With a title like “Kiss Somebody,” a lot of folks assume Morgan Evans wrote his hit single about his newlywed wife Kelsea Ballerini. Wrong.
The Aussie native didn’t write the song about his soulmate . . . he wrote it about his mate.
“A lot of people asked me if I wrote [“Kiss Somebody”] about Kelsea,” says Morgan. “No. The answer is absolutely no. It was inspired by a mate of mine, actually. I used to stay with him in Nashville before I moved here, and he went through this really rough breakup and he was devastated. And, I was with him through that period, and I went back to Australia. A year and a half later, I came back and he was still devastated over this situation. And, I was like, ‘Dude! You need to kiss somebody!’ And so, the lyrics kind of go, “Sometimes you’ve got to drink about somebody / Sometimes you’ve got to cry and miss somebody / Sometimes you’ve got to kiss somebody.’”
“Kiss Somebody,” which Morgan penned with Chris DeStefano and Josh Osborne, is currently No. 13 on the Mediabase chart.
If you’re wondering what is the first love song Morgan wrote about Kelsea, it’s “Dance With Me.”
“I’ve written a lot of love songs in my life, but this is my favorite one I’ve ever written,” says Morgan. “It’s my favorite one for a lot of reasons, it’s the first one I wrote for [Kelsea] . . . I wrote it one morning on a Tuesday at 9 o’clock in the morning. I was waiting for her to come on the TV. She was singing on the morning show. And the morning show was, like, talking about gossip or something like that, and it was the worse thing I’d ever seen so I couldn’t watch it. So I put it on mute, and I picked up the guitar and I just started playing this. This first verse and chorus came out in 20 minutes. It’s called ‘Dance With Me.’”
Watch Morgan perform “Dance With Me” below.
photo by Jason Simanek