Drake Milligan has been itching to flex his acting muscles ever since he portrayed the legendary Elvis Presley in the movie CMT series Sun Records. But he never imagined himself flexing that acting muscle alongside him Cheer star Gabi Butler.
“I had never met Gabi before,” says Milligan, 25, in a recent interview with PEOPLE. “We hit it off, made new friends there and had a lot of fun. Gabi is a natural. She seemed very comfortable in front of the camera and was just able to really show all the little emotions. And she looked great in front of the cameras.”
The two also came out of it with a music video for Milligan’s new song “What I Couldn’t Forget.”
“One of my favorite parts about this video is that I got to have all my friends in there,” Milligan explains of the music video, which was shot over two days in Nashville and is now premiering exclusively on PEOPLE. “In addition to Gabi being there, one of my friends from Texas came with me and was all over the videos. And everyone on my crew, people who work with my team, my social media team, my tour manager, all my band and his friends that I have around Nashville pitched in and we used them as extras in the video.”
The track is featured on Milligan’s new EP Jukebox songsit comes out on friday.
Drake Milligan.
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It’s a friendship that certainly grew stronger last April, when Milligan and his bandmates were involved in a bus accident while traveling between Fort Worth and Georgetown, Texas, when a tire blew into the van he and his bandmates were traveling in. , causing their vehicle to crash into a concrete center.
“Most of us were asleep when it happened,” reflects Milligan, who received 11 staples to the head after being hit by what he thought was a microwave oven. “It was pretty scary. My first reaction was to make sure everyone was okay. Once I realized I wasn’t really hurt, I wanted to make sure everyone was okay. And luckily, most of them were.”
But the successful singer/songwriter is still thinking about it.
“After that, you never want to take any show for granted, because it could be your last show,” says Milligan, who was recently cited as “one of the most successful acts in American talent history” by Judge Howie Mandel. “Sleeping in the van is no longer easy for me. If I fall asleep and we hit a bump or something, I wake up. But I think the more you do it, the better it gets again. The biggest thing is that we learned not to be too careful.”
And while Milligan says his current relationship is currently single, he says writing love songs often makes him reminisce about his past.
“You’re trying to think about past relationships or maybe the kind of relationship you want to be in when you’re writing this stuff,” says Milligan. “Heartbreaking stuff is also pretty simple.”
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Drake Milligan.
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But for “What I Couldn’t Forget,” which Milligan co-wrote with Derek Bahr and Marv Green, all that mattered was that he found himself back in his creative pocket.
“I love that mid-2000s country sound, and that’s what I wanted to achieve with this song,” says Milligan, who is due out with Cody Johnson later this year. ‘
“I love that kind of quirky little tune that grabs you, with lots of violins all over the place and the kind of traditional country revival that happened in the early 2000s with George [Strait] and Easton Corbin and Billy Currington. We kind of wanted a little bit of that feeling on this track.”
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Source: HIS Education