Ian Munsick Brings Unique Sound to Triple Tigers Debut "Love Is Blind"

“Good things happen when you pick up a guitar.”

Ian Munsick ’s philosophy may not work for everybody, but it definitely works for him. The perfect example is his latest single: “Love is Blind,” released by Triple Tigers to country radio via PlayMPE on April 10. The opening guitar riff is catchy, the melody fits nimbly with the vulnerable shades in his voice, and its word play is so subtle that it works as a bonus, showing itself to many listeners only after they’ve heard it more than once.

“All of the most-clever [plays] on words,” he reasons, “[are ones where] you hear it once, and it just kind of feels right — but then you hear it again, it’s like, ‘Oh, that’s what they did there.’”

What Munsick did with “Love is Blind” was all based on that guitar. During the holiday break in December 2024, he stepped away from music, recovering a bit from a physically challenging tour schedule. But as he spent more time at home, he started thinking about work a little sooner than he might have expected.

“I was just kind of itching to write,” Munsick says.

He picked up his guitar, started noodling and fumbled his way into an ascendant riff. The itch was officially scratched.

“I’m an extremely musically inspired writer, more than lyrically inspired,” he says. “That piece of music really, really started to just pour out these lyrics, and I wrote that first verse and pre-chorus pretty quick, and I kind of just had that theme take us to the chorus.”

The verse established a relationship in which the singer falls quickly, though the sweetly melodic pre-chorus reveals she wasn’t faithful.

Over the next couple weeks, he toyed with it off and on, and he came up with an opening idea for the chorus: “Now I’m right in the middle of a bow and a fiddle/Tell me how long have I been getting played?” The cheating theme is strong enough that the “fiddle… getting played” analogy may slip by a time or two.

After the first of the year, he brought that music to a Zoom writing appointment with Ryan Tyndell (“Springsteen,” “Everything She Ain’t”) and Jeremy Spillman (“Hell on the Heart,” “What Kinda Man”) on Jan. 9.

“I’m pretty sure we were all three in different states,” Spillman says. “Tyndell was in Texas, I was in Tennessee, and I think Ian was out in Wyoming.”

Among the remaining tasks was finding a title. The setup — with the woman playing the field while the guy committed himself — connected easily with the “Love is Blind” phrase they ultimately assigned to it. How they landed on that title is hazy, though they progressed through a series of internal rhymes, including three — “Got me stoned and all alone and wishing I was in Wyoming ” — in a single line in the chorus.

“Anytime I can get the word ‘Wyoming’ in a song, I’m gonna do it,” Munsick says.

When they turned their attention to verse two, they wrapped it in revenge and karma, and — though most songs only use a pre-chorus once — they repeated that melodic section before the second chorus.

“That’s like a hair of R&B/pop in there, but it just feels so damn good,” Munsick says. “We can’t just do that once. We got to do it twice.”

They gave that section new lyrics, with Tyndell dropping in a mention of “somebody done somebody wrong songs,” paying tribute in the process to one of the late B.J. Thomas’ iconic singles.

After they wrapped the Zoom session, Munsick took his guitar into a bathroom, where the acoustics were better, and sang on a work tape that he held on to for the better part of a year. After he signed with Triple Tigers, co-presidents Kevin Herring and Annie Ortmeier asked if he had any new music they hadn’t yet heard, and he played them the “Love is Blind” work tape. They both thought it sounded like it belonged on radio, a move that impressed Munsick.

“That’s when I knew that they were the right team for us,” he says, “because they could hear that through a work tape, and they weren’t afraid to commit to telling me that that song was going to be a hit.”

Munsick co-produced it with Spillman and Mike Robinson (Dasha, Teddy Swims), doing a fair amount of the work at Robinson’s studio, The Fishbowl, a water-themed facility with paintings of a turtle and a shark among the decor. Munsick replayed the guitar riff as he’d originally cut it in his bathroom session, and they added one instrument at a time from there, with the three co-producers playing most of the parts. They weaved in programmed drums, bass and a couple guitar tracks, then had Munsick sing lead before proceeding further.

“I like to get a vocal pretty early on, because I think it’s important to build around the lead vocal,” Robinson says. “You never want any of your pedal steel licks or anything like that stepping on what the lead vocal is doing.”

Spillman and Robinson, in addition to playing some of the instruments, kept Munsick from chasing perfection after they’d gotten takes that already worked.

“Ian needs somebody just to tell him to stop,” Spillman notes. “I feel like I have a really good ear, and Mike has a really good ear, and it’s like, ‘We can’t hear the difference in the last four takes, and they all sound great, Ian. Stop!’ So helping Ian with vocals is not so much like coaching him on how to sing as much as it is telling him, ‘It’s okay, we can move on.’”

Robinson played a simple mandolin part that dropped a few eighth notes into empty spaces in the signature riff, though he filtered them in a way that makes them sound more like an electronic keyboard.

“I had an idea just to accentuate beats two and four of the thing and make it feel like it’s a little bouncier there,” Robinson says. “We duplicated that mandolin track three times and put different effects on each one.”

Given the “middle of a bow and a fiddle” line, Munsick insisted on a fiddle solo — “Ian loves fiddle like nobody’s business,” Spillman says — and they hired Ross Holmes to fashion one based on the chorus melody. Holmes handed off the back half of that solo to steel guitarist Justin Schipper. Aaron Sterling replaced the programmed drums with real percussion, and Munsick sang his own harmonies.

When it was all completed, Triple Tigers was still on board to make it a single. It’s at No. 59 on the Country Airplay chart dated May 23, with KSON San Diego, KSCS Dallas and WDRM Huntsville, Ala., among the early supporters as “Love is Blind” highlights Munsick’s unique sound.

“That is my biggest M.O. as an artist,” he says, “to make it feel like me.”

_Originally reported by [Billboard](https://www.billboard.com/music/country/ian-munsicks-ove-is-blind-makin-tracks-1236253313/)._