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Cruise by Florida Georgia Line

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Georgia born and raised Tyler Hubbard and Florida native Brian Kelley both began playing guitar individually while they were in high school before meeting at Nashville's Belmont University. They began writing songs together between classes and soon found themselves playing local clubs, quickly building a fanbase. Hubbard and Kelley signed a publishing/production/management deal with Craig Wiseman's Big Loud Mountain record label in December 2011 and released their first five-song EP, It'z Just What We Do the following May. This breezy summer song is their first single from the collection.
The song's success was predicted by Brian Kelley as soon as the pair started laying it down. "I remember first day in the studio when we were recording 'Cruise' and it was starting to come to life," said Tyler as the song climbed the Hot 100. "BK looked at me and he said, 'Dude, we're gonna sell a million copies of this song.' And I'm like, 'Dude, there's no way. It's not even possible.' And you know, that was a year ago when we were starting to work on it."
When this tale of youthful attraction, music and Georgia back roads topped Billboard's Country Airplay chart, Florida Georgia Line became the first duo or group to reach #1 on the chart with a debut single since Zac Brown Band's " Chicken Fried " in December 2008.
The song left the Hot 100 in February 2013, after peaking at #16. However, after a pop crossover remix with rapper Nelly was released a couple of months later, the song reappeared on the chart this time in the Top 10.
This song found a home on pop radio playlists alongside far more kinetic fare by the likes of Icona Pop, Robin Thicke, and Maroon 5. Part of its appeal is its unabashedly Southern sentiments, as we hear about a beautiful girl who enjoys both The Marshall Tucker Band (" Can't You See ," " Heard It In A Love Song ") and Southern Comfort cocktails. Unlike most hits of the time, the song forgoes an intro and starts right in with the chorus, which is repeated three more times in the song. In the last verse, most of the musical backing is dropped, which adds provides a nice break near the end of the song and adds impact to that fourth chorus.
Brian Kelley of Florida Georgia Line explained to Radio.com how the collaboration with Nelly came together. "We had some pop stations that were wanting a different version of 'Cruise' that we could send out, and he [Nelly] is a labelmate," he said. "We heard he was a fan of what we were doing and the song. We knew he wanted to do it, and literally a day or two later we had the track and we cranked it up on the bus." He added that the pair were blown away by Nelly's version. "I literally think that whole weekend we probably listened to it a couple hundred times," he admitted. "We're huge fans of him. I don't think we could have picked anybody better. It fits what we're doing, it fits what he's doing. He's a country boy at heart. We're thankful that he put his amazing talent on our song." This wasn't the first time that Nelly had dipped his toe into the Nashville sound. In 2004 he recorded a country-rap hybrid, " Over and Over ," with Tim McGraw, which peaked at #3 on the Hot 100.
The song set the all-time record for the most weeks at #1 on the Hot Country Songs chart (over three different runs). It overtook three other titles that each led for 21 weeks - Eddy Arnold's "I'll Hold You in My Heart (1947-48), Hank Snow's "I'm Moving On" (1950-51) and Webb Pierce's "In the Jailhouse Now" (1955). The song finally abdicated the #1 crown after a run of 24 cumulative weeks, the last 19 occurring over consecutive frames. The record was eclipsed by Sam Hunt's smash single " Body Like a Back Road ," which spent its unprecedented 25th consecutive week atop the country chart on the tally dated August 12, 2017.
The song climbed into the Hot 100's top five in its 34th week on the chart, setting a record for the slowest ascent to the region in the chart's history. It eclipsed the 30-week ascent to the top five of Lonestar's " Amazed " in 1999-2000. Imagine Dragons bested Florida Georgia Line's longevity record just three weeks later when " Radioactive " climbed into the Hot 100's top five for the first time in its 42nd week on the chart.
