Makin’ Tracks: Flying Solo, FGL’s Tyler Hubbard Lands a ‘Plane’ Old Hit With ‘5 Foot 9’

The listener knows the height of the woman celebrated in Tyler Hubbard’s first solo single from its title, “5 Foot 9.” She also has brown eyes, wears a sundress, appreciates Tim McGraw and lives in a house with a gravel road. Outside of that, the song says almost as much about her actions — kissing her husband, dancing in the rain — as it does about her traits. And yet, it feels from hearing “5 Foot 9” as if listeners know her.

“I wanted it to be really relatable,” Hubbard says. “I also wanted it to be visual, you know. When I listen to the second verse, I can already see that picture in my head, whether it’s me or anybody pulling into the driveway and being met with a kiss. It just paints a picture, and it kind of makes you feel good.”

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Hubbard co-wrote it at the home of a Tennessee neighbor, The Cadillac Three’s Jaren Johnston (“Raise ’Em Up,” “Meanwhile Back at Mama’s”), with Chase McGill (“Never Say Never,” “With a Woman You Love”) in 2021. Hubbard had already released a song outside of his Florida Georgia Line beginnings — a collaboration with McGraw on “Undivided” — though his plans for a solo project weren’t fully clear to the other two. And they weren’t really concerned about what artist might cut whatever they wrote.

“We didn’t have a concept, we didn’t have an idea or a title,” recalls Hubbard. “We didn’t know how we were going to land the plane per se, but we were just kind of off — Jaren started this cool little vibe, as he does, on his guitar. We were just like, ‘Yeah, that feels nice. Let’s just see what happens.’”

McGill had a thought about comparing the good stuff that man creates to the better people that God makes for one another. They dug in at the top with a fairly indisputable statement, “Jack makes good whiskey,” and rolled through multiple “good” things, including “good ridin’ roads” and “good music.”

“Dry wood makes good fires,” they continued. “Goodyears make good … swings.” That line hints at the tires without revealing the obvious “fires/tires” rhyme.

“It was just enough good ol’ boy lyric, but it’s something that everybody can relate to,” Johnston says. “I remember us both kind of looking at each other — Chase and me — like, ‘OK, that’s a great way to get into the chorus.’ ”

At that point, they made the phrasing more aggressive and shifted into the “God” topic — “God makes 5 foot 9, brown eyes in a sundress.” It was then that Hubbard, whose wife is actually 5 feet, 10 inches, decided to focus the lyric on her. “I don’t even know if I said that out loud,” he recalls, “but in my head, I was just mentally going there.”

Johnston (whose wife is as tall as the woman in the song) and McGill (whose spouse stands 5 feet, 3 inches), all offered lines they knew would be apropos for their partners, too. Johnston suggested the McGraw reference. “He’s classic, you know — classic, yet current,” McGill says. “Who doesn’t love him? And it just kind of felt right.”

But if the song were to land with The Cadillac Three, Johnston would’ve gone with Charlie Daniels instead. “When I hear it on the radio,” he notes, “I still hear Charlie Daniels every time.”

He was more insistent a couple of lines later. “I fought them the whole time on the ending of that chorus,” says Johnston. “We start the song out with ‘Jack makes good whiskey.’ We were going to go, ‘Jack makes good whiskey/ But God makes the good stuff.’ And Tyler’s like, ‘Can we just come down and say it?’ And I go, ‘Yes, Tyler, yes. Just come down and land the plane. Land the plane.’ ”

As they moved into the next stanza, they bypassed any thought of repeating the man-made “good” stuff, turning instead to the woman’s movements. “Once we got to talking about the girl, it would have felt weird to zoom back out now that we had zoomed in,” McGill says.

Before the three-hour exercise was over, they squeezed in a short bridge that elevated the woman to angel status, and they debated what to call it. “God Makes the Good Stuff” seemed so obvious that it took any surprise out of the song’s direction. So they looked instead for other phrases they could pull, and “5 Foot 9” stood tall.

“If I saw this on a song list on the back of an album, I would want to see what that song was about,” says Hubbard. “I don’t think I would have any idea how that song was written.”

Hubbard sang vocals for a demo built over Johnston’s rolling acoustic guitar. The latter finished it on a bus en route to a show, constructing “5 Foot 9” as a comfortable, respectful performance. It seemed a likely single from the start for Hubbard’s team, and producer Jordan M. Schmidt (Mitchell Tenpenny, Florida Georgia Line) pulled together an eight-piece ensemble for a session at Nashville’s Sound Stage. They used the stems from Johnston’s demo to set the tempo and key, then muted them later once the players in the room took command, converting the attitude from respectful to celebratory.

“I’m all about dynamics, and it doesn’t need to be going from super-quiet to big and loud and huge,” Schmidt says. “It can be subtle as well, which I kind of feel like we did with this one.”

Drummer Nir Z was integral to the energy, bumping the rhythm to a train beat, played with brushes. It still felt light, but it provided a certain amount of movement, particularly essential in the chorus beneath the drawn-out notes of the “5 foot 9” melodic passage. Ilya Toshinsky laid down the acoustic guitar part to start, overdubbed a banjo that snuck in during the first chorus before rolling to greater prominence on verse two and added a Dobro part — including a rhythmic solo — before the day was over.

“We kind of showed him what we wanted — I think I referenced Nickel Creek and that bluegrassy kind of thing,” says Schmidt. “We could have gone with any solo he gave us — we just kept making him do it because it was so much fun.”

Steel guitarist Justin Schipper dropped an extra nugget into verse two, emphasizing the word “raindrop” with a glassy, liquid note, then enhancing the precipitation’s “fall from the sky” with a cascading sheet. “That’s the secret weapon that is Justin Schipper,” Schmidt suggests. “He’ll have these moments where his heart just fits the lyric so perfectly.”

Hubbard, used to investing dozens of passes on the vocal for one song during sessions with Florida Georgia Line producer Joey Moi (HARDY, Jake Owen), was taken aback when Schmidt suggested they try to knock out six or seven songs when he gave final voice to “5 Foot 9” at Schmidt’s home studio.

“It was a challenge because I’m very particular — I’m a pretty OCD personality type, and I want everything to kind of be perfect,” says Hubbard. “So it took me trusting Jordan. But we never came back and did anything else. That was it.”

EMI Nashville released “5 Foot 9” to country radio on May 19 via PlayMPE. It’s No. 21 in its eighth week on the Country Airplay chart dated July 16, and Hubbard appreciates that speed for his first solo outing.

“From experience, I know how rare that is,” he says. “You couldn’t ask for any more.”

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