Story Behind the Song: Thomas Rhett's 'What's Your Country Song'

When hit songwriters Ashley Gorley, Rhett Akins, Jesse Frasure and Parker Welling sat down on a tour bus in Dallas to write songs, this one particular day they decided to start with a song title Welling had in her phone called "What's Your Country Song?"

The writers were then immediately unsure how to write the song without using song titles — which was something none of them really wanted to do. But the finished product ended up referencing 16 song titles, a number none of the songwriters guessed correctly during this interview.

The writers elaborated on how the song came together and told the rest of the Story Behind the Song to Bart Herbison of Nashville Songwriters Association International.

Herbison: What's your country song? I love that title. I I heard (Thomas) Rhett play this I think in my office before the song came out and when Rhett first told me the title I went 'ehhh,' because those songs using a lot of titles usually I don't like. They don't work. But Oh my God, this is one of my favorite songs of all time... Y'all wrote this in a hotel in Dallas, right? That's a song title right there.

Akins: I just remember Parker coming up with that title and ... then the the question was 'how do we write it?' Because neither she nor I wanted to go the song title route, because it's so rare (that it works.)

Welling: So we had this debate. I don't prefer songs that do the title thing but we were like should we do it?Should we not? So the compromise we came to was the chorus wouldn't do it. And if we did it in the verses, it needed to make sense as if we were not putting titles in it. So like, we had to connect these titles in a way that if you didn't know the title, the story still made sense.

So the writers had a title and a chorus written, which just left the verses, which Frasure said made it like a puzzle at that point.

Frasure: You know when you in good and bad ways box yourself into a situation when you have the chorus like that and you've already kind of referenced ... this descriptive way of saying what country song describes you best.Now ... you basically have a puzzle box where you know what the picture is, but you feel like you're missing pieces.So then you have to start kind of coloring it up and making sure it's not hokey because, you know, Thomas is pretty picky about content. It's it's not like he's going to just pick the lowest hanging fruit song go, 'Oh yeah, yeah, it's fine.' So we really have to do a good job of like, making sure that this doesn't come across like a flop, you know? We can't just reference his dad's song in the second verse and call it a day.

PW: It's like when you have the chorus done, you're like, okay, We have the middle of it. We know what the like thesis of the song is now. We have to figure out how we want to get into it and how we want to get out.But I think it helps sometimes, especially something that's like a title like what's your country song, where it's kind of a broad thing. It's like, well, we know we're going to be asking lots of questions about how do you describe yourself.So it was kind of nice to have this like, zoomed out ... what does it mean to you?

For more behind-the-song stories and to hear how Rhett Akins feels about singing the song, which references his own song "That's My Truck." Akins swears it wasn't his idea to include his own song title in the song, which started as a joke, but ended as an important line in a very successful song.

About the series

In partnership with Nashville Songwriters Association International, the "Story Behind the Song" video interview series features Nashville-connected songwriters discussing one of their compositions. For full video interviews with all of our subjects, visit www.tennessean.com/music.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: 'What's Your Country Song' penned by Rhett Akins, Ashley Gorley, Jesse Frasure and Parker Welling