Over the past week, Lee Brice’s “One of Them Girls” was honored as song of the year at the country music awards ceremonies held by not just one, but three performing rights organizations — ASCAP, BMI and SESAC, marking the first time that a song has earned the song of the year distinction at all three ceremonies within a single year.
“When you get something like a No. 1 hit, or a song of the year at ASCAP, BMI or SESAC, it’s already huge,” Brice tells Billboard of the history-making accolade. “But this — it’s a song that keeps on giving.”
These awards ceremonies, held in Nashville each year (and most recently held virtually due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic), honor some of the most-played works crafted that year by songwriters affiliated with their respective performance rights organizations (PROs). SESAC-affiliated singer-songwriter Brice wrote “One of Them Girls” alongside ASCAP-affiliated writer Ashley Gorley and BMI-affiliated writers Dallas Davidson and Ben Johnson.
Brice has previously written hit songs recorded by Garth Brooks (“More Than a Memory”) and Eli Young Band (the ACM song of the year winner “Crazy Girl”), as well as his own hits, including “I Don’t Dance,” “Memory I Don’t Mess With,” and “Rumor.” But Brice says he never imagined one of his songs would achieve such a rare accolade.
“I thought, ‘I’m sure it’s been done before,’” Brice says. “We called [music journalist and historian] Robert Oermann and said, ‘Tell us if we’re wrong here.’ He knows his stuff and he was like, ‘Nope, it’s never happened.’ I was like, ‘Well, if you say so, I’m gonna go with it.’ All the PROs were excited, too, and they had people looking for like two days to confirm everything. We thought there’s no way it was really true. But it was. We have a monumental moment we can look back on and say we were part of.”
Naturally, it’s also a thrilling moment for Brice’s “One of Them Girls” co-writers. “I called Ashley and Dallas, and Ben was with Ashley when I called them,” Brice recalls. “They were over the moon. Dallas said, ‘They need to make a statue of us.’ Ashley was like, ‘I was thinking more let’s go have a drink,’ and Dallas was like, ‘No, statue!’”
The response from music fans is still astounding to Brice, given that the song was written on a whim. Brice was slated to do a recording session for three songs that could potentially become radio singles. The evening before the session, he felt an urge to write a song. He called up Gorley and Davidson for a late-night writing session.
“I didn’t even tell them I was recording the next day. We wrote until around 4 a.m.,” Brice says. “We went to Ashley’s studio at his house and Ben was there. I grabbed a guitar and hit that top riff on the acoustic. They hit record on that and we had no idea for the song yet, but that is literally the same guitar that is on the actual record.”
By 9 a.m. the next morning, Brice was recording the track. “We had already planned to cut three other songs, had the charts ready to go, but we had such a strong feeling about this one that we went in and recorded it first,” Brice says.
Brice’s hunch was right; the track resonated with music fans and stayed atop Billboard’s Country Airplay chart for three weeks. “One of Them Girls” also went double platinum and is featured on his latest album Hey World; he’s more recently notched another chart-topper from the project with “Memory I Don’t Mess With,” marking his eighth career No. 1 on Billboard‘s Country Airplay chart.
For multi-award-winner Brice, accolades that recognize the craft of songwriting are ones that mean a little something extra. “The songs are where it all starts, and it’s where I started,” he says. “When I heard George Strait on the radio, I figured as a nine-year-old kid that if he was the guy singing that song, he obviously wrote it, played the music and produced it. So, I thought, ‘If I want to sing, I guess I need to write some songs, and that’s what I did.’ That’s why this really means a lot to me.”
