Lee Brice – Hard to Love

Country music is something that is still relatively new to me. For a long time, it was a genre that I just flat out steered clear of. Two good friends of mine are most responsible for my opening up to this style of music, and I’m fortunate enough to be able to say that I am now in separate bands with each of them. One of those bands covers this song.

Now, before I joined this band, I would go see my friend play shows, both solo and with his bands. My friend is a talented guy, which is why I had been to so many of his shows (I was a fan of his long before we became friends), and I enjoyed hearing him play a great number of songs that I wouldn’t even know if not for him. Every now and then, he would cover a song and I would seek out the original, eventually discovering a song or artist that I have since come to enjoy on their own merit.

Lee Brice’s Hard to Love is not one of those songs.

It’s not a particularly bad song (in fact, the chords of the verse sound a lot like Tom Petty’s Learning to Fly, which is not my favorite Petty tune, but one I enjoy quite a bit), it’s just that the song doesn’t do a lot for me. You may be asking yourself at this point, “why is he telling me about this song he doesn’t really care for?” Well, this is why.

Before I joined the band but when I knew it was going to happen, I went to see them play at a not so local bar. There was a couple at this bar that seemed completely out of place. Without even describing their attire (let’s just say they were significantly more casual than everyone else at this VERY casual establishment), they seemed to be living in their own moment, drinking, dancing, and just all around rocking harder than everyone else in the room, in a way that made everyone else in the room politely avoid looking directly at them.

Which brings me to Hard to Love. As the opening guitar notes started to play, this couple hit the dance floor. From start to finish, you could taken the wrinkles out of your best dress shirt, assuming you had a way to get it between them, but there was something much more than that. Whoever these people were, whatever their lives were like, in this moment they were more in love than seemed possible, and this song was the center of it all.

Now, does their moment change how I or anyone else feels about the quality of the song? Probably not, but it does show that almost any song has the potential to capture and replay the most important and emotional moments of someone’s life.

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