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From ‘Crossroads’ to “underground hit”: Jason Aldean explains how he wound up cutting Bryan Adams’ “Heaven”

By Stephen Hubbard and Carena Liptak Jan 13, 2022 | 5:00 AM


ABC

Jason Aldean’s always had a heavy rock influence in his music, and nowhere is that truer than in his take on Bryan Adams’ “Heaven,” off the track list of his new album, Macon.

It’s a song that he’s actually been covering for years, Jason reveals, dating back to a CMT Crossroads performance he and Adams gave in 2009.

“When you do those, you kind of look at songs that you want to record,” the singer explains. Each CMT Crossroads episode pairs two artists from different genres for a collaborative set of songs across both their catalogs.

“CMT comes and says, ‘Okay, well, what Bryan Adams songs do you want to do?’ And so I sent them my Bryan Adams songs,” Jason explains. One of those selections was “Heaven.”

“Little did I know that song, coming off that show, was actually going to take on a life of its own and be a little bit of an underground hit for us,” the singer continues. He incorporated the song into his concert set list, and before long, fans were requesting an official version.

“They wanted to use it as a wedding song or whatever. I’ve just seen tons of people over the years asking about that song,” Jason goes on to say. “With this being a double album, we obviously had some extra room, and I’d kind of been teasing about maybe [releasing ‘Heaven’] in the past. It just kind of felt like the right time to record a ‘real’ version of that song, where people weren’t pulling it off YouTube or whatever. Now they have an actual version.”

The second half of the double album, Georgia, will arrive in April.

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