Cole Swindell and Jo Dee Messina Star in Fun-Filled ‘She Had Me at Heads Carolina’ Video [Watch]
Cole Swindell's nostalgic "She Had Me at Heads Carolina" features a familiar face: The "Heads Carolina" singer herself, Jo Dee Messina.
Directed by Spidey Smith and filmed in Downtown Nashville, the high-energy video visually tells the story of the song, which is a play off of Messina's 1996 single, "Heads Carolina." In Swindell's version, a man walks into a bar on karaoke night and instantly falls for a woman singing the hit Messina tune.
"'Heads Carolina, tails California' / Maybe she'd fall for a boy from South Georgia / She's got the bar in the palm of her hand / And she's a '90s country fan like I am," Swindell sings.
This modern-day love story is depicted in the video as Swindell enters a bar with a group of friends. Although he serves as the song's narrator, in the video, he's just one of the guys, and another man in the group falls for the girl onstage.
A pleasant surprise occurs less than a minute into the video when Swindell sits down at the bar and Messina is revealed to be the bartender. She smiles at the singer and the other patrons before the video returns to the song's story.
As the video continues, the man tries to approach the woman, but he is thwarted by various partygoers. Meanwhile, Swindell sings the tune from the bar and eventually makes his way onto the stage to sing. The video ends with a happy ending for the new couple and one more smile from Messina behind the bar. Not only does the video accurately depict the story of the song, but the set and the atmosphere encompasses the fun, free-spirited attitude of both Swindell's song and Messina's original.
"She Had Me at Heads Carolina" is featured on Swindell's Stereotype album, released on April 8. The Georgia-born singer co-wrote the tune with Thomas Rhett, Jesse Frasure and Ashley Gorley, and "Heads Carolina" writers Tim Nichols and Mark D. Sanders are also credited on the track. Swindell told Taste of Country Nights he wanted to write the song because he is a "huge fan" of Messina, and he reached out to the songwriters and Messina herself before releasing it.
"I just reached out to Jo Dee Messina this past weekend, making sure she was all good and knowing that I'm a huge fan and would not even have this without her," Swindell shared with ToC Nights soon after the release. "I told her, too, that I want her to be a part of it, as much of it or as little of it as she wants to, because she's the original."