At the dawn of the 2010s, a time when mainstream country teemed with
buff hunks singing party-hearty anthems, Lee Brice offered a subtler
alternative. Also raised on a combination of contemporary rock and
post-Garth Brooks country, Brice gravitated toward craft, not bluster.
He wasn't adverse to good times -- he had a country hit in 2013 called
"Parking Lot Party" -- but he specialized in heart-on-sleeve ballads
like "A Woman Like You," "Hard to Love," "I Drive Your Truck," and "I
Don't Dance," Top Ten country singles that showcased his supple,
weathered voice and skilled song structure. The latter is what first
brought him attention in Nashville -- he penned songs for Jason Aldean,
Tim McGraw, and his idol Brooks -- but the former is what turned him
into a star in the early years of the 2010s.
By that point, Brice
had been toiling away at a career for the better part of a decade. A
native of Sumter, South Carolina, he learned how to sing at church and
when he was seven, he began playing piano. Next came the guitar, and by
the age of ten he had started writing his own songs, partially under the
influence of his father's favorite artists, the Oak Ridge Boys and
Alabama. The performing bug bit him in high school, where he won the
school's talent contest for three straight years, and he started to
expand his horizons, spending time listening to rock & roll but
settling on Garth Brooks as his idol. In addition to music, Brice played
football. He earned a scholarship to Clemson University, but once he
suffered an arm injury he decided to devote himself to music. On the
advice of Doug Johnson, Brice moved to Nashville, where Johnson would
later sign the fledgling songwriter to a publishing contract as soon as
he became an A&R man at Curb Records. Brice began placing songs with
major-league artists, starting with a tune for the rock band Sister
Hazel in 2006, which led to Jason Aldean recording "Not Every Man Lives"
for his 2007 album Relentless, and Garth Brooks cutting "More Than a
Memory" for a bonus track on 2007's The Ultimate Hits.
Things
were beginning to break Brice's way behind the scenes but he was having a
harder time in front of the microphone. In 2007, he signed with Curb as
a recording artist and cut an album called Picture of Me but none of
the released singles -- "She Ain't Right," "Happy Endings," and "Upper
Middle Class White Trash" -- made waves on the charts. He spent 2008
writing professionally as he retooled his own music, re-emerging in 2009
with "Love Like Crazy." He had finally hit the right formula: the
single stayed on the charts for over a year, eventually reaching number
three on the Billboard country chart on its way to platinum
certification. An album, also called Love Like Crazy, showed up in June
2010 and while it wasn't a smash, the hit single laid down the
foundation for a successful career. Brice returned in late 2011 with "A
Woman Like You," the first single from 2012's Hard 2 Love. "A Woman Like
You" became his first number one single and opened the door for the
success of Hard 2 Love, which went gold on the strength of the Top Ten
country singles "Hard to Love" and "I Drive Your Truck," as well as the
gold single "Parking Lot Party" which peaked at 11.
With this
success under his belt, Brice returned with his third album, the
self-produced I Don't Dance, in 2014. It was preceded by the title
track, which became a Top Ten country single in the summer of 2014,
whetting the appetite for the record's September release. Upon its
release, I Don't Dance debuted at number one on the Billboard country
chart and five on the Top 200. "Drinking Class" and "That Don't Sound
Like You" remained on the charts into 2015; that summer, Brice released
the EP Mixtape: 'Til Summer's Gone. Brice spent 2016 working on new
music, returning in the summer of 2017 with "Boy," the first single from
his eponymous album, which arrived in November.
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