Country Star Nate Smith’s ‘Love Is Blind’ Theme Song Didn’t Come Easy
“It would be so much easier to let me go/Let me keep on wandering down my lonely road.”
These are the lyrics from Nate Smith’s “Love Is Blind,” a country ballad that accompanies a dramatic and intense scene between Love Is Blind cast members Izzy and Stacy on the fifth season of the Netflix reality series.
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“I ain’t that patient/ I ain’t that kind/ a little bit crazy most of my life/girl you saved me, I don’t know why/but I thank god that your love is blind.”
Izzy and Stacy make it out of the pods engaged and start to explore what it would be like to integrate one another into their real lives in Houston. In Episode Seven, Izzy brings Stacy to his apartment and shows her how he’s been living a bachelor-esque lifestyle up until this point, including a “lost and found” collection of jewelry and other objects women have left in his apartment. This, and the fact that Izzy keeps paper plates and plastic cups in his cupboard instead of actual dishes, upsets Stacy, and the two get into a fight about it. She storms out of his apartment and goes to cry outside on his back patio. Izzy follows her outside and the two of them sulk with their heads in their hands while Smith’s music plays.
The song title “Love Is Blind” is as fitting for the show as the lyrics. The 38-year-old singer-songwriter, whose hit single “Whiskey on You” went to No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart, came up with the idea for the song when he was finishing up his first album in March.
“We’ve all heard the [phrase], ‘Love is patient, love is kind, love is this, and this, and that.’ But good country music, in my opinion, isn’t where everything’s happy. It’s the gray areas, the realness of life that you go through,” Smith tells Rolling Stone. “I was like, ‘I’m not always that patient, I’m actually not that kind.’ But saying it to the person that you love, your greatest attribute is the fact that you see past the things that I have wrong in my life, you see past the faults, and that’s what love is. ‘Love is blind to the faults in my life and the faults of your life and I see you as who you are as a person, and I love you for that.’ That’s why I wrote that and that’s kind of the heart of that song.”
With only a couple of weeks left until he had to turn his album in, Smith, who was also nominated for New Male Artist of the Year at the 2023 Academy of Country Music Awards, co-wrote the single with Jessie Jo Dillon, Jesse Frasure, and Geoff Warburton, and was able to sneak in a final cut just in time to make the deluxe album.
“It was a last-minute thing,” Smith says. “It wasn’t even supposed to be there.”
Around the time the album was released in April, Smith wanted to get “Love Is Blind” into the right hands at Netflix because he thought it would be the perfect fit for the popular reality dating series. A friend passed it onto someone who’s involved in making musical decisions on screen and the rest, he says, is history.
Smith is a fan of Love Is Blind, explaining that he finds the show entertaining and he also thinks its overall message aligns with the themes in the music he writes and performs.
“I love the fact that it’s about people who are having to get to know who you really are. That really appeals to me,” he says. “I just think that’s so special because they can’t see each other, obviously, so it’s like getting to know who a person is by their heart, and that’s kind of what I’m talking about with my songs.”
Smith hasn’t managed to watch the fifth season of Love is Blind just yet. He tells Rolling Stone he’s been busy on tour with Thomas Rhett, but once the tour is over this weekend, he’s looking forward to sitting down and digging into the drama. He did, however, skip ahead to Episode Seven which features his song, something he says was a surreal experience.
“My jaw is on the floor, this is crazy. This is a big moment and it’s an emotional moment for me,” Smith says. “It’s insane. It’s my first song on Netflix and I’m just extremely grateful to have that happen.”
Smith’s journey to making music and releasing his album hasn’t been an easy one. When he was 23 years old, Smith moved to Nashville with a record deal and worked on what was supposed to be his first album. He says his A&R representative left the record label he was signed to, which blew up the whole deal. He stuck around and wrote songs for other artists but, after getting his heart broken, he moved back to his hometown of Paradise, California. Smith took a break from music and worked as a nurse’s assistant in intensive care units and drove for Uber until November 2018, when a fatal wildfire devastated the area.
“I lost everything,” he says. “People died and I’m lucky to be here. If I had been home just a couple hours later sleeping, which I normally would be because I worked the night shift, I wouldn’t have been here today. It was like this crazy thing where I’m just really grateful that I made it out but everything I’ve ever owned was destroyed.”
In the wake of the tragedy, a friend of Smith’s who plays with Florida Georgia Line sent him a guitar and he was inspired to write and sing an original song to raise money for a family from his community who also lost their home.
“I was just like, man, the power of music is amazing. This is actually making a difference,” he says. “So I started writing songs again.”
After that, he drove back down to Nashville with $14 in his pocket and managed to sign a publishing deal with Sony writing songs for other artists. While he was writing for other people he says he spent a lot of time honing his craft and thinking about what he wanted to convey in his own music. The publishing deal eventually led to a record deal, and now Smith’s music is on the Billboard charts.
“I feel like within my songs, somehow, someway, there’s always a little bit of a thread of hope, there’s usually always a happy ending,” Smith says. “Even though the song could be visceral and emotional, it really comes from my heart. The pain and all that stuff’s there, but I feel like there’s still a thread of overcoming. I think that’s what connects with people. I think we need to hear that and we need to know that there’s a little bit of hope out there.”
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