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.

Click inside to learn more about the story behind the R5 song…

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.