Ryan Hurd Talks Teaming Up with Wife Maren Morris on 'Every Other Memory,' Covering Taylor Swift

Ryan Hurd is back with a nostalgic new track.

Last week, the singer-songwriter released his new single "Every Other Memory." On the lovesick tune — which features backing vocals by his wife, Maren Morris — Hurd sings of the early days of a love story.

The "To a T" singer, 33, recently opened up to PEOPLE about the new song and more over a phone interview from his Nashville home, where he is social distancing amid the coronavirus pandemic with Morris, 30, and their 5-week-old son, Hayes Andrew.

Tell me about "Every Other Memory" and how it came together.

I wrote it in March of last year, so it's been a year. I think this is the most accessible thing that I've done as far as country music and with the idea of going to country radio. But I just love playing on that nostalgia. I think that if you do it in a creative way, it works every time. It's really fun to just write what I feel like is a great country song. When we started working on this song in the studio, it was immediately a feeling that this was special.

You're an artist, but you're also a professional songwriter and. Did you know that this was a song you wanted to hold on to rather than have another artist record?

Yeah, we held this one for me immediately just because we knew it was really a special tune. I don't know why; it's just one of those songs that you just hear it and it feels like it fits me. It feels like you've known it forever. So those are the really special songs. It's been really fun to have the fans react the way that they have.

Maren sings with you again on this one — that must be pretty meaningful.

She, obviously, sang the harmonies on "To a T." This time, we were all in the studio and the song was getting recorded, and it just felt really special. And she looked around, and our manager was there, and she was like, "I want to sing on this. Can I sing on this?" She definitely has an open invitation, and it's always fun when she gets excited about something — it just means that my compass is right. I love having her do anything musically with me, and she adds such a really cool layer with her vocals. It's really fun to get to sing with your partner.

You covered Taylor Swift's "Dress" on the road last year, and you just dropped your rendition of her song "False God" after performing it on your most recent tour. What is it about her songs that strikes a chord with you?

I just have a massive amount of respect for her as a writer. They're just very poetic, and I think they feel like rock songs kind of when you start to get into them. When we did "Dress," it was amazing the way that she thought of building breath — she made sure that she could breathe into the chorus. But I think with this song ["False God"] the lyric reminded me of a Hemingway short story "Hills Like White Elephants," where these two people are having a conversation that is sort of circling around what they actually mean. And so I think it's fun to do kind of a deeper cut on her stuff because it's only the people who really are into her catalog are familiar with it.

Every single person who tours right now has Taylor Swift fans that come to their shows because she's the biggest artist in the world. So it's really just a special thing to have her fans like it and respect it. It's one of the only good parts about being locked down; we've had an opportunity to be creative like that. We tried some other covers before we did that one on our tour and just felt like, "You know what, we're going to take a stab at this, because I think that it'll really go over well."