This was the first song that Florida Georgia Line wrote with producer Joey Moi (Nickelback, Jake Owen ). The trio built on a tune that Hubbard and Kelley had already started with brothers Chase and Jesse Rice. "It was one of those days where everything was firing perfectly," Moi told Billboard magazine. "No one got hung up or was banging their head on the wall trying to find a word that rhymes with 'car.'"
This won Single Of The Year at the 2013 CMA Awards. Florida Georgia Line also won Vocal Duo Of The Year at the same ceremony.
The remixed version of the song took Single of the Year at the 2013 American Music Awards. "I've got to thank my boy Nelly," said Tyler Hubbard. "Thank you for making this song epic for us. It's a huge honor."
NielsenSoundscan announced in early January 2014 that the song had overtaken Lady Antebellum's " Need You Now " to become the #1 best-selling digital Country single of all time.
The story of the song started one afternoon in Jesse Rice's living room when he, Kelley and Chase Rice were in the middle of a writing session. They had been penning another song when Kelley started playing something very different. "All of a sudden Brian [Kelley] pops up and strums a chord and starts humming this melody," Chase Rice told Radio.com. "That ended up being the 'Cruise' melody, and we looked at each other, all of us three, and we were like, 'What the hell is that?' He was like, 'I don't know, but we should write it.' As we got more into it, we completely dropped the other song we were writing that day, and I'm glad we did." Kelley continued the story. "The first line of the chorus got thrown out," he recalled. "We wrote it really quick, got it back in the studio, tweaked some things and added some things. Our producer Joey Moi really challenged us to tighten it up and to try and make it the best song we could. He made an amazing track to go along with that. It doesn't sound like anything else that's on the radio."
Bro-country is a term used in country music that refers to Nashville songs about young guys partying, drinking, admiring barely clad women and driving pickup trucks. The first use of 'bro-country' was by Jody Rosen of New York magazine in a August 11, 2013 article talking about this tune. "In short, 'Cruise' is bro-country: music by and of the tatted, gym-toned, party-hearty young American White dude," Rosen wrote. "It's a movement that has been gathering steam for several years now, and we may look back on 'Cruise' as a turning point, the moment when the balance of power tipped from an older generation of male country stars to the bros."
Producer Joey Moi used the hair metal band Def Leppard as a sonic template for the tune. "I came from a world where we spend days in the studio, trying to make a song better," he told Billboard magazine. "In my brain, the template is Def Leppard. Everything with them was a monster hook and a giant chorus."
This song came at a time when music-themed cruises were becoming popular, and accordingly, the duo set sail on the "This is How We Cruise" cruise on November 8, 2014. The four-day trip aboard the Norwegian Cruise Line vessel Norwegian Pearl featured two live performances by the duo, which each guest getting a photo with the guys. The cruise was so popular they did it again the next year.
Florida Georgia Line were a little-known duo when they recorded this song. Co-writer Chase Rice admitted to Taste of Country in a 2019 interview that he wasn't initially sold on Tyler Hubbard and Brian Kelley cutting "Cruise." "I wanted Luke Bryan or somebody big to cut it," he said. "And luckily they took it and made it what it was. Because at that time, nobody knew who they were. They know now."
"Cruise" was the first-ever country single to earn Diamond certification (10 million units sold) from the RIAA.
More songs from Florida Georgia Line
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Lyrics to Cruise
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Comments: 1

