High Valley‘s Way Back album, out on May 20, includes the song “Somebody Tell That Girl,” a duet with Christian singer Anne Wilson. The song, written by lead singer Brad Rempel, along with Jason Gant and Matt Rogers, wasn’t actually written specifically for Way Back, but made it onto the project thanks to encouragement from one of Rempel’s friends.

“I can’t take any credit for this song making it on the record, other than having written it,” Rempel tells Everything Nash, adding that it was his friend, Melissa Spillman, tasked with helping find songs for the record who rediscovered the song he had written about six ago. “She came on to A&R this record, and take a bird’s eye view of everything I’d written over the last forever, and take pitches from outside songs as well.

“And bless her heart, she went through the archives of all these songs and found ‘Somebody Tell That Girl,’ and she said, ‘Whatever happened to this song? This is a great song, but it needs to be a duet with a female,'” he continues. “I’d never thought of that before, but that is so smart. And Anne Wilson’s name kept on coming up. I think it was three times in the same week that three different people were bragging to me about Anne Wilson. saying, ‘You need to meet Anne Wilson. Her voice; she’s the next big thing in Christian music.”

Rempel had no idea how timely it would be when Wilson was asked to join him on “Somebody Tell That Girl.”

“We reached out to her; she was already a friend of Melissa’s and she’s like, ‘I’ve always wanted to be on a country record,'” Rempel recalls. “I think if I had just put out the song myself, it would have come across as a little preachy perhaps, with a dude saying all this stuff, but having her sing it from a girl’s perspective really took it to a whole different universe than I could have ever. She delivered the magic and I just delivered the country boy stuff.”

Now that Rempel has sung with Wilson, he is forever a fan of her and her music.

“She’s got something real,” Rempel gushes. “I’ve had buddies text me like, ‘Man, who is this Anna Wilson? Her voice is phenomenal.’ So I know she’s gonna have a huge career and hopefully someday in her book I’ll make one of the pages.”

Wilson was thrilled to be invited to join Rempel on “Somebody Tell That Girl,” especially at this point in her career.

“He reached out to my team and said that he wanted to have a Christian artist be on the song, a female Christian artist,” Wilson tells Everything Nash. “It worked out perfectly. I had never even really met him before; we didn’t have any connections, so it was so cool. And then our voices actually sounded so good together, and I was just blown away by how the whole song turned out.”

Way Back is available for pre-order here.