Break-Up Phrase ‘We Can Still Be Friends’ Inspired Brett Young’s ‘Like I Loved You’

After notching two chart-topping hits from his self-titled debut album, Brett Young is ready to see if three is a charm with his latest single, “Like I Loved You.” Young croons in the three-and-a-half minute clip about how frustrating it can be to hear the typically unrealistic phrase “we can still be friends” at the end of a relationship.

The California native wrote the track with Jesse Lee (Kelsea Ballerini “Peter Pan”) just after he moved to Nashville, prior to locking down his record deal. After two and a half hours of hitting a wall, the two decided to break for lunch.

“We were sitting at lunch and she started telling one of her horror stories in relationships,” Young recalled to Sounds Like Nashville and other media. “Within the conversation, she said something like, ‘And then at the end of it, he asked me if we could still be friends.’ And she got so fired up. She’s like, ‘Who thinks that that’s ever a good idea?’ She started flipping out about it and I’m normally the passionate, crazy one in the conversation, so when I heard the kind of passion she had for that, I had been so excited to get out of the writing, get to lunch, and be done with it because it was a rough write before that. But when I saw that, I went, ‘You know, we gotta go back. We gotta write that song.’”

The two combined their past relationship experiences into the track, one that Young is “really excited” to send to radio.

“Like I Loved You” is the follow-up to his platinum-selling single “In Case You Didn’t Know.” Brett Young will continue sharing his music with fans as he treks across the nation for Lady Antebellum’s You Look Good World Tour.