In this BMI Songwriter Spotlight, we get the story behind Luke Bryan's No. 1 song "Strip It Down" from Ross Copperman.
Copperman was the recipient of BMI's 2016 Songwriter of the Year award. He's written songs that have been recorded by Keith Urban, Brett Eldredge, Thompson Square, Dierks Bentley, Justin Moore, Jake Owen, Eli Young Band, Kenny Chesney, Darius Rucker, and many more.
He started songwriting at an early age, and even got disqualified from a school play for a song he wrote because they thought his mom wrote it for him. He learned the fundamentals of songwriting in college.
The next step in his songwriting path is an interesting one. After a John Mayer concert, Copperman followed the singer into a restaurant and introduced himself. It was followed by an awkward exchange, but lead Mayer to tell him about about a songwriting book that was very influential to him.
The book made Copperman fall in love with the lyrics of songwriting, and everything from that point is history.
Copperman co-wrote Bryan's No. 1 single "Strip It Down," and recalls it was quite the unique process.
"We wrote 'Strip It Down' out at Luke's farm. Luke grabbed his guitar and he literally just started strumming these chords and just started going 'Let it fade to black, let me run my fingers down your back.' ... We got on our computers and started catching all these things he was saying and just writing, writing, writing," Cooperman recalled.
"About 25 minutes into this Luke was like, 'ok y'all you wanna get back together on this one?'"
He says they knew they had to get back together on the song, because this was the one. They had all this material and Bryan had pretty much written the entire song in just bits. They went back and pieced it all together and it became "Strip It Down."
Original article at iHeartRadio