When a joke turns into a song…
Country music has never been shy about making people laugh, and overall, not taking itself too seriously. Sometimes I wish the mainstream would take itself a little more seriously, but there’s really no harm in having a little fun from time to time.
I mean, songs like “Red Solo Cup,” “You’re The Reason Our Kids Are Ugly,” “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy,” “It’s Five O’clock Somewhere,” this list goes on and on…
But what happens when you try and write a terrible country song? Well, I guess this…
Written by Brantley Gilbert, HARDY, Hunter Phelps and Will Weatherly, the song started out as a joke, but according to Brantley Gilbert, when Hardy threw out the idea, they ran with it:
“HARDY threw the idea on the table, and he said, ‘Guys, I know this is crazy, but I had a title I put down in my phone: ‘The Worst Country Song Of All Time.’
We all laughed it off because obviously it was a joke. Then we all were throwing out lines we thought were funny. The next thing you know, we’ve got this song written, and the rest is history in the making.
We were listening to the demo after we finished it, and I said to HARDY, ‘Man, if we get a wild hair and decide we’re actually going to cut this, would you be cool with cutting it with me?’ I’ll never forget, he looked at me and he said, ‘Absolutely.’”
But then they got Toby Keith on the track, who’s no stranger to corny, funny, country songs himself.
“As far as Toby goes… it’s freakin’ Toby Keith. He’s written some of the best and put out some of my favorite country songs of all time. So having him on it is kind of like that final seal of approval.”
For Gilbert though, the song was a product stepping outside the box this past year. With plenty of free time to write, he was able to push the boundaries more than usual.
“We’ve had a lot of great writes over the last few months. We got outside of our box a little bit. As artists and writers, we have a group of people that we’re extremely comfortable writing with, that we know we’re going to be productive with and we know what kind of song we’re going write.
But we branched out a little bit and wrote with some folks we haven’t written with before, just to see what would happen and what would come out of it. I have to say, I’m extremely proud of what we got on the way.”
Is it actually the worst country song of all time?
Well, since Florida Georgia Line is thing probably not, but it’s close. You be the judge…
And speaking of the actual worst “country” song of all time…
