Blake Shelton has a Top 30 single, with “Let Him In Anyway.” The song, written by HARDY, along with Zach Abend, Kyle Clark, and Carson Wallace, is on Shelton’s latest For Recreational Use Only record. Although Shelton didn’t write “Let Him In Anyway,” from the first time he heard the song, he knew he wanted to include it on his new album.

“Once I heard it, I immediately said, ‘If I can, I’d like to record that song,’” Shelton tells Country Now. “And then a month or two went by before the session came up, and HARDY texted me a day or two before we went into the recording session and said, ‘Man, are they messing with me? Are you really going to record this song?’ I go, ‘Man, I’m absolutely going to record that song.'”

Shelton has recorded other songs by HARDY, including “God’s Country” and “Come Back as a Country Boy.” But few songs that Shelton, or any other artist, has recorded mean as much to HARDY as “Let Him In Anyway.”

“He said, ‘Well, man, that song means a lot to me. I wrote it with some friends, and I’m really excited that you’re cutting it,” Shelton recalls, adding that HARDY didn’t initially believe Shelton was actually going to record “Let Him In Anyway.”

“I don’t know why he thought that,” Shelton adds. “I’ve cut a bunch of his songs over the years. He’s an incredible talent.”

What HARDY Says About Blake Shelton Recording “Let Him In Anyway”

“Let Him In Anyway” is a song about the afterlife. It says in part, “Hey, God / I know You know what I’m ’bout to pray, God / I just had to suck it up and say goodbye to my best friend / And I don’t ever wanna never see him again / And I know the only way to get in is through You and he / Wasn’t quite the Christian he was supposed to be / And Lord, it ain’t my place / But could You let him in anyway?”

Shelton’s older brother, Richie, was tragically killed in a car accident in 1990, which HARDY did not know when he sent Shelton “Let Him In Anyway.”

“It’s a very polarizing song. And to be honest, when I sent that to Blake, I didn’t know about his story about his brother and all of that,” HARDY acknowledges. “It’s just a very polarizing song, but it’s a message that I think a lot of people deal with when they lose somebody that’s too early or that was a little bit wild.”

HARDY references the opening lines of “Let Him In Anyway,” which says, “Ain’t it a scary thing / When somebody’s time here ends? / Laying flowers on their grave / Wondering where their soul went.”

“There’s a lot of wonder when it comes to that kind of thing,” HARDY concedes. “I think more than anything, it speaks to, if you have a message that you want to tell, convey to one of your friends, whether that’s witnessing to them or even just telling them to calm down a little bit or whatever it may be, I think it’s just a good message to send out to the world.”

It’s fitting that Shelton has cut several of HARDY’s songs, since Shelton was one of HARDY’s biggest inspirations when deciding to move to Nashville to pursue music.

“Blake has blown me away at how he’s just taken to my songs and my music. … I moved to town to write, I wanted to write a song for Blake Shelton,” HARDY says. “That’s who I model it after, and that gets into the songwriters themselves, and Craig Wiseman and all these people that wrote these great Blake Shelton songs. But he has really taken a chance on me. And time after time, I hear interviews of him just saying good things about me. So I love Blake. I love him.”