Carlos RuizTexas native Parker McCollum happened to come up with his breakthrough hit, “Pretty Heart,” during one of his very first writing sessions in Music City.

The genesis of the wistful ballad was tucked away in his phone, though it would evolve to be significantly different.

“I was looking for some kind of idea or something to go off for a write the next day with Randy Montana,” Parker recalls, “and really just didn’t want to go in empty-handed.”

“So I was kind of scrolling back through some videos and stuff on my phone,” Parker continues, “and I found a video from like 2013 or 2014… And it was a melody of me singing this line saying, ‘What does that say about me that I could love somebody like you?'”

“And I was like, ‘Man, how’d I forget about that?’ You know, just such a killer line. And that whole line didn’t make it into the song,” he explains. “But I took it into Randy the next day. And he was like, ‘Man, we need to chase that.’ I think we finished it that day.”

Of course, the original line from Parker’s phone evolved into the song’s hook, “What does that say about me, now that I’ve broke your pretty heart?”

Ironically, at first, he wasn’t all that thrilled about the tune. 

“Honestly… I did not really like the song,” he reveals. “I did not think it was very good when we wrote it.”

“And then when I was in the studio cutting it for the record,” he remembers, “and I was singing it… I was like ‘Man, this actually isn’t that bad. This is pretty good!'”

Right now, “Pretty Heart” is on the verge of becoming Parker’s first top twenty hit. 

By Stephen Hubbard
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