G.O.D. is the G.O.A.T.
In an era of texting shorthand, most people can probably agree with that statement, featuring a now-familiar acronym and another that a songwriter made up. God was the starting point for “I’ll Take You,” a song that Stone Country artist Ben Gallaher reimagined, turning the original ballad into a pulsing, good-natured take on commitment.
“A great song can be transformed at different tempos or feels and still be a great song,” Gallaher says. “That’s what makes it great, if you can take it and do it in different forms, and it still conveys that emotion.”
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“I’ll Take You,” started out with a title, “G.O.D.,” that felt much heavier than the final, gravel-voiced version. Songwriter Wendell Mobley (“Fast Cars and Freedom,” “Tattoos on This Town”) supplied that “G.O.D.” idea as an acronym for “God over the Devil,” and when co-writers Neil Thrasher (“Fly Over States,” “There Goes My Life”) and Tony Martin (“Just to See You Smile,” “You Look Good in My Shirt”) got a hold of it in 2022, “I’ll take God over the Devil” became the opening line and established the device at the center of the song. At its heart, it’s a series of choices – I’ll take one thing over another – that sets up the chorus’ promise: “I’ll take you over anybody any day.”
“It’s a foxhole song: I’ll be in a foxhole with you,” Martin says. “If the elevator is going to get stuck, I would want it to be with you.”
The opening items establish the tone. The guy prefers “whiskey over wine” and takes “Hotel California over The Long Run every time.” That latter pairing is a classic-rock reference that isn’t necessarily a knock on The Long Run.
“There’s not really a bad Eagles album, I don’t think,” says Mobley, “but we all have our favorites.”
After using the this-over-that lyrical device throughout the first verse, they continued it into the chorus with the opening line, “I’ll take you over anybody.” But even though it’s the same basic approach, it changes the focus of the song. “It’s just got to make it all about her,” Thrasher says. “You ultimately got to what the song was really about. The chorus is all about her.”
Writing on guitars, the song took on a slower pace initially after the opening “God” phrase put them in a contemplative mood. “I used to joke all the time,” Martin deadpans. “Why does it sound like a ballad? Because I can’t write that fast.”
Verse two infused more “over”-tures – “home grown over store-bought,” “down home over downtown” – but the singer got a little wobbly with the next pairing, “huntin’ over fishin’,” confessing that he might flip his preference on some days. So when he maintains he’s “set in his ways,” the singer actually seems more flexible than he recognizes.
“It’s hard to dog huntin’ and fishin’ in a country song,” Mobley says. “You got to give them both their space.”
As they finished writing, they dropped in a two-line bridge, breaking the this-over-that device in the first “ride-or-die” line, while underscoring the core sentiment. Mobley produced the demo with Thrasher singing lead, and turned it in that November. Nothing really happened with it, and the writers – truth be told – didn’t fully feel as if it was finished. They couldn’t even settle on a title – was it “You Over Anybody” or “I’ll Take You”? But Gallaher kept coming back to the demo.
“There’s just something about that song,” he says, adding that he’d “listened to it 100 times” in its original ballad form. As he collected songs for his forthcoming album, Gallaher and Thrasher, his producer, wanted more uptempo titles, but instead of trying to write them, Thrasher leafed through some of his ballads, looking for lyrics that might adapt well to a faster cadence. When he suggested speeding up “I’ll Take You,” it resonated with Gallaher immediately.
“I started playing this guitar riff – that intro riff – and it happened so fast and organic,” Gallaher says. “It’s like that riff was made to be melded into that song.” “It was,” Thrasher adds, “totally a God thing.”
The writers re-shaped it a bit, dropping a few lines from the original first verse so they could get to the chorus quicker, and – along with Gallaher – they collectively rejiggered the melody a bit, too. Gallaher, at the start of the chorus, inserted a pause that added some subtle drama: “I’ll take… you over anybody any day.”
It wasn’t a complete overhaul. The song felt more joyful, less weighty, but the bridge still sounded like the original. “We were turning an old classic car into a hot rod,” Martin says “We weren’t taking it and trying to turn it into a space shuttle.”
Thrasher produced the final version with his cousin, producer-engineer Patrick Thrasher (Cole Swindell, Metallica), recording the instrumental tracks on June 23, 2025, at Nashville’s Sound Stage. They played the ballad-paced demo for the musicians, then Gallaher and Neil performed it at the new tempo.
The players picked it up right away. “The first pass going down,” Gallaher recalls, “I looked at Neil and Pat, and I was like, ‘That’s it. That’s it right there.’ We just knew.”
Gallaher sang his final vocals at Patrick’s Thrashville Studio with ease under Neil’s direction, and he also layered in the opening guitar riff, a solo and all the fills. With an acoustic guitar and two other electrics already in place from the original tracking session, Gallaher purposely developed a consistent tone for those parts so that listeners could better identify his place in the instrumental mix.
“I spend a lot of time trying to dial in those tones, and I try to keep them pretty consistent, but not so consistent that it’s like, ‘Well, you know, that’s the same exact thing,’” he says. “They’re all in that same world. I definitely used the same guitar for the intro and the solo.”
He also used Neil as a harmony singer as they put the final touches on the song, with Gallaher and his team ultimately settling on “I’ll Take You” as the title. Stone Country released it to country radio via PlayMPE on Jan. 26 with an official add date of March 9. And while Gallaher didn’t write it, he’s deeply involved in its development and feels personally connected to the “I’ll Take You” message.
“For me, it’s my wife and my family, but, you know, ‘I’ll take you over anybody any day’ – that could be a newlywed couple, or they could be married 50 years with grandkids,” Gallaher says. “Maybe it’s a bachelor with his dog. It could even be a career. That’s the coolest part, I feel. The song really can relate to all of that, depending on how the listener correlates it to their life.”
That feels like how an energetic G.O.D. thing ought to work.
I.Y.K.Y.K.
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