EXCLUSIVE: The Story Behind R5's 'Lay Your Head Down' Is Actually Quite Romantic

R5 have officially moved past the point of everyone having their own song on a record.

In the past, we’ve always heard Ross Lynch take the lead on all the vocals, with Rocky, Rydel, Riker and Ellington Ratliff coming in with backups. Now, it’s all changed.

“We kind of got past setting standards for ourselves,” Ross tells JJJ when talking about having Rocky take the lead on “Lay Your Head Down”.

“When you have these limitations…the ‘let’s all try to sing every once in awhile’. It’s like, Rydel needs a song or this needs to happen because that’s what we’ve done in the past. We’ve kind of abandoned all those old limitations because it frees you up to do more unexpected things,” he says. “You’ll probably see much more of that in the future.”

Which is music to our ears, especially if we have more Rocky-led songs like this one.

“Lay Your Head Down” was actually the first song they wrote for their new EP, New Addictions.

“Ross was filming a movie and he usually starts the melodies while I’m doing more the production side of things and he wasn’t there,” Rocky reveals. “I started making this song, because someone wasn’t there to sing and I [just] ended up singing whatever was happening while doing the production side as well.”

He continues, “I was basically forced to write this song on my own and sing it because no one else was there. By the time that Ross got back and I played it for him, everyone was like ‘Yo, you have to sing this Rocky’.”

“He kept trying to make me sing it and I was like ‘Bro, no way I’m singing this song. It’s your song’,” Ross says.

Ross actually, really couldn’t sing it. It was Rocky‘s: “It’s because the story is what is so personal. All of our music is honest. We don’t write songs when we’re not in the mood to write songs,” he says. “Every time we have a song that’s completed, it’s because we loved doing it in that moment and we were saying something that was true to us.”

Rocky tells us the true story behind the song: “We were playing a show in Japan and I met this girl who was a Polish model, working there. I met her on our last day there and ended up having an instant connection.”

“Obviously, we had to leave the next day, so we ended up spending one night together and then the band was off. We kept in touch after that and decided to met up in Curacao [which was great. Her flight was delayed and I roamed the island for a few days before]. We met up in Korea after that and we kind of had this long distance relationship going on, but there was always kind of this feeling that it had to end at some point, but only because of the distance.”

While Rocky and the model still keep in touch, they “said our goodbyes after our final trip back to Japan and now, it’s a song.”

“Lay Your Head Down” is also Rocky‘s full-length song that he sings on.

“There are a couple of older songs that I sang verses on, and never really wanted to, it just kind of happened that way,” he admits. “This is the first one where I sing the entire thing. People seem to like it so far.”

We have a feeling fans will be wanting more…much more.

New Addictions is out on Friday, May 12th.

EXCLUSIVE: R5's Rocky & Ross Lynch Dish About What It Took For Them To Be Producers On 'New Addictions'

You hear it don’t you? R5‘s new EP, New Addictions is different — it’s better.

The reason is all because Rocky and Ross Lynch are the ones behind it all — they’re the producers.

“It feels really good to have that producer title now,” Rocky tells us. “We’ve been writing and producing music for a long time, but everyone always told us that it wasn’t good enough or it doesn’t sound like other writers and producers are sending in for us to record.”

“It was always a battle with ‘we like these songs we’re making’, but others were basically saying no,” he shared.

But things started to turn around with “If”: “[That] was the first song we finished where we are the only writers and producers on that track. We wrote, we engineered it, we recorded all the vocals, we produced it — just Ross, me and Ellington Ratliff.”

He continued, “We actually popped a bottle of champagne after I sent it into the mixer to celebrate. It was a moment that we’ve been working for, for a long time. We finally arrived there and now that we’ve broken that boundary of others not letting us do it ourselves, we got past that stage and now we are accepted as writers/producers now and can continue to do that.

“I’m excited for the next stage of doing that more and growing as a writing team and seeing where that takes us.”

Getting that producer title didn’t come easy for the guys, and Rocky is the first to admit it.

“The biggest issue with our past songs that we wrote and pitched was that they didn’t sound good enough,” he says. “We’ve always been creative people and we’ve written good songs. The best songs were always the simple ones and when we were starting out as writers, that wasn’t the problem.”

“It was more that our songs didn’t sound anything like others that were being pitched to us from others. They really sounded like crap. They had better microphones…everything they had, it was better than the technology that we were using,” Rocky adds. “We were forced to teach ourselves how to do it all. We sent in a couple of songs to our label and they told us it wasn’t good. We were comparing our songs to the other songs that had been mixed and took it upon ourselves to just be better.

And he did — he re-learned basically everything he knew.

“I watched videos, I read more, I bought better plugins to make the songs sound better and now, they do,” Rocky says. “We put the time in…Ross records all his own vocals, he’s a great vocal producer now and it shows. We decided to do it ourselves and strive to make ourselves better and we got there.”

Ross added further, “We started trying to be self sufficient and have arrived at that spot.”

So now, it’s just about getting ever better.

“From here on out, it’s now about growth,” Ross says. “We’re only competing with ourselves and the question is just how can we continue write better songs and continue to push the envelope as far as our genre? We’re just really looking forward to creating more music.”

New Addictions is out NOW and you can get all the stories behind the songs — “If“, “Red Velvet“, “Lay Your Head Down“, “Trading Time” and their cover of INXS‘ “Need You Tonight” — on JJJ.