Lauren Alaina’s multitasking skills are being tested.
She starts a half-hour phone call about her current single — “All My Exes” featuring Chase Matthew — while changing diapers for her daughter, Beni Doll Arnold, born June 11. As the chat continues, she veers briefly from answering a question to talking with the baby, consoling the child through a bout with acid reflux. She never loses her place in the actual interview, though there’s little overlap between the concurrent threads.
“It’s actually hilarious,” Alaina muses, “that I’m over here changing diapers and breastfeeding around the clock, and this is our current single.”
“All My Exes” isn’t a song that draws on motherly instincts — or even, one could argue, adult traits. Instead, it reflects an embarrassing public moment from a period when Alaina, now 30, was still on her own.
“I was 22, 23, living in Nashville and dating other country music artists and dating other people in the business, and comedians, and all the wrong people, basically,” she says. “I wrote this song about one of those guys, getting into an argument downtown.”
Not that the argument was the inspiration for “All My Exes.” Alaina wasn’t actually around when the song got started. Ben Johnson (“Bar None,” “Truck Bed”) and two pop writers, Whitney Phillips (Justin Bieber & Ariana Grande’s “Stuck With U”) and songwriter-producer Jimmy Gutch, dug in on “Exes” during a Zoom write at the peak of the COVID era in 2020 or 2021. Phillips brought in a hypnotic hook —
“I ain’t saying that you’re right about me/I’m just saying all my exes would agree” — that formed the backbone for that day’s work.
The “All My Exes” title naturally brought George Strait to mind. Johnson wasn’t bothered by the similarities.
“Everybody already loves ‘All My Ex’s Live In Texas,’ ” he says. “I just think it’s fun to kind of flip that on its head.”
They crafted a chorus and an opening verse in about two hours, building it around a slinky guitar riff with a soul-pop feel. Johnson sang on the demo with an expectation that it would turn into a guy-and-girl duet, and over the course of the next two years, several artists expressed interest in finishing “All My Exes.”
“We kept rewriting the verses, trying to make it fit for different artists,” Johnson recalls.
Listening back to the demo at one point, Johnson felt like it might fit Alaina, who he calls “one of my best friends.” He persuaded her to put her voice on the demo, and they subsequently agreed that “Exes” might benefit from making Alaina the lead voice and attempting to find a male collaborator to pair with her. Alaina’s then-boyfriend and now-husband, Cameron Arnold, thought it sounded like a hit and encouraged her to tackle “Exes.”
Alaina and Johnson tweaked the song, and they set up a more formal writing session when Phillips was visiting Nashville. They shaped it around Alaina’s mutually headstrong breakup on Third Avenue, though phrasing made “Second Avenue” a better first-verse lyric.
“I wasn’t a big go-downtown person until this six-month stretch of my life,” Alaina remembers. “I kind of mirrored this song about that fight, and he was just saying that I was too opinionated, and too loud, and too much. And I was like, ‘Well, you’re not the first to tell me this, thank you very much.’ ”
Alaina and Arnold became friends with Matthew when both singers were opening acts on Jason Aldean’s 2024 Highway Desperado tour, and Arnold reached out to Matthew on his own with “Exes,” openly lobbying for a collaboration. “So Cameron A&R’d the record, basically,” Alaina says with a laugh.
Matthew’s participation required yet another revision on “All My Exes.” “Once we knew Chase was going to be on it, I think Lauren and I got together and tweaked a few more things for Chase,” Johnson says. “Maybe that’s four writing sessions on it.”
Producer Joey Moi (Morgan Wallen, HARDY) was spending large blocks of time in Los Angeles following the opening of Big Loud Rock, but Big Loud partner/CEO Seth England started priming him to fit in a session for “Exes” next time he was back in Nashville. They cut it at Blackbird Studio A with a small band — electric guitarist Tom Bukovac, acoustic guitarist Bryan Sutton and keyboardist Alex Wright — redoing Johnson’s demo and adding a few extra embellishments, including some Bukovac hooks that built onto the original riff.
“He elaborated on it in the post-chorus, when the turn comes back around,” Moi says. “And all of the guitar melodies that are in the chorus — that’s all stuff we added in the studio.”
They recorded Alaina’s vocals at Moi’s Big Loud studio in a fairly easy session. Despite the singer’s penchant for big notes, “All My Exes” called for a more restrained performance. “You don’t really have to use a ton of technique to sing this song,” Alaina says. “It’s kind of an earworm, and those songs are usually easier to sing.”
It’s an approach that Moi has advocated for since she signed with Big Loud in 2022.
“I’ve really preached that with her, because she always wants to do those big ad-libs,” he says. “In this climate, stylists beat powerhouses. Even in real contemporary music, it’s not powerhouse anymore. Even the powerhouses there, like Ariana [Grande], she will lean heavy on style, but she can do all the moves. Sabrina [Carpenter] is a powerhouse, but she does all of the real super-stylistic stuff.”
Moi enlisted a co-producer, Jacob Durrett (ERNEST, Cole Swindell), to run a separate vocal session with Matthew in Nashville. Durrett also programmed the drum part, using 808 beats to provide a pop undercurrent beneath the country sound of the singers’ voices.
They changed a lyric about Knoxville — the hometown of the guy Alaina originally referenced — to Nashville, reflecting Matthew’s residence. And while they dropped a few harmonies into the pre-chorus, the bulk of the singers’ performance was in unison in different octaves. “We tried to do harmony on the chorus, and it just felt bigger with the octaves,” Alaina says.
“All My Exes” was one of five Alaina recordings that Big Loud released to digital partners in advance of her next album, and it set a personal streaming record for her in the track’s first week. That made it an easy pick for her current single, issued to country radio through PlayMPE on July 28. Both Alaina and Arnold thought it was the right choice, even if it doesn’t match her current story.
“I will forever use this as an example against people who go, ‘Well, you know, that’s just not really me. I’m not going through that in my life,’ ” Moi says. “I’m like, ‘Well, look at this.’ ”
Alaina is less concerned about aligning her personal and professional story than she is about making her business work for the family. “I hope it’s a multi-week No. 1 song on the radio and changes our life,” she says. “We’ve got a little girl to take care of.”
