What happens when you bump into an ex at a mall? You write a song about it.
That’s precisely what Mitchell Tenpenny did with his latest single, “We Got History.”
Speaking with ABC Audio recently, Mitchell recounted his chance encounter with an old flame and how it catalyzed his heartbreak number.
“I ran into an ex at the mall, but we didn’t say anything. We saw each other and noticed each other and walked through, did the whole like turn back around and looked,” Mitchell recalls. “That just fascinated me because we spent so much time together and it was like seeing a ghost, you know? It truly was.”
Not long after, Mitchell recollected the uncomfortable situation to Andrew Albert, Devin Dawson and Jordan Schmidt at their songwriting session.
“I brought up this story and we started talking about it and we came up with the idea, ‘I know we don’t have a future anymore, but man, we got history.’ And that just hit me. I was like, ‘Damn, that’s so right.’ That doesn’t mean you have to have a relationship with this person. [You don’t] call them, text them [or] hang out. But, they led you to the next person,” says Mitchell.
“Rascal Flatts has a great song, ‘Bless the Broken Road,'” he adds. “I think there is something that just fascinated me about that concept. You could be so close to somebody and then absolutely not know them anymore. And that’s where that song derived from.”
“We Got History” is currently #15 and rising on the country charts. You can find it on Mitchell’s 2022 album, This Is The Heavy, which also includes its lead single, “Truth About You.”
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