Co-written by Wallen, Florida Georgia Line's Tyler Hubbard, Brian Kelley and Jordan Schmidt in 2017, the song stemmed from an emotional point Hubbard made putting himself in his wife Hayley's position, that it must be hard to love someone who's on the road all the time. Once the idea was put out into the universe, there was no question it was a hit waiting to be written.
"Tyler said that he had looked at Hayley and how he figured, you know, it was kind of hard with his job and everything that he has to do — how it might be hard to love me," Wallen recalls of writing the "You Make It Easy" lyrics. "He just told her that she makes it easy, so we all just kind of like, 'Damn, well that sounds like a song right there, man, why don't we just write that?' And so we did. It was just a pretty natural feeling song, just pretty straight forward. The idea came from Tyler and Hayley Hubbard."
The "Up Down" singer reveals that the writing process for "You Make It Easy" was as natural and, well, easy as the title implies, with the collaboration taking shape organically.
"We had the hook to start it off with ... we just started off right there at the top and just wrote the rest of it. I think we wrote the first verse, then most of the chorus including the hook, and then we wrote the second verse and then we came back and kind of got the rest of the chorus to go along with it," he says.
It was Schmidt who had the groove, is fair to compare to Keith Urban's powerful hit "Blue Ain't Your Color" because of its 6/8 measure and waltz-style rhythm. "I believe he [Schmidt] had already had that the vibe created for us when we came in the room, so it was just kind of there and we felt like that fit the vibe," Wallen says.
"There's not a whole lot of songs in country music to compare it to, so I'd say that's automatically the most recent and so I understand that," he adds of the comparison to Urban's hit. The "You Make It Easy" lyrics find Aldean grateful for his wife, expressing how she makes a hectic life more peaceful.
"You make it easy / Lovin' up on you / Make it easy / With every little thing you do / You're my sunshine in the darkest days / My better half, my saving grace / You make me who I wanna be / You make it easy," he sings, praising her in the chorus. While the demo of the track, which features Wallen on lead vocals, is very similar to the version Aldean cut, those roaming guitar riffs are all Aldean.
"That would definitely be something that he also added to the equation," Wallen admits. "I love his recording. I bought it this morning and listened to it a couple times. I've been listening to Jason Aldean since I was like 13 years old, so it's really incredible for me to be able to say that I'm part of writing a song that he's using as a next single."
All of the writers felt "You Make It Easy" was special (Wallen admits he was tempted to cut it himself), but there wasn't any hesitation about handing it over to a superstar like Aldean. They knew he would help the song soar to new heights.
"We all knew it," Wallen says of their instinct that "You Make It Easy" will be a hit. "I wanted to sing it too, it was just kind of one of those songs that everybody was like, 'Well, this is awesome.' And they [FGL] weren't really cutting at the time; I was obviously looking for songs, but Jason Aldean hears a song and he loves it — and especially at the time, for me, it was just something that I was willing to let go of for him."
"You Make it Easy" is the lead song off Aldean's recently-announced upcoming album, Rearview Town.
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