “That just adds another layer of underground to me.”
Listen to Canaan Smith’s “Catch Me If You Can” (Feat. Brent Cobb):
Smith co-wrote “Catch Me If You Can” — the fifth of 12 songs on his forthcoming new album, High Country Sound — with Florida Georgia Line‘s Brian Kelley and Tyler Hubbard, along with Jason Afable. Smith also produced the track, which he describes as “the testosterone booster on the album.”
“[It] kind of ties in a little bit of the old rock influence to the new, more grounded, rootsy sound,” Smith says. “I just love how it feels … like a hoedown.”
Its lyrics, the singer explains, reflect how he tries to live his life: “I’m gonna do me; I’m not looking around … to see what you’re doing, so you’d better keep up, you know?”
“I like how the music reflects that lyric, too,” Smith continues, “with a nonstop, untameable sound.”
High Country Sound is Smith’s sophomore album, and his first with Hubbard and Kelley’s Round Here Records. Whereas Smith’s 2014 No. 1 single “Love Me Like You Mean It” and 2015’s Top 20 single “Hole in the Bottle” — as well as 2015’s Bronco, Smith’s debut album on Mercury Nashville — had more of a mainstream sound, Smith aimed to channel his backwoods Virginia roots on this new project.
Smith co-wrote all 12 of High Country Sound‘s songs and produced eight of them alone; the other four, he co-produced with Hubbard and Kelley. The album is due out on Friday (April 2).
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