Thomas Rhett Strikes Diamond with ‘Die a Happy Man’

This week on Backstage Country, Elaina Smith’s co-host is basically country music royalty, and he’s got the diamond to prove it. Thomas Rhett, the man with 23 number-one hits and a knack for writing songs that melt your heart and make you swoon, will shine a spotlight on one of his songs and how they wrote the RIAA Diamond-certified hit.  

Rhett revealed that he wrote “Die a Happy Man” with a couple of guys from LA in a parking lot in Little Rock, Arkansas. He recounted, “We were opening for Jason Aldean, and I remember the same day we wrote the song, I sang the song in the set that night.” He laughed, “There's a video of it on YouTube, actually, and none of the words are really accurate. The melodies aren't even the same as they ended up being on the actual recording.”  

But in that moment, the Georgia-born singer-songwriter knew they struck gold (or in this case, diamond): “I knew from just singing that broken version of what we had done that day, we had something special. I sent it around to my team the next day, and I wasn't expecting the response I got. I just thought it was like a cool love song that everyone should hear. And everybody was like, ‘Bro, we think this is a game changer for your career.’”   

He added, “I remember when it came out, back when the iTunes chart was the thing that everybody looked at. You pay $1.29 for a single, and the song came out and just kept sitting at number one on the iTunes Chart. And then all the radio stations started playing it, and it started moving. Then it sat at number one for like six or seven weeks and started winning awards and single of the year, and song of the year. I was like, ‘What the frick is happening right now?’ It took on a life of its own.”   

Despite the success the track was experiencing, Rhett admitted he almost couldn’t enjoy it because he’s already second-guessing himself: “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, well, when this one ends, what are we going to do next?’ But the good news is that song lasted so long that we had so much time to create what ended up being ‘Crash and Burn,’ ‘T-Shirt,’ and ‘Sixteen,’ and all these songs to follow it.”   

He added, “This year, I actually got the headline, Fenway Park, and that's been a dream of mine ever since I was 20 years old. My whole label was out there, and they presented me with a diamond plaque of this song standing on the picture mound at Fenway, and it was just such a dream. And you look back at all the people who made that possible. I think I sit in a rare company, at least in country music, to have a diamond hit. That doesn't happen every day.”