Bebe Rexha – Meant to Be (feat. Florida Georgia Line)

She stopped by the studio to say hello. That was the entire plan for the afternoon.

It was the second session of the day for all of them and nobody wanted to be there. Bebe Rexha had come by the Los Angeles studio where Tyler Hubbard was writing with David Garcia and Josh Miller, intending to say hello and not much else, and by her own account everyone in the room was tired and about done. Then Hubbard sat down and mentioned what his wife had told him on his way out that morning. Haley Hubbard was pregnant at the time and had said something offhand about things being meant to be. They wrote most of the song in the next two hours.

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Rexha then spent a while deciding she did not want to be on it. She has said plainly that she struggled with the idea, because she is not a country artist and had no business being on a country record. What changed her mind was the observation that every artist she admired had at some point done something that made no obvious sense. She agreed to it, and that decision produced the longest-running number one in the history of the American country chart.

The song nearly did not survive the production, either. Hubbard, David Garcia and Josh Miller — producing together under the name Wilshire — added a layer of pop polish and then realized they had gone too far, that the thing was becoming slick and losing whatever had made it work in the room. They stripped it back. Serban Ghenea’s mix left two voices, a piano and an 808, which is close to nothing, and is exactly why it works. Joey Moi, Florida Georgia Line’s regular producer, is credited alongside them.

Fifty weeks

It was never supposed to be a single. The track was earmarked for Rexha’s EP All Your Fault: Pt. 2 and would have sat there, except that her audience found it and the streaming numbers started doing something nobody had planned for. Hubbard’s account is that they looked at what was happening and decided they should release it themselves. Big Machine took it to country radio in parallel.

Warner Bros. put it out on October 24, 2017. It entered the Hot 100 at No.61 in November and climbed to No.2, held off the top only by Drake’s “God’s Plan.” On the Hot Country Songs chart it went to No.1 on the December 16 listing and stayed there for fifty consecutive weeks — its entire chart run spent at the summit. The previous record, Sam Hunt’s “Body Like a Back Road,” was 34 weeks and had been set that same year. Nothing in the chart’s history since 1958 has come close.

Rexha also passed Taylor Swift for the longest country No.1 by a lead female artist, which is a strange sentence to write about a pop singer from Brooklyn who did not want to make a country record. It finished as the third-best-selling song of 2018 in America and the best-selling country song of the entire decade, went Diamond in both the United States and Canada, and in 2025 Billboard named it the No.1 country song of the twenty-first century.

A diner in Albuquerque

Sophie Muller directed the video, which is a heavier credit than a country crossover single normally attracts — she made “Don’t Speak” for No Doubt, “Hips Don’t Lie” for Shakira and “Stay” for Rihanna, and has been shooting music videos since the 1980s. She took the song to Albuquerque and built it around Rexha playing a waitress in an old-fashioned diner who wants to be a singer, with Florida Georgia Line sitting in one of the booths as customers. It ends with her on the roadside holding two garbage bags of belongings, waiting for a lift.

It went up on October 23, 2017, a day before the song went to American radio, and by October 2024 it had passed 1.2 billion views. That made it Florida Georgia Line’s first entry in YouTube’s Billion Views Club and Rexha’s second, after her feature on David Guetta’s “Hey Mama.”

The other fifty

Five years later Rexha did it again somewhere else entirely. “I’m Good,” her collaboration with David Guetta, spent fifty weeks at No.1 on Hot Dance/Electronic Songs. That makes her the only artist ever to hold a fifty-week number one on two different Billboard charts — and nobody else has managed multiple fifty-week runs on any of the dozen or more charts that combine streaming, airplay and sales.

Florida Georgia Line have since gone their separate ways, with Hubbard and Brian Kelley both working solo. Rexha released an acoustic version of this song without them in April 2018, which is worth hearing for what it reveals: the song holds up perfectly well as one voice and a piano. It just does not do what it did. The whole engine of the record is the sound of two people from opposite ends of the industry agreeing to be on the same three minutes, which is what the title is about, and which is what Haley Hubbard said to her husband before any of it existed.