“I didn’t have a daughter and the song didn’t speak to me the way it did to millions of people,” says Crawford. “It taught us that people respond to human emotions and not great snare drum sounds.”Ĭrawford admits that before hearing the song on the radio, he didn’t have a lot of hope for it. “It turns out they were right,” says Aldridge. “We didn’t talk about it much, but the song you hear on the radio is the $500 demo,” says Crawford.Īldridge, who also produced the “I Loved Her First” album, said Borchetta felt the $500 demo could stand up to other songs recorded for $25,000. “We would take that money and go to Nashville and shop around to labels.”Ĭrawford says Heartland took the $500 demo of “I Loved Her First” to Lofton Creek Records. “We would play shows for basically whatever someone wanted to pay us,” says Crawford. It took Heartland 12 years to get their record deal.Ĭharles Crawford, fiddler, acoustic guitarist, and backing vocalist of Heartland says “I Loved Her First” was a last ditch effort by the band.
Three months later, Aldridge got a call from Mike Borchetta (whose son, Scott, discovered and signed Taylor Swift to Big Machine Records a year before), who said he had just signed Heartland to his new independent label, Lofton Creek Records, and wanted to use “I Loved Her First” as the first single for their upcoming album of the same name. Aldridge produced the demo for $500, admitting he never expected to hear from Heartland again. A band called Heartland came up to him after the show and asked Aldridge to help them record the song.
“It was too sappy, too slow, the lyric made the singer sound too old, so on and so forth.”įive years after its completion, Aldridge played “I Loved Her First” at a solo show in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. “We had heard every reason for passes,” says Aldridge. Upon its completion, Park and Aldridge were sure they had a major hit on their hands, but getting the song recorded proved to be a much more difficult task than they had anticipated. “It never would have seen the light of day without him.” “Walt showed me how to write a hit song that day,” says Park. After his first two ideas didn’t garner much interest from Aldridge, Park took to the piano and sang the only two lines of a song he had started a year and a half prior, the song that would eventually become “I Loved Her First.”Īlthough Park brought the idea to the session, he realizes that without Aldridge, “I Loved Her First” would have never existed. Park says because he was the less accomplished writer, it was his job to bring ideas to the table. The story of “I Loved Her First” begins in 2001 at a writing session between newcomer Elliott Park and veteran Walt Aldridge.Īldridge had been certified with five number one songs at the time Elliott Park had never written a song with another person before.
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