The Eli Young Band is back with a new single, “Love Talking,” which is already generating plenty of buzz. The song, written by the band’s Mike Eli, along with Jeffrey East and Eric Arjes, is from an upcoming new album, and was written during the height of the pandemic, when the group was off the road.

“Mike really hunkered down and took songwriting like a job,” the band’s Jon Jones tells Everything Nash. “He was very creative and was very inspired to write. He sat up in his office on Zoom with writers three or four days a week and just 9:00 to 5:00 learned how to do all the recording side and all that stuff that he needs to do to make the demos. And out of that, he wrote nearly a hundred songs for us to pick from, which was great. Every week he was sending one or two that he was super excited about, and ‘Love Talking’ just really quickly rose to the top. It was one of those when everybody first listened, we all agreed on it.”

Jones knew as soon as he heard “Love Talking” that it had the potential to be a big hit for them. For a band that has had more than a dozen charting singles already, including their multi-platinum “Crazy Girl” and “Even If It Breaks Your Heart,” their collective intuition told them the song would resonate with others as much as it did with them.

“There are only a couple big themes in music, especially country music, with love being probably the 80 percent of what you hear,” Jones reflects. “Love is a big theme, so we love a song that is in one of those boxes but that is done in a slightly different way, and that has a really unique take. This checks that box for us. It’s about, maybe I had a drink, maybe I need a little encouragement. Maybe I needed that, but it wasn’t the booze talking. It was love talking. It was genuine. It was from the heart. I just love that sentiment. And the way that the song is written, it has really great energy, and it has a good flow to it, and agreat melody, which is all the things that we really look for in a song.”

With four members in the Eli Young Band, it can be a challenge to narrow down songs to record, even after 20 years together.

“it’s tough for four people, ’cause there can be two ties,” Jones concedes. “When it’s a two – two tie, there’s usually someone who is either very passionately for, or very passionately against. We have to try to listen to each other and not just raise our hand, and know that that the votes are all equal. We each get equal, but at different times we have figured out who might deserve a little bit more weight here and there. But when all four of us raise our hands together, we know we’re on the right track.

“There were definitely enough songs that if it was a two – two tie, we could be like, ‘All right, we have enough other songs. We could put this in the revisit at some other point bucket,'” he adds. “We just try to give, if one of us writes it, maybe give it a little bit more weight.”

“Love Talking” will, appropriately, officially be released to radio on February 14. Their new album is expected to be released later this year. Find all of the Eli Young Band’s music and tour dates here.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of EB Media / Corey Ray