Lee Brice celebrated the success of his #1 single “Drinking Class” in Nashville this week, the Gold certified second single from his album I Don’t Dance. Written by David Frasier, Ed Hill, and Josh Kear, produced by Brice, Kyle Jacobs, and Matt McClure, and released by Curb Records, the song is anthemic and unifying, a rallying cry for hard workers.
“When I first heard it, I kind of compared it in my mind to my version of like a “Friends in Low Places,” Brice said at the event. “Garth is a big thing for me so I envisioned it as that and a #1 a big song that resonated with folks and so for it to actually kinda come to pass, it’s really cool. It was on the charts for a long time and it was a battle to get that – we had a lot of stuff that was in that top five at that time and so it was a real real battle to get it there and so to get it was even that much sweeter. It’s still growing on the road and live and I think it’s gonna continue to do that.”
“It’s exactly what I wanted to do,” Brice says of his ability to bring both deeper material and uptempo anthems to top the radio charts. “It’s not natural for me to just kind of do the in between, I kind of wanna either really tug your heartstrings, ‘cuz that’s the stuff I grew up loving, or I wanna make you just fall into the anthemic, let’s party together, let’s celebrate together, let’s be a part of one thing. So I’m kind of extreme left and extreme right and sometimes it’s a little harder to get those songs played on the radio, they don’t just fly up the charts. It takes work, but to me it’s more gratifying in the end, and hopefully they’re more memorable and they hang around. Ten years from now maybe some of these songs will maybe still be relevant.”
“It’s not really about drinking, it’s everybody, it’s all of us,” Frasier says of the anthem to hard work. Though the title may imply a more trivial subject matter, the song had a more somber tone from the start. “The little intro lick, the ‘oo–’ started out piano, on the original demo that little piano riff runs through the entire song,” Kear says. “That kind of laid the mood for where it ended up going. It sounded grand somehow, with the beat that we set up, and the piano lick, it sounded very serious. So there was never going to be any confusion once the music piece was there that laid the bedrock for the whole song.”
“Our experiences kind of guide that as well,” Kear says of the song’s more serious message, a tribute to those that put in the hard-earned long hours. “David started out in the old fields on an old rig, Ed was painting houses when he first got to Nashville, and it hasn’t been that long since I was cleaning the Harding Mall, praying that someday it’d be torn down. But we relate, because we’ve all worked some really hard, not impressive, fun jobs ourselves. But I am proud of the fact that I did bust my tail doing those things, that I have that experience.” “People aren’t quitters,” Hill adds. It definitely rings true of the writing trio – though they’ve gotten together to write almost every Tuesday for 15 years, it hasn’t been until now that they’ve scored a #1 together.
“Drinking Class” is in many ways an ode to the working man, a background with which Brice as well is all too familiar. “Daddy dropped me off one time before he had a trencher, like a tractor trencher that would dig ditches,” he shares. “And I was his trencher, with a shovel. But this was a parking lot that was basically, I mean I had to chip through with a pick through the concrete and then dig through. It’d been 30/40 years of pavement in the baking sun, clay underneath, so there was sparks coming off the clay, and I was supposed to dig this thing two feet deep about 20 feet long for this one wire to go down underneath for this one little service. And I was like, ‘Daddy, I mean, the shovel’s bending, you know?’ He left me there, said, ‘It has to be done. Figure it out.’ And it wasn’t cruel, it was just like a lesson of, when I get to a place to where maybe I don’t know where to go or if I don’t know if I can go any further or I’m tired, haven’t been spending time at home or whatever it may be, you just have to keep figuring it out. The lesson he taught me, is you either just quit, which is not an option, ‘cuz you gotta just keep going. If you want to succeed, if you wanna have joy, you just gotta take that next step. Figure it out.”
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