Even though “Take Your Time” has turned out to be Sam Hunt’s latest top ten hit, he confesses he wasn’t always sure that would be the case.
“‘Take Your Time’ is a song I wrote two or three years ago,” he recalls, “and it was sort of my first experience using a unique cadence in the verses and flowing from that spoken thing into a melody and then back again.”
Along the way, Sam worried the song might just be too different for country radio. However, the strong and powerful message in the song proved to strike a chord with listeners.
Instead of pairing his romantic ballad with a standard romantic plot line, Hunt uses his video to confront the topic of domestic violence.
The video features a young woman with an infant who’s in an abusive relationship. Hunt watches her from afar at a bar, laundry mat and gas station. Each time he sees the woman, her partner is shoving her and yelling at her.
At the end of the music video, the woman gets into her car to drive away from her partner, and he hits her in their front yard. Hunt finally intervenes.
Whether it’s the music or the message, “Take Your Time” has put Sam Hunt in the country music spotlight.
“It probably represents a lot of the R&B influence that a lot of my music has, and I’ve always been really attracted to that rhythmic style of music. It’s a song that I’ve had for a while and been most antsy about putting out, because it is one of the first songs I wrote when I started working on my own project.”
