Real life often inspires art, but sometimes it works the other way around, too. For Maddie & Tae and their new single "Friends Don't," it's a little bit of both.

Maddie Marlow and Tae Dye say that the seed of the song was planted after a conversation between Marlow and her younger sister, who was trying to figure out if a guy was interested or just being nice (Spoiler alert: they concluded he was way into her). "But it was tricky because we wanted it to feel more mature because we're not 18-year-old girls anymore," she says of turning a title into a song. "We're 23-year-old women."

"So we're like, we wanna take a more of like a sexier, more fun, tension approach with this title." Jon Nite and Justin Ebach helped the duo write the song.

Marlow has more or less been dating the same guy since high school, aside from a year where they split up, tried to be friends and realized that friends don't do certain things or talk to each other in certain ways. When they wrote "Friends Don't," Dye had just gone through a breakup, but she's now dating songwriter Josh Kerr.

"I call it the 'Friends Don't' dance," Dye says. "We went on our first date and I think four months later put a label on it. You try to resist love and it's like, 'Gotcha!'"

In 2019 Marlow will marry her "Friends Don't" dance partner. In June she announced she and Jonah Font were getting hitched, but the wedding was shuffled due to Marlow's day job. One welcome caveat about landing an opening spot on Carrie Underwood's Cry Pretty 360 Tour is that she had to move her wedding date. It was originally scheduled for the same day the tour visits Nashville!

Not that Marlow or her future hubs minded the move. For the record, Underwood officially apologized for the inconvenience in August. It wasn't necessary, Maddie & Tae say.

A Maddie & Tae Album Made This List of the 100 Best of the 2000s! Find It:

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