Performer: "Make You Miss Me" held the #1 spot last week on the Country Airplay charts. Hunt has had four singles at #1 on the Country Airplay charts, all off of his debut album, Montevallo, although none of those singles topped #20 on the Hot 100.
Writers: Sam Hunt, Josh Osborne, Matthew Ramsey; produced by Zach Crowell and Shane McAnally.
Title: A specific title that points to a main idea. And some nice alliteration.
BPM: 73
Length: 3:46
Structure: Verse / Chorus / Verse / Chorus / Instrumental / Chorus (new lyrics) / Outro Chorus
Points of Interest:
1) "Make You Miss Me" boasts some really skillful songwriting moves. The first four lines of the chorus bind together for some typical reasons, such as repetition and rhyme, but the syllabic repetition of lines 3 and 4 from lines 1 and 2 almost break the group into two sections of two lines, rather than one section of four lines. But the writers/producers play a neat rhythmic trick, making the first "Whoa, whoa" start on the first beat of a measure, and then when we get to the repeat in line three, the "Whoa, whoa" starts on the third beat of a measure. In other words, before the listener can feel that we have completed a thought and tied everything up rhythmically, the next half of the thought starts. The end effect is a totally unified four line thought, which doesn't feel as repetitive as it actually is.
2) Another skillful songwriting move happens in the second half of the first chorus. The arrangement abruptly cuts to a spare a cappella arrangement with an overdriven kick drum heartbeat kind of sound in the back. It's an unusual move for a chorus arrangement, when listeners typically want things to accelerate. But lyrically, the song does accelerate at this same part of the chorus, because suddenly we're packing twice as many syllables into the same amount of space. We're left with a really tense push/pull between lyrics and arrangement, which gives the chorus an urgency that all good choruses deserve.
3) "Make You Miss Me" does not have a bridge, and it barely has an instrumental break, so we're basically working with two alternating or repeating sections; verse and chorus; and each of these sections is on the long end of the spectrum. And yet the song doesn't ever feel repetitive or boring. The dynamics of the arrangement do a lot of work to keep things interesting; loud and quiet, full and spare; sometimes changing at unusual times. Lyrical shifts in the the last chorus repeat, a very atypical move, keep the repetition interesting as well, not to mention the Chorus B/Outro that serves as almost a third chorus repeat but not quite.