Kenneth Mobley Brice Jr. is one of the more active singers of Country Music in The New '10s.
After a false start with an unreleased album, Brice broke through in a big way with "Love Like Crazy", the title track to his first full studio disc. The song set a new chart record when it managed a 56-week run up the Billboard Hot Country Songs charts, and it became the first song to become that publication's top song of the year on Billboard Year-End despite not hitting #1.
Next came Hard 2 Love, his most commercially successful album to date, containing the smash hits "A Woman Like You", "Hard to Love", and "I Drive Your Truck", along with "I Don't Dance" and "Drinking Class" from I Don't Dance. Brice also had a #1 featured credit on Carly Pearce's 2020 hit "I Hope You're Happy Now".
Brice's catalog of hits is not limited to ones he's sung, however. Coinciding with his musical breakthrough, he penned Garth Brooks' "More than a Memory", the only song ever to debut at #1 on the Billboard country music charts when they were still tabulated entirely by airplay. He also wrote "Crazy Girl" by Eli Young Band, which was the top country hit of 2011.
Albums
- Love Like Crazy (2010)
- Hard 2 Love (2012)
- I Don't Dance (2014)
- Lee Brice (2017)
- Hey World (2020)
Tropes present in Brice's work:
- Chronological Album Title: Hard 2 Love
- Continuity Nod: A possible unintentional example; about a year after "Love Like Crazy", he penned Eli Young Band's "Crazy Girl" which contains the line "I love you like crazy, girl."
- Everyone Can See It: "Rumor"
- Everything Is an Instrument: He strikes an anvil on "Drinking Class".
- Grief Song: "I Drive Your Truck" is about the emotions felt when driving in a truck owned by a relative who has died.
- I Can't Dance: Played with on "I Don't Dance":I don't dance, but here I am
Spinning you 'round and 'round in circles
It ain't my style, but I don't care
I'd do anything with you anywhere
Guess you got me in the palm of your hand
'Cause I don't dance - Letters 2 Numbers: Again, Hard 2 Love
- Nobody Thinks It Will Work: The subject of "Love Like Crazy", which is about a relationship that no one thinks will work, but ends up working anyway.
- Rearrange the Song: "That Don't Sound Like You" was given a heavier backbeat for the radio edit.
- The Runner-Up Takes It All: In both 2010 and 2015, Brice had the biggest country hit of the year according to Billboard Year-End: "Love Like Crazy" in 2010, and "Drinking Class" in 2015. Neither song made it to #1 on the weekly charts, with "Love Like Crazy" being the first time in the chart's history that a song that did not peak at #1 on the weekly charts managed to become the biggest hit of the year anyway. In both cases, the song's success was due to abnormally long chart runs.
- Shaped Like Itself: "Parking Lot Party" contains the line "And after the party's the after-party".
- Vocal Evolution: His voice became noticeably softer starting with I Don't Dance, and is especially noticeable on "Boy".
