ABC/Mark LevineIt’s been nearly forty years since The Bellamy Brothers encouraged us to “Get into Reggae Cowboy,” and even longer since Webb Pierce topped the chart in 1953 with “There Stands the Glass.”

This week, however, Sam Hunt takes the Bellamys’ suggestion and combines Jamaican rhythms with a sample of Pierce’s country classic to create his latest number one, “Hard to Forget.”

The Georgia native is quick to point out he wasn’t the one who had the stroke of genius to marry the two disparate genres.

“I can’t take credit for coming up with it, but I recognized it immediately,” Sam tells ABC Audio. “I just knew… there was something to it. And [co-writer] Luke Laird played that for me when we were writing that day. And I just wanted there to be an idea that kept up with the track.”

“So it took a little while to find the right idea,” Sam recalls. “But finally, I think [the “Hard to Forget”] idea actually came from another write…  but we combined those worlds and it just came together from there.”

“[I]t was just a perfect storm of a lot of creative people coming together to make that happen,” he reflects.

Sam wasn’t afraid to get a little weird with the music video, either, featuring a depressed clown, a goat, an aging cowboy, and Sam playing checkers with his digital twin.

“That was shot at a really cool hotel outside of Los Angeles…” he reveals. “It’s just this little world that exists at this little hotel where you’ve got this kind of motley crew of characters… whether they’re running from their problems or not, they’re all there just trying to do their best.”

“And I’m inserted into that scenario, just observing and also partaking in the craziness,” he adds. 

By Stephen Hubbard
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