There is more than one way to write a great country song. There is the really, really long arduous way, the very, very quick way, and all the ways in between. But for Morgan Evans, sometimes the first chorus to pop into his head is the best way to get his message across.
In a new interview with Billboard Country Update, Evans shared the story behind writing his new dobro-heavy song, “Diamonds.” Inspired, obviously, by his wife Kelsea Ballerini.
“You can sweat over a chorus for like four hours, or you can write it in five minutes. It’s funny — the five-minute ones are usually better than the four-hour ones, and that was the perfect example,” Evans said of the guts of this song: I love you like a diamond/And diamonds are forever/You know it when you find one/You never let go, ever/People spend their whole damn life trying to find that shine.
(The “A diamond is forever” line was originally written as the tag line for an advertising campaign for jewelry retailer DeBeers back in 1948.)
Evans wrote the new song around Valentine’s Day last year, along with Chris DeStefano and Evan Bogart, and recorded it with a studio band instead of playing all the parts himself.
“It was important for me to just start from scratch on this one. We certainly sat in the control room and played them the demo, and I remember a couple of the guys are like, ‘Well, that sounds like you’ve got a record there. What do you want us to do?’ That kind of set the challenge maybe for them, and they just killed it,” he recalled, adding that the song only has four chords, but it is a six-chord progression.
“And the order that they’re in, it makes a huge difference,” Evans said. “It just doesn’t sound like anything that I’ve done before.”