The Writer of This Early Collin Raye Hit Was Told It Was a “Terrible Song”

In 1991, Collin Raye released “Love, Me”. The song, written by Skip Ewing and Max T. Barnes, is part of Raye’s freshman All I Can Be album. “Love, Me” is Raye’s second single, and his first No. 1 hit.

“Love, Me” is a sweet song about a couple’s lengthy love story. The chorus says, “If you get there before I do, don’t give up on me / I’ll meet you when my chores are through / I don’t know how long I’ll be / But I’m not gonna let you down, darling wait and see / And between now and then, till I see you again / I’ll be loving you / Love, me.”

When Ewing wrote “Love, Me” with Barnes, he was signed as an artist and intended to release “Love, Me” on his own. Unfortunately for Ewing, other people on his team intensely disliked the song.

“I played it for my producer at the time with MCA,” Ewing tells The Boot. “And he told me it was a terrible song that would never work on radio and that I should consider trying to write radio hits, not songs like ‘Love, Me’.”

What Collin Raye Says About Recording “Love, Me”

Raye was still new to country music when he released “Love, Me”. He was at the end of a meeting, looking for songs to include on All I Can Be, when someone played him “Love, Me”. 

“He literally reached in his top drawer of his desk, pulled out a cassette and said, ‘This is a song Skip Ewing and Max T. Barnes just wrote, and you might like it,’” Raye recalls. “He played it, and of course, Skip Ewing sounded wonderful on the demo, and by the time we got to the chorus, Jerry and I looked at each other and thought, ‘Wow, that’s pretty good!’’”

Raye may have been a relative newcomer in country music at the time. Still, he knew as soon as he released “Love, Me” that it was going to be a big hit.

“It was jumping 12 to 15 spots each week, to where the first single would stay two weeks in the same spot. And then it would move two spots, or three, and then it might stay up there,” Raye remembers. “Literally three weeks in after the release of ‘Love, Me,’ we knew we were going to have a hit. But I had no idea it was going to go No. 1.”

Photo by Paul Natkin/Getty Images

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