Lee Brice

“I am playing the part of the broken heart,” Nashville country singer Lee Brice said in an Apple Music interview about “I Hope You’re Happy Now,” his 2019 duet with Carly Pearce. “And I kinda probably did play that part more in my life than [Carly] ever did.” That says plenty about the artist born Kenneth Mobley Brice, Jr. in South Carolina in 1979. As a songwriter, he’s always been drawn to poignant American narratives steeped in heartache and nostalgia. They're themes he comes by honestly: While Brice got his start early, writing original songs influenced by Alabama and singing in church as a kid, it wasn’t until an injury knocked him out of university football that he shifted his focus to music full-time. In the mid-’00s, his sensitive, meticulously crafted tunes, at first written for stars like Jason Aldean and Tim McGraw, provided an alternative to the party anthems blowing up country airwaves. Shortly after moving to Nashville, he penned the haunted “More Than a Memory” in 2007—the first single in the history of the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart to debut at No. 1—for his hero Garth Brooks. A few years later, he stepped into the spotlight with 2010’s Love Like Crazy, his first in a slew of high-performing solo albums, all of which he’s co-produced, and each of which has further cemented his towering status in the contemporary country landscape.