The first few times through Luke Bryan’s latest single, the hook might throw a listener or two off.
Did he really just sing, “She country and she knows it?” She? Not she’s?
Yup. He wrong, and he knows it.
“Your high school English teacher would certainly cringe at that,” Bryan concedes. “But, you know, it sounds a little country when you’re saying it that way.”
“Country and She Knows It” also sounds utterly engaging. Between its Western-tipped signature riff, relentless backbeat and engaging melody, it’s three minutes of energetic uplift, a worthy distraction from the world at large. It hooky and he knows it.
“I always like to envision people in the summertime dancing at the lake on their boats,” he says. “And this feels like they’ll be doing that with this song.”
“Country and She Knows It” was created last fall, as songwriter Matt Dragstrem (“Water at a Wedding,” “One Margarita”) hosted a writing session at his workplace in Nashville’s 12 South neighborhood on Nov. 3. Josh Miller (“Brunette,” “Meant to Be”) and Parker Welling (“Ride, Ride, Ride,” “Blue Tacoma”) joined for the day, and since they weren’t writing with an artist, they had the freedom to chase whatever arose. Once they agreed to work with the “Country and She Knows It” title, a direction quickly emerged. The good-time attitude was evident, and Drag developed a two-chord progression that challenged convention: a minor chord alternating with a major-seventh chord, no standard three-note major triad.
“I’m like, ‘What if we just had it fun, but with minor chords,’” he says. “We made it a little darker.”
Dragstrem built a chugging, rhythmic track, and Miller sang the hook with a descending, stairstep melody to open the chorus. That melody set the tone for the rest of the stanza, and they envisioned it as a Russell Dickerson or Tyler Hubbard song. But as they started into the back half, it needed a change of pace. Drag offered up a dance-related pause — “like one-two, one-two” — before they dove back into the primary melody. Something about it changed their target.
“I remember being like, ‘This sounds crazy. It kind of sounds like this would be good for Luke,’” Welling says. “And Drag goes, ‘Oh, my gosh. I was also thinking that.’ And so we kind of shifted gears.”
They struggled a bit with the chorus’ final line, but whatever they landed on seemed good enough for the moment. From there, they turned their attention to the opening, where they would need to paint a picture of the woman in question. They put her in a ballcap and cutoffs so short that the pockets were visible, sucking on a beer with the label peeled off.
“It takes a dirt road to make a girl like that,” the verse concluded.
“Whoever that girl is, is going to the Luke Bryan show,” Welling notes. “That’s the girl we’re trying to describe there.”
They threw in a pre-chorus that brought the song’s melodic range lower, and the phrase that went with it — “She’s certified/County line” — held out the notes, almost like the song is taking a deep breath before it launches into the fast-paced chorus.
“That’s intentional,” Welling adds. “Whatever your flow is for the chorus, you want your ‘pre’ to be doing the opposite, so it feels like when you get into that next section, it’s an arrival.”
The second verse went a little deeper to describe the woman: Her “’y’all’ gets thicker when she’s tippin’ back wine,” she likes “Fishin’ in the Dark” and she has a tattoo of Psalms 42. They didn’t want her inked with a standard Biblical passage, such as John 3:16 or Psalms 23, and they decided a passage that ended with the numeral two would rhyme with “tattoo.” Psalms 42 was the first chapter they examined, and its opening sentence, with a deer in a stream, fit a country girl.
“It checked so many boxes,” Welling says. “It was really serendipitous that that worked out.”
Dragstrem pulled together the beginnings of a demo, and they reconnected seven or eight days later to smooth out a few parts in the song. Miller handled the demo vocal when they finalized it — “That dude can sing his tail off,” Drag says — and Dragstrem used multiple stringed instruments to lay out the groove. He also fashioned the anticipatory Western sig lick, and crafted a guitar solo that built off of the notes from that intro.
“I am a guitar noodler, so I’ll just noodle until I find something that’s fun and different I haven’t heard before,” he says. “It’s 10, 15 minutes of playing over the chords and finding something.”
Drag sent the demo off to Bryan and his manager, KP Entertainment founder/president Kerri Edwards. Bryan was into it, but he also wanted some changes.
“When writers send me songs, they’re throwing darts at a wall,” he reasons. “So when I hear a song idea or something that’s really, really close to me cutting it, I want to give those writers the best chance at success.”
A second-verse reference to Los Angeles got revised to “Marina Del Rey,” and Miller fixed the payoff line at the chorus — the one the writers had struggled to finish — with “She knows she got this country boy tonight.” It created more intrigue between the two characters, while elevating her, and it felt natural to the chorus’ lyrical flow.
“That was probably the toughest part of writing the song, was just making it easy-sounding,” Dragstrem recalls.
Bryan kept the Psalms 42 phrase — it sounded different and seemed kind of cool, whatever meaning people might try to find.
“There’s no Da Vinci Code stuff going on,” he quips.
The demo was strong, and instead of waiting to line up studio time when all the relevant musicians were available, they decided to build on Drag’s work one instrument at a time. Drag teamed with Bryan’s usual producers, Jeff and Jody Stevens, to guide the final version, keeping some of the original sounds and replaying others. He built a deep, relaxed clap track and layered about 30 Drag voices to create a “hey!” gang vocal that enhanced the rhythm.
Bryan adjusted more of the song, too, during the vocal session. “Fishin’ in the Dark” became “Dancing in the Dark,” and the team spun a short bridge that follows Sol Philcox-Littlefield’s replayed version of Drag’s original guitar solo.
Bryan performed it live for the first time in front of fellow judges Carrie Underwood and Lionel Richie on the April 27 edition of ABC’s American Idol, one month after MCA Nashville released it to country radio on March 26 via PlayMPE. It’s No. 24 on the May 16 Country Airplay chart in its sixth week on the list. He winning and he knows it.
“There’s days to dive in and pick apart stuff,” Bryan says, “but this is all about big old summer fun.”
