LAKEVIEW might have taken a winding path to Nashville, but it’s exactly where they are meant to be. The rising duo, made up of Jesse Denaro and Luke Healy, came to Music City via Pittsburgh, launching a career in country music after both playing in heavy metal bands. It might not be the typical career path, but not much about LAKEVIEW is conventional anyway.

“We were drunk at a bar one night,” Luke recalled to Everything Nash. “Me and Jesse used to work two full-time jobs. We had one night off and we just went out and got completely annihilated and decided that we felt like we were getting good feedback from everybody about the songs we were writing. They were like, ‘Hey, maybe you guys should just move to Nashville.’ Drunk at the bar, we just set a date on our calendar. We stuck to it. It was just that decision one night.”

LAKEVIEW didn’t waste any time making music once they made it to Nashville. They just released their current single, “She Drove Me to the Bar,” which follows songs like “Poor Me,” “Eyes Closed” and their most recent release, “Rain Down.”

“We wrote that song with our friend, Dave Thompson,” Jesse recalled of “She Drove Me to the Bar.” “He’s Canadian, and we love him to death. He’s a writer for Sony. We went to his house, and we were kind of talking about that song, trying to figure out ideas. He brought up the idea of ‘She Drove Me to the Bar,’ and was like, ‘Hey, what if we write a song about certain things: a past breakup, or a fight, or something happened between you and somebody you love, and it literally drove you to the bar? Like, pushed you there?’ I could probably speak for a lot of us; that’s kind of a place that we go to reconcile some of our feelings and our thoughts, when we’re going through a hard time.

“You just want to be around people and with your friends at the bar, getting drunk, having a good time,” he continued. “So that song is just about these things that have happened in this relationship have pushed you, and it feels like she’s actually in the car with you driving you to the bar, and dropping you off there because that’s the one place that you need to be.”

“She Drove Me to the Bar,” like all of their other songs, is inspired at least in part by their own personal stories — something they plan to continue with all of their music.

“I think for me and Jesse personally, we were writing a lot of songs and not all of them are extremely personal to us, but the ones that we do cut and we put out, we feel like they have to be personal to us,” Luke explained. “There has to be some real part of that song where we actually connected as songwriters. We are also are going to write a lot of songs that we don’t. That doesn’t mean they’re bad songs, but for us, for me and Jesse to sit there and accept the fact that we’re going to play a song for the rest of our lives, potentially, we need to know that we believed in it. It was real to us.”

LAKEVIEW hoped to release an album later this year, but with so much of life impacted by the coronavirus pandemic, the two are shifting their plans, at least for the time being.

“We’ve written about 60 or 70 songs by now,” Jesse revealed. “There’s a lot of good ones. But with the pandemic and everything going on, I think the music landscape has obviously changed, and so we also have to pivot and change with that as well So for right now,  because you can’t do a traditional tour and you can’t go on a radio tour and you can’t really promote a body of work, we’re just gonna pick our favorite songs basically every single month and put out a new song and do what we can to build a fan base.

“Do as much grassroots stuff as we can, with the help of all of our awesome people on our team,” he added. “Now it’s just kind of single after single, and just give some stuff to some people. Hopefully people digest it and love it.”

Download or stream “She Drove Me to the Bar” here.