Parmalee is celebrating two back-to-back No. 1 singles, first with “Just the Way,” their collaboration with Blanco Brown, followed by their mega-hit, “Take My Name,” which became the No. 1 song on Billboard‘s year-end Country Airplay chart. Lead singer Matt Thomas wrote the song with Ashley Gorley, Ben Johnson and David Fanning, never imagining the extent to which the romantic track would impact their career.
“I don’t think anybody in our camp, label or writers, I don’t think anybody could have seen that coming,” Thomas tells Everything Nash. “We all felt like we had something good. The song felt good when we wrote it. We knew we were tapping into the wedding thing. But to have it be the most-played Song of the Year, and right now it’s at like No. 18 on Hot AC and is still No. 4 on Recurrents.”
Thomas knew they had something special with “Take My Name,” but even he couldn’t envision what that one song would do for Parmalee.
“I gotta go back and listen to that thing a couple of times and make sure I bring a little bit of that to what I’m doing now,” Thomas says with a laugh. “I never write a song, and get the demo and, and tell my co-writers, ‘This is a smash. This is a hit.’ I never do that, ’cause you never know until it is. And with this song, we just felt like we had something good, but who could have imagined? We must have hit some kind of nerve that we didn’t realize we were gonna hit.”
Parmalee has had hits at radio before, including their No. 1 hit, “Carolina,” along with Top 10 singles like “Close Your Eyes” and “Already Callin’ You Mine.” But neither Thomas nor anyone else in Parmalee ever saw a song climb as quickly as they did with “Take My Name.”
“There was a period of time when it was at country radio, and it started jumping spots, like five spots at a time,” Thomas recounts. “And then within like two or three weeks, it jumped like ten spots. And then it was like, ‘Something’s going on here. It’s out of our control.’ We had slated to go to radio, and it went later than we thought. And then we were just kind of trying to project when it could be moving up, and it just kind of started snowballing. Once that really started happening, once it got into the teens, it really started moving. That was a surprise.”
Parmalee is back at radio with “Girl in Mine.” The song is from a forthcoming new album. Parmalee will embark on their headlining Take My Name Tour on February 2 in Champaign, Illinois. Find music and tour dates at ParmaleeMusic.com.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of True Public Relations / Joseph Llanes