Luke Bryan – That’s My Kind Of Night

A fellow country star called it the worst song he had ever heard — it spent eleven weeks at No. 1 and gave a whole disputed genre its name.

In September 2013, Zac Brown went on a Vancouver radio station and torched a No. 1 country record by name. Luke Bryan’s That’s My Kind of Night, he said, was one of the worst songs he had ever heard — the kind of song that made him ashamed to share a genre with it. It was an extraordinary thing for one Nashville star to say about another out loud, and it turned a party single into a referendum. The strange part is that the insult changed nothing about the song’s fortunes. By the time Brown said it, That’s My Kind of Night was already on its way to eleven straight weeks at No. 1, and it would come to define an entire era of country music — for better and for worse.

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The song came to Bryan finished. Written by three of Nashville’s most reliable hit-makers — Dallas Davidson, Chris DeStefano, and Ashley Gorley — it was an up-tempo party track stitched together from a checklist of rural-night pleasures: a jacked-up truck, a cooler of beer, a fishing line, a bonfire, and a girl to share it with, all set to a beat with unmistakable hip-hop bones. Davidson sent it over, and Bryan committed to it as a single on the spot, though the arrangement fought him in the studio. He has described going back and forth with producer Jeff Stevens until the two of them compromised their way to the final mix. Bryan’s own read on the track shifted depending on the day — sometimes a party riot you couldn’t sit still through, sometimes, more tenderly, “a fun little love story.” Released on August 5, 2013, as the second single from his fourth album Crash My Party, it detonated on impact.

The juggernaut nobody could stop

The chart run was violent. After debuting at No. 21, the song vaulted from No. 35 to No. 1 in a single week — its third week on the Hot Country Songs chart — becoming Bryan’s fifth chart-topper and then refusing to leave, holding the summit for eleven consecutive weeks. It helped Bryan set a Nielsen-era record for a male country artist’s simultaneous chart dominance, powered Crash My Party to become one of the best-selling albums of the year, and lent its name to his 2014–15 headlining tour, a five-leg, 89-show run that grossed nearly sixty million dollars. Two videos served it: a tour-performance clip and the official narrative video, directed by Shaun Silva, which premiered — appropriately for its runaway momentum — on Friday, September 13, 2013.

The song that named an era

What Zac Brown had actually done was put a target on the biggest example of a sound Nashville was rapidly industrializing. Critics had a name for it soon enough — bro-country — and That’s My Kind of Night became its unofficial anthem-by-committee, the song cited more than any other when writers wanted to describe trucks-beer-and-tailgate formula crowding traditionalists off country radio. Jason Aldean leapt to Bryan’s defense; Davidson, the co-writer, answered Brown publicly; and the argument raged for years while the song kept selling. Bryan, for his part, never seemed wounded by it — he understood exactly what the record was and what it was for. Four years later he would release What Makes You Country, a partial answer to everyone who had questioned his authenticity in the wake of this very song. However the genre debate settles, the commercial verdict never wavered: the worst song one star had ever heard was, by every number that Nashville actually counts, one of the biggest country hits of the decade.