Why Thomas Rhett had to write “Beautiful as You” + more songs outside of Nashville

With “Beautiful as You” approaching the top 10 of the country charts, Thomas Rhett‘s walking down memory lane to recall the day he wrote his new hit during a retreat in Chattanooga, Tennessee. 

“I wrote it on a writing camp in Chattanooga with a couple of guys that I’ve known, but we never actually worked with each other,” Thomas tells ABC Audio. “They had this chorus already written, of course, that you hear in the song, and we spent the next couple of days just kind of fine-tuning that. We wrote four or five other tunes that made it on this project.”

“The Chattanooga times were really good, man,” he reminisces. “They became somewhat of the centerpiece for this project.”

While Nashville is typically where songwriters congregate to write, heading out of Music City was imperative for the father of four.

“I think what I’ve noticed is when I do camps in Nashville, I’m very tempted to go home, which is fine. It’s just, I think when you’re at a writing camp, it’s really good to fully submerge yourself in what’s happening,” Thomas says. “And so Chattanooga was close enough but yet far away to where you couldn’t go home.”

“We just holed up there for like four days and did nothing but write songs,” he adds.