Parmalee didn’t set out to revisit their horrifying shooting incident when writing “Gonna Love You.” But as the creative process unfolded, the band felt it was the right time to share their story.
“[We thought] ‘Gonna Love You’ is just all about love and unconditional love. That person, [your] ride or die, that one,” Parmalee’s Matt Thomas tells ABC Audio. “We’re doing the song and we’re starting to talk about the video and we’re just going through ideas and all of a sudden it clicked. It’s like, ‘OK, we have it. This is how to tell our story about what we went through in 2010.””
Perhaps unbeknownst to new fans, Parmalee was involved in an attempted armed robbery years back that left their drummer, Scott Thomas, wounded from three gunshots and with a 5% chance of living.
“It wasn’t intentional at all to write the song about that. It had nothing to do with it. It was just a global love song,” Matt explains. “But when we thought about the story and then we did the video, it’s a whole different thing.”
“We’re excited for everybody to see that. It really took a lot out of us,” he adds of the autobiographical video treatment. “I mean, it’s pretty emotional, but we got a lot off our chest.”
“Gonna Love You” is currently in the top 40 of the country charts. It’s the latest single off For You 2, which is the deluxe version of 2021’s For You.
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