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January was a hot month for Lee Brice.
“Crazy Girl,” a song Brice co-wrote, became a No. 1 hit for the Eli Young Band. Then, on Jan. 21, his tour bus caught fire while parked outside Toby Keith’s Bar and Grill in Mesa, Ariz. The singer and his band escaped unharmed.
“I was asleep when we pulled up to Toby Keith’s, and the next thing I knew I was waking up to my bass player going ‘The bus is on fire, we gotta get off,’ ” Brice said in a phone interview. “I thought he was joking, but he opened the curtain and smoke rolled in. We hauled butt to get out and then I ran back to grab what I could, but within three minutes it was totally in flames.”
Hopefully the rest of the year will be more of the “Crazy Girl” type of heat. Brice’s second album, “Hard to Love,” is due out in April and the first single, “A Woman Like You,” is already a hit. Brice, performing as part of Future Faces 2012 at 7 Flags Event Center, said his band is already playing five songs off “Woman” at live shows to give fans a taste of what to expect.
Brice is probably best known for his hit, “Love Like Crazy,” which had the distinction of taking 57 weeks to reach its peak of No. 3 on the Billboard Hot Country charts. That’s a record for the longest chart run, and made “Love Like Crazy” the most played song of 2010.
“It was interesting to watch it go up and down the charts from week to week,” Brice said. “Every week I wondered if we were going to hang on. It’s not a song I wrote, but I did feel it. I knew if it got high enough people would hear and identify with it.”
While Brice didn’t write that song, he has written a number of hits for other artists. He co-wrote Garth Brooks’ “More Than a Memory,” which became the first song to ever debut at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot Country charts. He also co-wrote Tim McGraw’s “Still.” Brice said deciding what songs to keep and which ones to give to other artists is tricky.
“When I wrote ‘Crazy Girl’ I had every intention of recording it myself. I really loved it. But the label couldn’t get it out and I sat on it for eight years,” Brice said. “I was really honored when the Eli Young Band wanted to record it. To have it end up doing well is the best feeling in the world. Sometimes it’s just the circumstances of whatever order it happens in.”
