Kane Brown hit the top of the country charts with “Like I Love Country Music,” the second single off his Different Man album, but the song almost ended up on the cutting room floor.

The singer shares the story in a new video interview with CMT, explaining that he wrote “Like I Love Country Music” in 2019, the same day he wrote “BFE,” one of the songs off his 2020 album, Mixtape, Vol. 1.

“Country Music” — or at least an early version of it — kind of got lost in the shuffle, Kane says.

“I just kind of fell out of love with this one and just realized that there was, like, a half-time missing,” he says. “Which made me not like the song anymore. So we went in and beefed it up a little bit.”

With help from his producer, Dann Huff, Kane reconfigured the song as the throwback anthem fans know and love today — and added a short feature from Brooks & Dunn, who sing a snipped from their song “Brand New Man” during a reference to the track in Kane’s lyrics.

“That is not an edit from their song,” Kane clarifies. “They actually went in the studio and both sang, like, a word apiece. Which I thought was a bigger story than them singing a whole verse or a whole chorus … it made the song amazing.”

“Country Music” went #1 faster than any other single in Kane’s career so far.

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