Camille from Toronto, Oh Every once in awhile, song lyrics come along that make you wonder why they hadn't already been written before. This is one of those songs. They just make perfect sense. Nelly's video of this is hot; I've never listened to his music before but love the mix of the Florida Georgia Line boys with Nelly. This one will always remind you of 2013/summer.

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About Cruise

"Cruise" is a song recorded by American country music duo Florida Georgia Line. It was first released to iTunes in April 2012 and then to radio in August 2012 as the first single from their extended play It'z Just What We Do. It was written by group members Brian Kelley and Tyler Hubbard with Joey Moi, Chase Rice, and Jesse Rice (no relation). It is included on their first album for Republic Nashville, Here's to the Good Times, which was released on December 4. "Cruise" is the best-selling country digital song of all time in the United States as of January 2014. The song is considered the foremost example of the genre of country music termed "bro-country". The recording by Florida Georgia Line reached No. 16 on the Billboard Hot 100 on its initial release, but dropped off the Hot 100 in February 2013. A couple of months later, a remix by rapper Nelly was released, and the song then re-entered the top 10. The song reached a peak of No. 4 on the Hot 100 chart in its 34th week, one of the slowest climbs to the top five in the chart's history. The song also logged 24 weeks at No. 1 on Hot Country Songs, becoming the longest-running No. 1 single on that chart at the time, until it was surpassed in 2017 by Sam Hunt's "Body Like a Back Road". more »

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Florida Georgia Line is an American country music duo composed of Tyler Hubbard (from Monroe, Georgia) and Brian Kelley (from Ormond Beach, Florida). In December of 2011, they signed a publishing/production/management deal with Craig Wiseman (Big Loud Shirt Publishing), Kevin "Chief" Zaruk (Chief Music Management) and Joey Moi's (Mountain View Records) partnership, Big Loud Mountain. Their second EP, It'z Just What We Do, charted on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart. Florida Georgia Line played on the 2012 Country Throwdown Tour, sponsored as the Kingsford BBQ Band, along with acts such as Josh Thompson, Corey Smith, Gary Allan, Justin Moore, and Rodney Atkins. They have also opened for Brantley Gilbert, Jake Owen, Colt Ford and Dierks Bentley. more »

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Written by: Bryan Kelley, Chase Rice, Jesse Kenneth Robert Rice, Joseph Kelly Moi, Tyler Reed Hubbard

Lyrics © OLE MEDIA MANAGEMENT LP, Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Round Hill Music Big Loud Songs

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"Cruise Lyrics." Lyrics.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 27 Apr. 2024. < https://www.lyrics.com/lyric/32204805/Florida+Georgia+Line/Cruise >.

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‘GREAT F–KIN’ IDEA!’: How Florida Georgia Line & Nelly’s ‘Cruise’ Teamup Made (Controversial) History

10 years ago, the team-up reinvigorated a hit and broke genre barriers and chart records, pointing the way to both the "bro-country" takeover and to historical imbalances still lingering in country.

By Natalie Weiner

Natalie Weiner

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It started, as you might expect, with a truck.

“There were two dudes — I’m not joking — sitting on the tailgate of a truck across from my house,” Jesse Rice recalls of the first time he met Brian Kelley and Tyler Hubbard, the singer-songwriters who would become Florida Georgia Line . It turned out they were his neighbors in a townhouse complex near Vanderbilt, and the duo had heard through the grapevine that Rice was a songwriter too. “We have a little duo, and we’re trying to get into country music,” the pair, still then students at Belmont University, told him. “We wanted to see if you’d like to write some time.”

Florida Georgia Line’s ‘Cruise’ Reaches RIAA Diamond Status

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“I knew it was special,” Jesse Rice recalls of the day they wrote “ Cruise .” “But I didn’t think it was going to change country music.”

The song-about-a-song is a straightforward-sounding, meticulously-constructed earworm that hinges on the most appealing and specific version of the now-ubiquitous masculine country checklist (lusty descriptions of women, backroads, trucks). It turned out to be something of a “generational gauntlet,” as critic Jody Rosen puts it — particularly in the form of its blockbuster Nelly-featuring remix, released 10 years ago this week. Its massive success colored much of what came after its 24 record-breaking weeks atop the Hot Country Songs chart, whether that was songs trying to imitate it or the tidal wave of critical backlash.

“It definitively announced that this marriage of hip hop and country was happening ,” Rosen says. “In commercial terms, in cultural terms, it’s got to be one of the 10 most important songs of the decade, of the past 20 years — whatever you got.”

“Cruise” and its pop experimentation paved the way for the vast majority of contemporary country music, in large part because of the way it seamlessly drew from an influence that, in previous iterations, mostly been cringeworthy: hip-hop. That innovation opened up Nashville’s sonic landscape in a way that’s still felt today – though it also tied it into a long history of one-way relationships between Black art and country music, which hasn’t necessarily gotten a lot more balanced in the years since.

