Story Behind the Song: Brooke Eden, ‘Got No Choice’

Brooke Eden was told she could keep her country music career or her girlfriend (now her fiancée). She called that bluff with a song.

"Got No Choice," the final of three new songs Eden released in early 2021, is an anthem for love — any and all kinds of love. It's especially poignant, however, knowing what the singer went through in regards to her own relationship, with a woman named Hilary Hoover who also works in the country music industry.

The two are now engaged and no longer keeping their relationship a secret, and Eden says this song and the two others she released around the same time are the most authentically her of anything she's released to date. Keep reading for the story behind "Got No Choice," in Eden's own words:

At the time that I wrote "Got No Choice" ... I was being told that I could either be in a relationship with Hilary or keep my career, and I couldn't have both.

That was this really pivotal point in my life, and it was also a really fearful point in my life, because I had been a singer my whole life — since I was four years old, I'd been striving for this career that I was in the middle of that was just, like, finally where I wanted it to be, and, at the same time, had just met this incredible human and had fallen head over heels and was faced with this choice.

And I just felt like, this is such a made-up rule — like, who made up this rule that I can either be with Hilary or be a country singer? Like, this just doesn't even make sense. But I also was really in this dark place of, like, trying to figure out how my life was gonna look going forward.

I just woke up one morning and out popped — I had a melody and "got no choice," and the chorus for "Got No Choice" just popped out of my head that morning. It was this, kind of, answer to my question — not really my question, but their question, which was: Are you gonna keep your career? And my answer was, I'm going to write a song about how I don't have a choice except to love this person. I knew that there was no going back from that.

So I went and wrote the song that day with my now-producer, Jesse Frasure, and a longtime co-writer, Cary Barlowe. I brought the idea to them, and they both jumped on it immediately. Cary added those cool guitar licks at the beginning of it, and we wrote the song together that day.

It was kind of like this putting-my-foot-down answer of "Hey, if you're trying to make me have a choice here, I don't have a choice other than to be with this person. And I think that your rule is also made-up. So I want to put out this song ..."

What's wild about it is, I was singing it in live shows but never got to record it until [now. By recording it], I was finally able to put my foot down and say, "I didn't have to make a choice, and the fact that y'all were trying to make me have to choose was not cool" ...

But, I just love the way that it came out. Because if you listen to [the melody], it sounds like a really happy song ... But if you dig in and listen to the words, there's struggle in that, and I think that it kind of tells both sides of the story. [The lyrics tell] the side of where I was at the time that I wrote it, which was living with this really big choice on my back and trying to figure that out, and then if you listen to the actual music, it's kind of like the other side, where I am now — which is, I didn't have to make the choice; I got to have both.

I love the way that song came out. I'm probably most proud of this song of all the songs I've ever written.

It really did [feel so good to put the song out]. And it was like — it was just an anthem for love, for anyone who's ever had to have to fight for their love or anyone who is just, like, so pumped about the person that they love and wanting to shout it from the rooftops. It was the my anthem for love, and I was so excited to put it out and see other people see their love stories in it, too.

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