Beer's Better Cold - EP

Beer's Better Cold - EP

“Touring, and opening up shows, playing festivals, headlining clubs, all of that has really given me a great understanding of how I write and craft these songs for the stage and have them still be authentic to me,” Travis Denning tells Apple Music. On his debut EP, Beer’s Better Cold, the Georgia bar-scene graduate pairs an affably self-deprecating persona that’s prone to occasional brooding with the rocking attack of a power trio. “For me, live country music has always been a loud Les Paul in a honky-tonk bar,” says Denning. “That's what I did when I was 18, 19, 20 years old. And I like to think we still do that today, even if we're playing an amphitheater or a small theater somewhere. It's just always been my influence. I've got a broad love for music, but it always traces back to Southern rock, rock ’n’ roll and country music.” Here Denning tells the stories behind each of the six tracks on the record. Where That Beer’s Been “I was on a writing trip in Panama City. Rhett Akins walked in fresh off the plane, and he was like, ‘What are we writing?’ I said, ‘I got this title, “Where That Beer's Been.” I think the idea is something like, I don't know where that beer has been.’ And without even thinking twice, Rhett just said, ‘Yeah, well, I know where it's going.’ He had that last piece of the puzzle of the song, and then it just wrote itself. I mean, I love that song because it's obviously about the same thing half the beer songs are—getting the party started—but I love the way it's presented. It's just this weird, stupid redneck thought process of ‘I got no clue how this beer got here, but I know exactly what's about to happen to it. It's about to go into my belly right now.’ It sounds like something your grandpa would have said.” After a Few “I wanted that song from the get-go to feel kind of dangerous. It's walking this line of ‘this is so wrong it feels right’ kind of thing. Lyrically, I think it definitely lives in that moment. But the music and the drone of that guitar lick, it's so layered and thick, it's two or three guitars. There's a synthesizer going over it. It just sounds like this weird ominous thing going on, and I just wanted it to be in that mood of ‘I shouldn't be doing this. This is a bad idea. I'm going to regret it, but it's going to probably feel really good in the moment of it.’” ABBY “For me, that song is kind of like the other side of the coin from ‘After a Few.’ If you just read the lyrics of that song, you're like, ‘Oh my god, this is so mean. This dude is immature as hell.’ The music, it's just playful enough to where it kind of finds a way to be not a guy song, not a girl song. It's just for anybody who is so damn glad they don't have that person in their life anymore. I thought it was hilarious. It made me laugh and think back to Jerry Reed and Blake Shelton. I want to make people laugh. I want to make people smile, even when it's about something that probably was difficult to go through. Country music, and music as a whole, has always helped me get through times, whether it's a serious closure kind of feel or if it's, ‘Hey, let's laugh it off because life's too short to take anything seriously.’” Tank of Gas and a Radio Song “It's pretty, it's dark, and it doesn't ever get really big from a production standpoint. When we wrote that song, I wanted it to be this guy's missing this love, he's missing this girl. But I think overall, he's just missing that 19-, 20-year-old kind of time in everybody's life where you feel like you got the whole world at your hands and you can do anything. Sometimes we get older and we realize we didn't get to do something we wanted to do. Maybe we're not doing exactly what we thought. It doesn't necessarily make you feel great after the end of the song. It's a song that I felt like everybody can relate to, and not necessarily in just the most happy way. But weirdly enough, it’s always been one of my favorite songs to play live.” Beer’s Better Cold “There's been a lot of people looking at the EP tracklisting and going, ‘He's got two beer songs.’ Actually ‘Beer's Better Cold’ is not about drinking at all—it's about finally reading the writing on the wall and understanding what's going on and that's a relationship's over and it is done. We've all been there, whether it's our fault or not. We've had to face a moment in our life, whether it's a relationship or just a turning point, where it's like, ‘Man, I got to just move on from this shit.’ And that's exactly what that is. It's just a fact. There's a lot of obvious things in this world, and sometimes the relationship being over is just as obvious as beer is better cold.” Sittin’ by a Fire “I'm kind of at that point in my life right now where I'm having a great time with my girlfriend and I'd say nine times out of ten, I had the best times of my life just being with her, sitting by the fire, drinking a beer and maybe getting a little drunk listening to Taylor Swift or something and just having fun with her. The reason I wanted that to be the last track on the EP is it's very different from everything else on there, and it's a side of me that I haven't shown yet. I'm at this point where I'm ready to show a little bit more of that so-called vulnerable side. I love those songs and I love writing those songs, because it's easy for me to go there right now.”

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