Singled Out: The Dean's List's Dear Professor

"Dear Professor" was quite the process to get off the ground because the song took a while on the production end. Mik was going through YouTube looking for potential samples and even though he was already familiar with The Band Perry's "If I Die Young," this time something clicked.

We worked on this song for a long time. We kept coming back to it and it ended up being one of the last songs we did on "The Drive-In," but definitely one of the strongest. Sonny was the one who made us work on it, he noticed something there and started writing his lyrics to it, which he kept pretty simple since it was such a pop track. The whole thing probably took at least two months before we finalized the song. We were going to do a feature on it but eventually decided not to so that took some time to finalize. Long story short, we approached an artist about jumping on the song and they passed but then a little bit later once it had started to take off they hit us back begging to be involved. That was a really big wake up call for us on how this industry really works and we'll always remember that about "Dear Professor."

When we finished the track we knew it was going to be a big song but none of us had any idea how big it would actually be. It was kind of a perfect storm of timing because The Band Perry's original song was really starting to hit just as we were pushing our version so it drew a lot of extra attention.

Looking back it has definitely been our biggest song to date. We always close with it at our shows and people start going crazy for it. We're fans of The Band Perry and while we probably wouldn't sample them again we'd love to collaborate with them at some point.