“I used to freestyle over it, so I just sort of started freestyling that first verse,” Jesse Rice recalls. “We were kind of like, ‘Whoa, what’s that? That sounds really freakin’ cool.'” 45 minutes later, the initial version of “Cruise” was committed to tape — and they went back to working on “Rain.”

Initially Jesse Rice was the one performing “Cruise” when the four of them went on an early tour of college towns in the Southeast. But when Kelley came up and harmonized with him during a soundcheck in Starkville, Mississippi, it became apparent that it needed to be a Florida Georgia Line song. Kelley and Hubbard performed it together for the first time in Tuscaloosa. “It sounded amazing,” Jesse says. “I was like, ‘Well, that’s a no-brainer. You guys are gonna do that one for the rest of the tour.’”

Kelley and Hubbard took the song to then-rising producer Joey Moi for one of their very first recording sessions. Moi had “discovered” them at a county fair before signing them to a publishing deal with the company now known simply as Big Loud. “We were very, very green in the studio,” Hubbard remembers. “Everything about it was a learning experience.”

“The very first time we worked in the studio together, it was partially about breaking them of the mentality that going in to record the song doesn’t mean it’s done,” says Moi. “Let’s dig back into these lyrics and make this better.” So they tinkered, “tightening the screws” on the lyrics, as Kelley describes it, for a few hours — distilling the song’s core idea into a pop monolith.

Moi has been in it long enough that radio formats are effectively his first language: “FGL incorporated a lot more rhythmic elements and active rock,” he explains. “We got to this neat, rock-hybrid, very live-venue-friendly, high-energy type of place.”

But according to Moi and the other “Cruise” co-writers, the song just proved to be the perfect exemplar of the simmering shift already taking place around Nashville; Moi’s first big Nashville production, Jake Owen’s Barefoot Blue Jean Night , had been something of an opening salvo, while Jason Aldean’s “Dirt Road Anthem” (2010) put hip-hop influences front and center (and later featured a Ludacris remix). “Cruise” would eventually take the top spot on the Hot Country Songs chart from Taylor Swift’s “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” another take on Millennial-friendly country-pop crossover.

When Kelley and Hubbard stepped out of the studio, though, they weren’t thinking about any of that. “I mean, we couldn’t stop playing it ourselves,” Kelley recalls. “It felt so different and new, but it also felt like us. We felt like we were just onto something.”

They released the song, their very first single, to iTunes in April 2012. “I was like, ‘Damn, first single by a band that nobody knows? Nobody’s gonna hear this,'” says Chase Rice, who had thought the song might have a shot with a bigger act, like Luke Bryan. “Damn, was I wrong.”

He didn’t become that guy, signing FGL to Republic Nashville (a joint venture between Big Machine and Republic Records) in July 2012. Though there were some conversations inside the label about whether the satellite success of “Cruise” would translate over the terrestrial airwaves, and even whether they should send “Tip It Back” — a slightly more familiar-sounding song off the duo’s second EP — to radio first. Instead, they decided to move ahead with “Cruise,” and it made its way up the country charts.

As it reached its first country chart peak (and a No. 16 peak on the Billboard Hot 100 ) in December of 2012, Republic Nashville started floating the idea of sending the song to pop radio — a decision that was still somewhat radical in the self-isolating world of commercial country music. “We wanted to solidify ourselves in Nashville and country radio,” Moi told Billboard of considering a pop push in 2013. “We were very hesitant. It was just kind of a scary thought, of trying to cross over.”

Still, Republic sent the record to producer Jason Nevins, who had achieved overseas success with a number of house-driven hip-hop remixes in the late ’90s and early ’00s, with the idea of creating a club-ready option for “Cruise” — something similar to the promotional “ mixshow edit ” he’d done for FGL’s Republic Nashville labelmates The Band Perry the year prior.

