Julia Cole Sends Her Final Regards to Ex-Boyfriend in ‘Thank God We Broke Up’ [Listen]

It was a night Julia Cole had long been looking forward to. The country music singer was celebrating her one-year anniversary with her boyfriend, and the couple decided to celebrate by going to a party.

It was going to be a great night…until it wasn’t.

“He got so drunk that he was throwing up in the front yard,” Cole says with a slight chuckle during a recent interview with Taste of Country. “I was like, ‘This isn't right. This isn't what I should be having to put up with.”

So, they broke up. But Cole didn’t walk away empty-handed. Actually, far from it. Because the singer-songwriter born and raised in Texas brought the unfortunate experience into a Nashville writing room in the Summer of 2021, and what came out was the song “Thank God We Broke Up.”

And yes, she included ‘throw up’ in the lyrics.

“A lot of people have asked me how I put ‘throw up’ in a song," Cole says of the song her camp rush released as a result of its TikTok tease racking up 1.4 million views in March of 2022. “I know so many people that have resonated with that line specifically, because they've been with someone who either abuses alcohol or considers partying a priority over their love and their relationship. I'm just glad that it ended up sounding cool.”

“The basic premise of the song was that it is never the right decision to be with somebody who isn't going to treat you right,” Cole says of the song she wrote alongside Josh Ronen, "Messy" David Asher Mescon, Steven Battey and Cole Burkett. “It's never the right decision to be with someone who's going to make you feel less than worthy.”

And it’s this bigger message that Cole finds so very important.

“Just the fact that all of these women writing me were actually looking for an excuse to get out of a bad relationship, and now they are using my song to do just that means a lot to me,” says Cole, who was named to CMT’s Next Women of Country class earlier in 2022. “If my music can empower some of these women and men, I feel like that’s a real good thing.”

As relatable as the song is, so is its music video.

“We were on tour, and we were in this seedy little hotel room that the promoters from the tour got comped for us,” she says with a chuckle of the video directed by Alejandro Medina III. “We looked around, and it was just too good. We knew we had to make the video right then and there. I even wore the same outfit in the video that I had wore on stage that night for the show. I’m pretty sure we didn’t get to filming it until midnight.”

It's this sort of pace that has spelled success for Cole, who has found that it’s the key to the Nashville game at the moment.

“It’s all about consistently releasing new music,” says Cole, who has opened artists including Dan + Shay, Dierks Bentley and Kane Brown, along with performing on the Grand Ole Opry stage alongside Charles Esten.

“You just don't know what song is going to work,” Cole continues. “And so, with every song I release, it's kind of a lottery ticket and I just let the fans decide."