Story Behind the Song: Little Big Town, ‘Over Drinking’

Little Big Town's "Over Drinking" turned out to be the song that introduced fans to the group's 2020 album Nightfall. However, it almost didn't make the record at all.

Co-written by an ace team of Nashville songwriters -- Ashley Gorley, Cary Barlowe, Hillary Lindsey, Jesse Frasure and Steph Jones -- the tune fell into Little Big Town's lap at the last minute. Read on as the band's Phillip Sweet explains how the song came to be not only a track on their album, but also its first single.

We thought we were done [choosing songs or the album], basically, so we're out on the road, and we hear this song sent to us on a video clip of them writing it the night before. And the writers were obviously over-drinking, for sure!

We came back the next morning and we were like, "Oh my gosh, you gotta send us the rest of this song." It took them a while to wake up, because they had obviously been over-served the night before. But it was really beautiful, the fact that the song came to us and we all loved it and were instantly like, "Oh my gosh, this is the last piece of the puzzle we we're missing."

We'd thought we were done, but there was something that was just not quite there, and that was the song. It had the swagger. I loved what it said. It was fun, it sang really good, it was country, it was all these things.

And we literally turned it around -- we recorded drums and other instruments on the road. We padded out a dressing room and recorded with our engineer, who was with us. We just made the record as best we could. It was literally a week turnaround, we had it mixed, mastered, and then it was on the record. And then we were like, "This should just be the first single!" It felt like the perfect thing.

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