“I Get Goosebumps”: Morgan Wallen Recalls the Moment He Knew ‘Smile’ Was a Special Song in New Behind-the-Scenes Video

Ever since Morgan Wallen first shared the tantalising unreleased teaser for ‘Smile’ back in August, fans had been calling for the 2024 CMA Entertainer of the Year to drop the striking, forlorn offering. This was nothing new, as each snippet Wallen uploads to Instagram tends to provoke a sudden clamouring for an official release. Yet with ‘Smile’, those calls felt significantly louder, with the buzz surrounding the introspective ballad staying strong for months after it was first teased.

When it finally arrived as a New Year's Eve gift from Wallen, therefore, it was met with a fervent response from listeners, suggesting that - compared to the other stellar singles released so far - there's something particularly special about ‘Smile’.

‘Lies, Lies, Lies’ carries the heartbroken yearning that Morgan Wallen has become so adept at capturing throughout his discography, while ‘Love Somebody’ is permeated by a refreshingly breezy, summery ambience. ‘Smile’, though, features a level of perception and atmospheric depth that digs beyond both songs, with Wallen pushing his storytelling ability and emotional intricacy into a whole other echelon.

In the newly shared Behind-the-Scenes video for ‘Smile’, which has been made available to watch via Morgan Wallen's official YouTube channel, Wallen concludes the clip by underlining that he, too, felt like there was something different about ‘Smile’.

Tellingly, the ‘Thought You Should Know’ singer-songwriter compares it to the first time he heard ‘Last Night’, which went on to become Billboard's top Hot 100 song of 2023 and set the record for the longest-running No. 1 hit of the 2020s (before Shaboozey's ‘A Bar Song (Tipsy)’ came along, of course). Wallen recalls, “There’s been a couple songs where I have a feeling that they’re gonna do well, and ‘Last Night’ was the last one that I had that feeling on. My feeling was right, you know?”

Morgan Wallen expands, “And I have that same feeling with this song, and - I actually like this song better - and it’s just one of those songs where, no matter how many times I’m singing it or listening to it, I get goosebumps at some point in the song. So, it’s like, those songs don’t come around very often, so I’m super excited about it”.

At the moment, ‘Smile’ has a long way to go if it is to emulate the success of ‘Last Night’, with the former debuting at No. 27 on the Billboard Hot 100 despite only having three days of tracking, before surging to No. 4 in the latest version of the chart.

While it may not be the pop-infused, radio-friendly smash that ‘Last Night’ was, ‘Smile’ confirms that Morgan Wallen is exploring new sonic avenues for his keenly anticipated new album, with Wallen seemingly setting out to not only consolidate his status as a global megastar, but also establish himself as an internationally revered artist.

Elsewhere during the Behind-the-Scenes ‘Smile’ video, Morgan Wallen is seen arriving in a motorcycle, before linking up with director Justin Clough as shooting gets underway.

It's a fascinating insight into the construction of the cinematic visuals, which find Wallen in the midst of a relationship crisis. He's been booked to perform his upbeat hit, ‘Love Somebody’, on a celebratory New Year's Eve talk-show, but instead, he decides to deliver a despairing, resonant ode directed at his soon-to-be-ex - ‘Smile’.

Making the Behind-the-Scenes footage all the more intriguing is the fact that many suspect the ‘Smile’ music video contains a clue as to the potential name of Morgan Wallen's fourth album. The theory is that Caleb Pressley's fictional talk-show in the video, Dark Til Daylight, is the title of Wallen's next project, with an unreleased song penned by a couple of his go-to co-writers being registered on the official ASCAP database - which could be the title-track. Additionally, we have compiled the clues and put forward our prediction that the ‘Sand in My Boots’ crooner will drop his blockbuster fourth project on Friday, April 4th, 2025.

We'll have to wait and see what Morgan Wallen's exact plans are for his momentous One Thing At A Time follow-up, but either way, as the powerful music video underlines, it seems ‘Smile’ is set to be a keystone of Wallen's forthcoming body of work.

For more on Morgan Wallen, see below: