Photo credit: Jim WrightEven though he already has four number ones to his credit, Cole Swindell believes he hasn’t released his career-defining song — until now. “You Should Be Here” was inspired by the sudden passing of his father in 2013.
“This song is by far the most important, special — everything to me. I feel like this is why I moved to Nashville, to write a song like this. To me it’s very personal,” he says. “It’s about my dad. I lost my dad a couple years ago.”
The moving video for “You Should Be Here” opens with cellphone footage of Cole calling his dad to tell him he’d just signed with Warner Brothers, shot just a couple months before he died. The rest of the clip, filmed in his hometown of Glennville, Georgia, follows Cole as he visits his father’s grave for the first time.
Ultimately, Cole says the first single from his second album reinforces the reason he loves country music– because it speaks to universal emotions, no matter what the listener may be going through.
“To me, country music, that’s why I fell in love with it: It’s relatable, it’s real life things. I think there’s a lot of people out there…that are going through the same things I’ve been through,” he reflects. “Even if you haven’t lost somebody…there’s always that one person in life that could make any moment just a little better if they were there, so that’s kinda what the song’s about.”
This week, Cole wraps up the final dates on his Down Home Tour, stopping in Winston-Salem, North Carolina on Thursday, Charlotte on Friday, and finishing up in Greenville, South Carolina on Saturday. So far, there’s no official release date for his sophomore album, which is due in 2016.
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