Videos
- Blaine Larsen – How Do You Get That Lonely (Official Video)
Channel:- BlaineLarsenVEVO
Date Published:- 2022-May-24th
Link
Discography
Blaine Larsen
How Do You Get That Lonely
Blaine Larsen
Album:- In My High School
Track:- #10
Written By:- Rory Feek & Jamie Teachenor
Produced By:- Rory Feek & Tim Johnson
Lyrics
Blaine Larsen
How Do You Get That Lonely
It was just another story printed on the second page, underneath the Tiger’s football score
It said he was only eighteen, a boy about my age
They found him face down on his bedroom floor
There’ll be services on Friday at the Lawrence Funeral Home, then out on Mooresville Highway, they’ll lay him ‘neath a stone
How do you get that lonely?
How do you hurt that bad to make you
Make the call that having no life at all is better than the life that you had?
How do you feel so empty you want to let it all go?
How do you get that lonely and nobody know?
Did his girlfriend break up with him?
Did he buy or steal that gun?
Did his mom and daddy forget to say “I love you, son?”
Did no one see the writing on the wall?
I’m not blamin’ anybody
We all do the best we can
I know hindsight’s 20/20
But I still don’t understand
How do you get that lonely?
How do you hurt that bad to make you
Make the call that having no life at all was better than the life that you had?
How do you feel so empty you want to let it all go?
How do you get that lonely and nobody know?
It was just another story printed on the second page
Underneath the Tiger’s football score
About the Song
Tennessean
Dave Paulson
Story Behind the Song: ‘How Do You Get That Lonely?’
“How do you get that lonely? How do you hurt that bad? To make you make the call that having no life at all is better than the life that you had?”
Jamie Teachenor and Rory Feek asked themselves those questions on the first day the two country songwriters sat down to write with each other.
The session was interrupted by a phone call: It was Feek’s daughter’s high school, who called with the news that her best friend’s boyfriend, 19-year-old Lance Emmitt, had committed suicide. In response the two penned “How Do You Get That Lonely,” a 2004 hit for country singer Blaine Larsen that helped bring comfort to Emmitt’s family and friends, and clarity to others contemplating suicide.
Teachenor shared the story of “Lonely” with Bart Herbison, executive director of Nashville Songwriters Association International.
Blaine Larsen recorded this, and it’s a tribute and dedication to the memory of Lance Emmitt, who took his life. The song, I think, is one of the most powerful ones I’ve ever heard, but I think it’s got a message in the sadness of it all that’s empowering to somebody that might find themselves in that situation. Tell us about it.
Rory Feek from Joey + Rory and myself sat down. I’d been asking him to write a song. We sat down, the first time we’d ever written, and it was a Wednesday, Nov. 12, 2003.
It was the anniversary of the day that his dad had passed away, a few years before. So he had that on his mind, and we were trying to figure out, as we say, a new way to rhyme “love,” and just wanted to come up with something fresh, something uptempo that we thought someone would record.
He got a phone call and stepped out of the room for a second, at Murrah Music over on 16th Avenue. It was the office of his daughter’s high school, and her best friend’s boyfriend had taken his life. … I feel like great songs are not written. I feel like they’re found. We were just in the right room at the right time. If we had been in a different room, a different phone call, we would have never written that song.
You played it for me pretty soon after you wrote it, and I went, “I love this. It’s so powerful. It’s going to help, but nobody’s ever going to record this.” I was wrong.
Well, a lot of people felt that way. (Late Nashville songwriter/producer) Tim Johnson heard it and sent it to Blaine, and Blaine listened to it, and they recorded it on a session with six songs in three hours.
Had Blaine been touched with that in his life?
A friend of his brother had taken his life. We didn’t know any of the details. We just made up (a story). We didn’t know a lot of those things, but a lot of those things (we wrote) ended up being (similar).
It’s really interesting that they would come out that way, and I’m thankful to the Lord that that song was used, because a radio station got in touch and told us the story that this young girl went into her dad and mom’s room and took a gun out of the nightstand, and put it to her temple. She had decided she was going to take her life. (She was) a teenager. And the song came on the radio, and she stood there for four minutes and one second or whatever it is — it’s a pretty long song — with (the gun) and listened to every word of the song. She had never heard it before, and she went into the other room, gave the gun to her mom and told her mom what happened.
She realized no one knew — “How do you get that lonely, and nobody knows?” — the girl’s mother got in touch with the radio station and said, “I want to tell the people that made this song up what happened.”
— Compiled by Dave Paulson
Learning in the Open 