Gabby Barrett and Cade Foehner’s American Idol romance got off to an awkward start. In her new Amazon Music mini-documentary, Breakthrough: Gabby Barrett, the 20-year-old country singer recalls the first time she went up to her now-husband.
“I asked you for a picture and it was weird,” Barrett tells Foehner. “I took the picture as a lead way to be able to message you and say, ‘Hey, here’s the picture if you wanted it!'”
Though Barrett may have felt the interaction was weird, Foehner admits that he was crushing on his future wife at the time.
“I had my eye on her, but I was always really nervous,” he admits. “I just kind of stayed back and was hoping she’d notice me and I guess she did.”
After the end of their American Idol stints in 2018, Barrett and Foehner got engaged in March 2019, tied the knot that October, and are now expecting their first child.
“With Gabby and I, it’s always been that we’re each other’s biggest fans,” Foehner, 24, says. “We’re always supportive of each other. We’re always trying to put each other first.”
“It’s cool because we pretty much do music together now, which makes it all the more fun,” Barrett adds.
In addition to making music together, Barrett has also used her husband as her inspiration for many songs including “The Good Ones,” which appeared on her debut album, Goldmine.
“When we were dating at the time during American Idol and only a few people in our families kind of knew, they would always ask me, ‘How’s your boyfriend doing?’ And I’d be like, ‘He’s good. He’s a good one. He’s a keeper,'” she recalls. “And so I was like, ‘I need to write a song for the good ones because there are good ones out there.'”
While “The Good Ones” delves into Barrett’s present life, her chart-topping single, “I Hope,” is focused on her past.
“‘I Hope’ is the fourth song that I’d ever written in Nashville,” she says. “I didn’t know that it was as special as it was. Even when we wrote it, the thing that got me excited was one co-writer on the song… said, ‘Oh my gosh, I think this may be the biggest song of my career.’ And I was like, ‘OK, now that got me excited.'”
“We all felt it was special when it came together,” Barrett continues. “It catches people off guard a little bit because of how the song was formulated… I think when people listen to things that they’re not expecting and then they like it, they like it even more because it’s different from what they’ve been hearing.”
When 360APROKO spoke with Barrett back in June, she revealed how much the release of Goldmine meant to her.
“It’s exciting mostly, but it also makes me feel so blessed and grateful for the journey that brought me to this place,” she said. “I’m getting to put my music out into the world the way that I envisioned and hoped it would be when I was little, and that is a total dream come true.”
