Luke Bryan, Lady Antebellum's Kelley and Haywood Toast Success of "Do I"
"We're a new group called 'Boys in Black,'" quipped Capitol Records artist Luke Bryan Tuesday afternoon (Feb. 9) just before he and Lady Antebellum's Dave Haywood and Charles Kelley joined voices to sing Bryan's latest hit, "Do I." The three men, all clad in black jackets, also wrote the song.
The performance -- which took place at Icon, an upscale condo development near Nashville's Music Row -- kicked off a celebration of the song's success. The event was sponsored by BMI, the performance rights society.
"Every day I wake up," Bryan said, "I get to be thankful for this song."
In addition to rising to No. 2 on the Billboard country chart, "Do I" was also certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America for shipments of 500,000 copies. It was Bryan's first gold award.
BMI's Clay Bradley told the crowd of music industry guests that the three songwriters wrote "Do I" at Bryan's house. Later, Lady Antebellum's Hillary Scott talked Bryan into singing the song with the group at a show in Augusta, Ga.
A video of his performance caught the attention of Capitol Records chief Mike Dungan who encouraged Bryan to record the song for his second album, Doin' My Thing.
"I feel like we're just at the beginning of this project," Dungan said of Bryan's album. He pointed out that it was only the extraordinary strength of Lady Antebellum's "Need You Now," which spent five weeks at No. 1, that kept "Do I" out of Billboard's top spot.
Dungan explained that a country song will almost always go No. 1 if it racks up a weekly total of 35 million impressions (the estimated number of times it's heard on radio). At its peak, "Do I" was registering 37 million impressions, Dungan continued, but "Need You Now" was simultaneously posting 39 million impressions.
Lady Antebellum also records for Capitol.
"This [achievement] is arguably better than other things we've done," said Haywood. It's a tall statement, considering that Lady Antebellum recently won a Grammy and last week had the bestselling album in America.
"This is bigger to us [than some other successes]," Kelley agreed. "It's a little sweeter."
Friends since childhood, Kelley and Haywood wrote their first song when they were 14 and later came to Nashville specifically to be songwriters.
Bryan's new single is "Rain Is a Good Thing."