That idea was simple: Nelly . 12 years after Country Grammar and “Ride Wit Me,” the melodic MC could join yet another breezy, summertime, driving-with-the-windows-down song — one penned by a few guys who had realistically been as influenced by the St. Louis rapper’s music as they had by any of their Nashville forebears. (FGL and Nelly would eventually perform the songs back to back at the American Music Awards .) It had been several years since the rapper had a bona fide smash, and his country resume — duetting with Tim McGraw on 2004’s “Over And Over” — was just a bonus.

Nevins still has the email that Republic CEO Monte Lipman wrote back. It was three words, in big red letters: “GREAT F–KIN’ IDEA!” “Monte never writes emails to me like that,” Nevins says. “So I knew I was onto something.” Nelly was on Republic Records at the time, so there were no administrative hurdles.

The producer stripped “Cruise” down to the studs, omitting all the banjo and dobro that had made it fit in on country radio and rebuilding it around a less genre-specific and very Top 40-friendly sound. “That was the one area where we were skeptical,” says Moi. “We were like, ‘It’s really country — it’s going to take a lot to really land it in that space.'”

Very little of the original — besides the song itself — survived the transformation: twangy Telecaster riffs turned into new, hyper-processed vocal lines courtesy of Hubbard and Kelley, and acoustic guitar was pushed into the background to showcase the wall of harmonies.

The result was singular. A smiling country song with veneers, it combined the rabid, over-the-top party spirit of the EDM era with an enviably carefree, breezy backroads affect. Nelly’s verse, in which he rehashes the chorus with characteristic panache, is the cherry on top — the ultimate nostalgic, full-circle moment for an artist whose professional debut centered on touting his country bona fides.

Needless to say, the remix worked. Released to iTunes on April 2, 2013, it was downloaded 186,000 times its first week, immediately returning the song to the Hot 100 at No. 8 and sending it to its sixth week atop Hot Country Songs. The song was already double platinum; it would go platinum six times over by the end of 2013, and spend 24 total weeks atop Hot Country Songs — the longest run in that chart’s history, until Sam Hunt’s “Body Like a Back Road” toppled the record in 2017. (FGL would almost immediately reclaim the title in 2018 with their Bebe Rehxa collaboration “Meant To Be,” and have held it since.)

The remix peaked at No. 4 on the Hot 100, with the song spending 54 weeks total on the chart; it reached the top 10 on the Adult and Mainstream Top 40 charts as well, cementing its crossover appeal. Overall, the song is platinum 14 times over — diamond and then some — as of last October. All Billboard chart metrics and RIAA certifications combine the numbers for the original version with the remix, so it’s hard to know which record ultimately proved to be the most popular. But there’s no question that it was the remix that sparked “Cruise” to ubiquity — to the impossible-to-ignore success that made the song the line between one era of country music and another.

Of course, it sparked legions of imitators, most immediately a somewhat halfhearted remix of FGL’s own Luke Bryan collaboration “This Is How We Roll” with Jason Derulo (which reached Top 40 and was quite successful, albeit nowhere near the scale of “Cruise”). Rosen wrote a piece for New York Magazine about it that had nearly as much of an impact on country music as the song itself: “ On the Rise of Bro-Country ,” which coined the term that’s been bandied about ever since, most often as an indictment of the most superficial and laziest tendencies of country music’s commercially driven side.

The term became incredibly popular, mostly for use as a cudgel against the trend that FGL had crystallized with “Cruise.” “If I’m being honest, that s–t really drives me bananas,” says Jesse Rice. “You want to call ‘Cruise’ bro-country? ‘Cruise’ is a very complex song … not all of [that kind of music] is good, and maybe most of it wasn’t good, but I think it demeans some of it that was really good. Especially when you’re hearing it from people you’re working with in Nashville.”

“Bro-country” became inescapable as an idea, though, partly due to the lack of a better term for the sea change happening in the music. “Even at the time, you could recognize that there was some kind of changing of the guard going,” Rosen says now, echoing sentiments he predicted back in his 2013 piece. “That assessment still feels right in retrospect.”

