Friends and fans – it seems like about the right time, so I released another song from my upcoming album, Re-Covered today: “When The Stars Come Out,” which I wrote with Chris Stapleton. I drew a celestial, calligraphy-packed, illustrated lyric video to go with my version of the song – check out the premiere in Taste of Country.  The song is also available now on PledgeMusic and everywhere you get music (iTunes, Spotify, Amazon, etc) along with two other songs from the Re-Covered album – “Someone Like You” (ft. Kronos Quartet) (written with Adele) and “Home” (written with Dierks Bentley).

I wrote “When the Stars Come Out” with Chris Stapleton when he visited our house in LA a few years ago. Chris was in the midst of figuring out what his next album was going to be, but we didn’t really set out to write something for him to record. We just got together and wrote a couple of songs. Later I was pleasantly surprised to learn that he had cut a version of “When the Stars,” and then even more pleased when I heard it – his version is great.

The idea was Chris’. He told me it was partly inspired by my picking up and moving my family from Minneapolis to LA in 2010. He said, “We can call it, ‘One of those LA nights when the stars come out.’” I told him that actually the smog here is so bad that most nights we don’t really see much in the way of stars.

“Dan, it’s a metaphor,” Chris said with a laugh. Ohhhhh, I get it. So we wrote a song about a night when LA’s metaphorical stars come out, and they shine.