Wyatt Durrette's songwriting career is a series of events that are all tied in together in some way. When it comes to the recent smash "Colder Weather" by the Zac Brown Band, he added one more piece to the puzzle and gave his friends in the band one more reason to celebrate when the song topped the charts. Roughstock recently talked with Durrette about the tune and the day the idea was born.
"‘Colder Weather’ was written a while back," Durrette tells Roughstock. "It was probably about four years ago, and I was seeing a girl who I had met in Georgia. She had since moved to Kansas City. I was out on the road, and it was the kind of thing where we really liked each other – dare I say loved – but we could never seem to get together because of her school and my moving and everything. It was the kind of thing where geography and timing kept us missing each other.
"I was supposed to go see her," Durrette continues. "I was in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and I was supposed to go see her in Kansas City. We were playing a radio show there or something like that. It started snowing in Green Bay, and we had to cancel that show in Kansas City. I called her and was like, ‘Look … I can’t be there.’ She let me have it [laughs], and I basically walked on the bus and that is kind of when I wrote the chorus.
"I had the chorus for about six months," he adds. "I would play it for anybody who would listen. I finished the chorus, and then I started the first verse with Zac. It was one of those songs that I knew was going to be really special. It’s probably one of my favorite songs I’ve ever been involved in.
"I was at my house one night, and I called over Levi Lowrey who is an amazing writer," Durrette recalls of what happened next. "He’s really good at painting a picture also. I called him over, and we wrote most of the verses. Zac and Cory helped write the bridge and the last verse. That song was a real team effort. The piano melody came from Clay Cook. That was probably the first song where there was a lot of us involved in by the time it was done, which made it even more special to all of us. It was one of the first ones where other people brought in the instrumental parts of it. It had a little bit of everybody’s touch on it.
"A lot of people read that song differently," notes the songwriter who also penned many of the ZBB's other hits. "The guys in the band kind of treat it as a song about being away from your loved ones. I wrote the chorus about impossible love and just the idea that sometimes love isn’t enough. Sometimes geography and live gets in the way, and you just kind of have to deal with it. That’s kind of the way I look at it."
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