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.

Tyler Hubbard was in a Los Angeles studio with two other writers when Bebe Rexha put her head round the door. She was not there to work. She was there to say hello, and that was the whole of it. What turned a social visit into a writing session was something Hubbard’s wife Haley had said to him on his way out that morning — that if it was meant to be, a song would come out of the day. They picked the phrase up and used it, and inside a couple of hours most of the record existed.

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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.

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.