With Mother’s Day in the rearview mirror, Gabby Barrett is learning to better appreciate the parent/child relationship the holiday represents.
In successful child-rearing, Mom and Dad essentially make themselves obsolete — after doting on the kids, sinking time and money into them, those children grow up, move away and create lives of their own. It makes things complicated, but there’s a sweet full-circle experience when the grown-up offspring come to understand the sacrifice that was involved in raising them as they, in turn, parent the next generation.
“I never understood that before I had kids,” Barrett says. “I’ve seen those relationships where it’s really difficult for parents to let their children go, you know, but they’re going to be adults longer than they’re going to be children, and having your mind set up that way will hopefully make it a little bit easier whenever that day comes.”
Barrett isn’t the only person thinking about circle-of-life inevitability. So is Luke Combs, who had an idea in 2022 to write about how letting go plays out in a father/daughter relationship. Combs was trying to widen his creative relationships at the time, setting appointments with some of his frequent collaborators’ co-writers. And it was in that spirit that he proposed a writing appointment with regular co-writer James McNair (“Lovin’ On You,” “Glory Days”) and one of McNair’s professional partners, Emily Weisband (“Can’t Break Up Now,” “Looking for You”). When Combs extended the invitation, it fell during a week Weisband had intended to take off to prep for her wedding, but she couldn’t pass up the opportunity.
“I’m a huge fan of Luke,” she says. “And I’m a huge fan of the way that he does business and the way that he stays so connected and loyal to his friends.”
Combs, McNair and Weisband met on Sept. 26 at Sony Music Publishing’s Fire Hall, spending about an hour chatting before Combs mentioned “Dance Like No One’s Watching,” an idea he had about the sweep of a father/daughter relationship. The setup for the day was perfect because a song about a daughter needed to have a female involved in its creation.
“I think in his brain it was this big, iconic wedding song,” recalls Weisband. “He was like, ‘If you can write one of those, they’re huge.’ And so we took on the challenge.”
They fell into a waltz time — not because the hook involved dancing, Weisband says, but because it felt “big and dramatic.” That’s certainly the tone they gave the chorus first, fitting the title to a languid melody with long notes.
“The big drawn-out melody, ‘Daaaance liiiike noooooo ooooone’s watching,’ it just felt like this is a singer’s song,” explains Weisband. “So [we] let the notes last a long time, let it just kind of flow out. It doesn’t have to be too wordy. It just has to be pure emotion. I definitely think we had to get that part right first.”
That chorus included her father’s encouragement to accept the risk of love if it appeared, unwittingly mirroring the encouragement in Lee Ann Womack’s “I Hope You Dance.”
When the chorus was mostly finished, they started building the rest of the story. Verse one relied, in part, on Weisband’s memory of a father/daughter Valentine’s dance at elementary school, when her dad guided her through her insecurities about dancing in front of her classmates. Verse two zoomed ahead to Dad helping pack the trunk as the protagonist heads off for college — shades of The Chicks’ “Wide Open Spaces.”
Weisband had mentioned as they wrote the chorus that she and her father had taken lessons for the first dance at her wedding — “Well, that’s the bridge,” Combs told her — and they reversed the emotions from the Valentine’s dance for that section, with the daughter coaching Dad during the wedding dance to stay cool: “Just don’t look at Mom.” Though they consider it a bridge, it’s literally a third verse, using the established verse melody.
“When I say ‘bridge,’ it was just that last thing that’s going to really put the dagger in the heart,” she notes.
Weisband played “Dance Like No One’s Watching” for her dad later that week, and he managed to hold it together. “I remember he went, ‘It’s good,’ and just turned away,” she says. “He had to wait till after my wedding to be like, ‘That song’s amazing.’ ”
Between her Oct. 1 wedding, the honeymoon and moving into a new home, it was weeks before she finished the demo. The day she sent it to Combs, he texted it to Barrett, whom he had always envisioned as the beneficiary of their work. Barrett was taking a leisurely bath when the phone pinged, and she held the cell tightly as “Dance” connected with her on an emotional level. “Fortunately, I did not drop it in the water,” she says.
“Dance” resonated with Barrett as a mom — she delivered her third baby, Ivy Josephine Foehner, on Feb. 17 — but it also spoke to her of her own transition into adulthood.
“The lyric ‘Girl, it’s a big world/ And it’s so easy to get lost in’ — that lyric hits me and just brings me back to the memories of really starting to do things all on my own,” she says.
She joined a band of session players at Nashville’s Blackbird Studios to record “Dance,” the first time she had been able to do that. Her first album’s vocals, recalls producer Ross Copperman (Dierks Bentley, Darius Rucker), were either from her songwriting demos or done remotely during the pandemic. The band responded to her emotions, dressing her performance with a quiet fragility.
Barrett returned to Blackbird at a later date to do the final vocal, delivering the parent/child storyline with all the right emotions, though she remained almost motionless in the process.
“She was so pregnant,” says Copperman. “She was sitting on a stool, and it just kind of flies out of her mouth. You’re like, ‘Wow, how did that just happen?’ ”
McNair orchestrated Combs’ participation on background vocals. Combs never steals the show — there are moments that it sounds like him, though he’s mostly tucked in behind Barrett, acting very much like a support singer. In the final seconds, though, he lines his harmonies up tightly with Barrett’s curly melodic ad-lib.
“This guy is such a good singer,” Copperman says. “I would not have followed that trill. I would have just kind of fallen off that note. But it’s cool, and it’s also cool just how intentional he was with singing the harmony. Most people wouldn’t have gone that deep on a harmony.”
Warner Music Nashville released “Dance Like No One’s Watching” to country radio via PlayMPE on March 8. The plot is timeless, but it should make a particular impact next month as the calendar reaches Father’s Day.
“It’s becoming a song to create new special memories like Daddy/daughter dances or at-school events or weddings,” says Barrett. “I’m receiving all these sweet clips of fans sharing that moment with me, and I’m seeing my fans make core memories. It’s just so amazing they think of me to share their forever moment.”
