Chris Young’s current single, “Hangin’ On,” has been hanging on to the No. 2 spot on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart for the last two weeks as Luke Combs’ “She Got the Best of Me” continues its three-week run atop the chart.
But don’t count “Hangin’ On” out just yet. It’s been hanging on for a while.
“Hangin’ On” is the second single from Chris’ 2017 album, Losing Sleep, but it’s a song he’s had in his pocket since co-writing it with Josh Hoge and Corey Crowder more than three years ago. In fact, it was a song he contemplated putting on his 2015 album, I’m Comin’ Over, but it just didn’t make the cut “for whatever reason,” as Chris tells Kix Brooks of American Country Countdown.
“I wrote this song almost three and a half years ago, and it didn’t end up on the last project for whatever reason, and then we really wanted one more tempo for [Losing Sleep], and I was like, ‘Man, we really oughta go back and revisit “Hangin’ On” as an idea,’ so we got in the studio and liked the demo,” says Chris to Kix. “Sometimes you’ll have a case of you really like the demo going, and then you cut it, and it’s like, ‘Uh, it’s almost like something in the demo’s a little bit better,’ and this one was the opposite case. This was . . . when we tracked that day, we were like, ‘Oh, this is gonna sound awesome when we’re done.’ It’s just one that I’ve loved a long, long time, and I’m really excited to see it, you know, climbing and doing well.”
Tune in next week to see if “Hangin’ On” can climb one more spot to the top of the chart and become Chris’ 11th No. 1 single.
photo by Jason Simanek