Despite its title, Bailey Zimmerman’s churning hit “Fall in Love” is not a romantic ballad, with the Illinois native lamenting on the track: “Love’s a smoke ring wrapped around your finger/One second it’s a blessing, and the next it’s already gone.” Yet the single’s impact is anything but ephemeral, as it reached No. 9 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart and has earned 78.7 million on-demand U.S. official streams, according to Luminate.
The rising country star says of the song’s inspiration, “After you lose that special person you never thought you’d lose, it’s hard to want to give love a second chance. We felt like we could relate to a lot of people by shining a light on that feeling.” Zimmerman, 22, co-wrote the song with Austin Shawn, who also produced the track, and Gavin Lucas, who had the initial idea for its first verse and chorus in 2020.
Last year, Lucas and Zimmerman fleshed out the second verse with Shawn during a co-writing session at Shawn’s home studio, and the finished version arrived this February. “One of my favorite parts of that session was writing the line ‘Seen your mama walking out the county market,’” says Zimmerman, “because it ties the whole story together and gives it that small-town feeling.”
Zimmerman, who is signed to Warner Music Nashville/Elektra Music Group and The Core Entertainment and 10th Street Entertainment for management, hit No. 2 on the Emerging Artists chart. Come July 11, “Fall in Love” will be promoted to country radio. (Already, follow up hit “Rock and a Hard Place” is taking off, debuting at No. 24 on the Hot 100 and No. 2 on Hot Country Songs).
“From the beginning of us writing ‘Fall in Love’ on my couch with an acoustic guitar, I was thinking big-picture,” Shawn recalls. “I was thinking about Bailey’s roots, his rasp, the message the song carried. I wanted to define what he is all about through the emotion and sound it carried — that gritty, modern-Americana country vibe.”
This story originally appeared in the June 25, 2022, issue of Billboard.
