Eastern Kentucky

Eastern Kentucky was another curve ball we did not see coming, Donnie and I had just signed a publishing deal with Anthem Entertainment and Chris Janson’s Old Tom Publishing. We had cut 5 tracks on the record and needed another 7 or so tracks for our next session that was around the corner, we knew we had plenty of material but wanted to try and write a few more things. We thought it would be good to bring in our producer David ”Ferg” Ferguson to the writing room, now that we already tracked and heard some of the rough mixes, we had a better understanding of each other. We also had been hanging a good bit with Ben Chapman and really digging his style and approach to songwriting. We called Ben and he immediately thought it would be a cool write, we also called our buddy Ronnie Bowman. Ferg in return called his buddy Pat Mclaughlin to come in. We got to the pub house that morning and split up. Donnie, Ronnie and Pat went into a room and Ben, Myself and Ferg went into another room. We sat down on the couch and Ferg started playing this guitar part, boom it was on. I had recently lost a close friend and had a couple other close family and friends going through cancer treatments. I had just been thinking a lot about life and what these older folks passing would mean. Some of them were combat veterans and struggled throughout life with the things they witnessed in war. They were also some of the most positive people to be around, you would never know the mental and physical pain they endured. They had taught Donnie and myself a lot about life over the years. The first thing I said was… let’s write something about “life being short and let’s make the most of it while we’re here. Instead of all the arguing and fighting going on today, we should be hugging and kissing each other. Ben jumped right on it and said let’s just say that but in a different way. We did, about 3 hours later, we finished the song and that was a wrap.