Country singer-songwriter Wade Bowen recalls fondly his time playing high school football at Waco’s Bishop Louis Reicher Catholic High School. “It was one of those small schools where you play both ways on offense and defense,” he says. “I was a quarterback and a cornerback. I learned so much about being a man from it.” Was the team any good? “We had a pretty good junior year and a pretty good senior year,” he says. “We weren’t anything to write home about, but it left a lot of memories.”
Those memories form the basis for Bowen’s song “Friday Night,” the music video for which is out today. The track is a mid-tempo rocker that embraces full-on nostalgia, with Bowen unfolding a narrative of small-town kids sneaking beers from the party barn and waiting tables after school, on their way to finding out who they are on a Friday night. The video plays up those sentiments, with help from an unlikely source: Dallas Cowboys legend Troy Aikman.
“A buddy of mine sent me a screenshot of Troy’s Instagram years ago saying that one of my songs was his number one most-listened-to song on Spotify that year,” Bowen recalls. “So I reached out and said, ‘Hey man, thank you for listening to my music. I can’t tell you what that means to me. I had your posters on my wall as a kid.’ And we’ve been friends ever since.” That friendship led Aikman to lend his voice to the track, although “Friday Night” is no duet. The video opens with an announcer, played by Aikman, giving the play-by-play during a high school football game in New Braunfels—Aikman identifies the team as the Guardians, the name of the varsity squad that Bowen’s son plays on—as the song’s first notes build in the background. (Serious Aikman fans may recall the Hall of Fame quarterback’s first foray into country music—that’d be his 1993 single “Oklahoma Nights.”)
Aikman’s cameo occurs during the video’s framing sequence, in which an older husband and wife relive their high school days before we cut to images of classic Americana—letterman jackets, diner booths, Dr Pepper served in glass bottles, pickup trucks, keg stands, balls being tossed through a tire swinging from a tree in the backyard, and, of course, the Friday night lights. To capture those nostalgic images authentically, the video’s director, Cameron Gott, surprised Bowen by recruiting a significant chunk of the population of Maypearl, Texas, a town of 939 outside of Waxahachie, to serve as the video’s cast. “Somehow he convinced this entire town to get together on a Saturday and fill the bleachers, get the cheerleaders out there, and do a mock football game, and really just become true actors in this video,” Bowen says. “It blew me away.”
Gott had another surprise in store for the singer: Toward the end of the video, as the couple from the opening scene walk onto the field to shake hands with a coach, the man they meet was the offensive coordinator from Bowen’s own Bishop Reicher glory days. “I didn’t know he was going to be in the video,” Bowen says. “The first few times I watched it, it really almost brought tears to my eyes. It brought back so many memories.”
