Just about five miles south of downtown Nashville, there’s a tunnel on Thompson Lane. It’s something you might miss if you blink. But for Cole Swindell, that tunnel was the perfect backdrop for his brand new video “Love You Too Late.”
Swindell penned the song with longtime collaborators Michael Carter and Brandon Kinney, but he told CMT.com that it was a departure for the trio. Together, they usually wrote songs infused with a little more, well, booze. “Brought to You by Beer” from 2014, “No Can Left Behind” from 2016, and “Reason to Drink” from 2018.
This time, though, it was different.
“The three of us were writing together before I ever even got in the room with other songwriters. Those are the two guys I’ve always leaned on. Those drinking songs? Those party anthems? That’s been our niche,” Swindell told us. “And this sounds nothing like that, but it is one of my favorites.”
Directed by Sam Siske, the video features Swindell in the tunnel, while the woman who can’t seem to get away from him fast enough — actress/stuntwoman Kachina Dechert — is driving like hell to try. Swindell told me when they were brainstorming initial ideas, he asked, “What if we find a badass stunt girl,” he said. And they found her in Dechert. “You can tell she’s just a high adrenaline person.”
What’s even more important to Swindell when it comes to making music — both songs and videos — is that he has been there. Wherever that may have been. “That’s always me. Even going back to ’Break Up in the End.’ I have to have lived a song. Sometimes, to a fault,” he said. “That’s why I write songs. I have been there, and that’s why I can sing this song. The tempo of this one kind of takes you away from the heartbreak of it, but the lyric is as real as it gets. A lot of times, guys have too much pride, or they don’t know how to say how they feel. And nobody’s gonna wait around forever.”
But there’s one lyric in the song that says that best. I can’t take back what I never said. It’ss Swindell’s favorite line of the whole story, because that’s what it all comes down to. “That line’s why I love this song. Because that’s the truth. Sometimes people will get lost in the song,” he said, “but I hope people catch that line and love it like I do.”