It was, indeed, a turning point, on a scale even larger than Rosen had foreseen. “Cruise” emerged at the dawn of the streaming age, when genreless consumption — already a dominant mode — was on the cusp of taking over. The unbothered blending of country, rock and hip-hop influences that became Florida Georgia Line’s specialty would reshape country’s commercial sound completely, to the chagrin of both traditionalists and outsiders — and expand its reach exponentially.

“Whether you like what happened after that or you hate it, it took country music to a whole other level,” says Chase Rice. “For better or worse, it’s just never going away.”

It also took almost everyone involved to a whole other level, including Chase, who became a solo hitmaker in his own right; Moi, who became one of the genre’s most sought-after producers; Big Loud as an entreprise, and of course FGL as an act, with its 16 Country Airplay No. 1s and the genre’s first diamond-certified song. “Culturally and creatively, it just felt like the format was ready for a little bit more of a progressive sound,” adds Moi. “We just happened to land at the exact right time.”

“In the post-‘Cruise’ era, it feels like production is really important in country in a way maybe it hadn’t been,” Rosen says now. “The beats came in, hip-hop entered the picture. That is a marker now of all these acts, whether they’re really, truly conversant in hip-hop, or they just have a certain kind of rhythm in their sound.”

In other words, country evolved for a new generation and a wider audience in the same way it always has — on the back of Black art and artists. The biggest achievement of “Cruise,” in that light, is that it actually made a Black artist inextricable from a country hit that drew from Black music; that there was some degree of payoff to its casual appropriation. That piece of its success was, notably, not imitated. Black artists have faced as many barriers to contributing to Nashville’s music industry as they ever have over the past decade: for every artist like Kane Brown, Breland, Jimmie Allen and Mickey Guyton who’s made inroads at country radio and on the charts, there’s been something to remind those artists of their otherness or make them feel like outsiders .

An oft-retold story among those who helped shape “Cruise” comes down to its most memorable hook, which also happens to be its opening line: “Baby you a song, you make me wanna roll my windows down, and cruuuuuuise.” Kelley, Chase Rice and Jesse Rice had originally written the line as, “Baby you’re like a song…”, and performed it that way for a while before Kelley and Hubbard elected to take it to Moi as a potential addition to their second EP.

These kinds of happy-for-executives coincidences typically get explained away with ease. “They grew up listening to hip-hop as well as country,” Scott Borchetta, founder of the Big Machine Label Group, explained to the Washington Post in 2013 of the growing number of country artists incorporating hip-hop in their music. “It’s coming out in their music because it’s in their DNA.”

It certainly makes sense that hip-hop influences felt as intuitive for FGL-generation country artists as for any others who have come of age since hip-hop became mainstream pop. Watching Nelly perform alongside the duo, though, is a stark reminder of how in that exchange of ideas, the money tends to only flow one way; that while it might feel like hip-hop is “in [FGL’s] DNA,” it’s not. The intervening years have brought more efforts by both FGL and Nelly (among a number of other well-intentioned and like-minded artists) to correct that inequity. But “Baby you a song” isn’t just like Country Grammar — it is country grammar, a grammar that is as influential in country music today as ever.

The push and pull between progressive-minded inclusion and the genre-agnostic artistry it can create, and appropriation — from barely perceptible to egregious and everything in between — lives within “Cruise” and its legacy. The song’s victory, though, was the integration of a Black hip-hop artist into a huge hit that anyone asked would call country, and the destruction, however temporarily, of the fundamental, racist genre divide that has defined American recorded music from the start.

That brought them their other win: an addictive, electric pop song whose reach and inventiveness has not yet been exactly replicated, despite seemingly all of Nashville’s best efforts. “We’re looking for the next ‘Cruise’,” Jesse Rice remembers hearing in the aftermath, as labels banged down his door. “No s–t’, you’re looking for the next ‘Cruise,'” he says. “You and everybody .”

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