Justin Moore photo by Kristin Barlowe, courtesy of The Valory Music Co.

"With this album, I really got to make my record, which can be a rarity for a new act, and I’m very thankful to everybody here for allowing me to do that. My goal was to make sure people knew what I was about as an artist as well as a person.

"I liked those guys growing up where you felt like they were just one of you, except they had a really cool job and got to play music. That’s kind of what I’ve tried to be in my career. After we play shows, I just hang out and drink beer with people in the clubs."--Justin Moore

"How I Got to Be This Way"
(Justin Moore, Rivers Rutherford, Jeremy Stover)

" Rivers has more hits than I will have in the next 30 years as a writer and it was cool to write with him. That was the only time we’ve written. When you get in these rooms with folks you’ve never written with before, you kind of B.S. for awhile and learn about each other.

"He was just asking me how I grew up and what kind of kid I was. I said, ‘I was a pretty good kid. I mean, I did some stupid stuff like any other kid does, but for the most part I was pretty good.’ I said something like, ‘I guess that’s how I got to be this way,’ and he said, ‘Right there. What was some of the stuff you did?’ I told him I totaled my dad’s truck on Dixonville curve when I was in high school, and we went from there. The first line says, ‘I rolled my dad’s truck off the Dixonville curve after drinking my fifth beer.’ That’s a pretty true song. Most of the stuff that happened in it actually happened. There’s a pretty funny line in the song that says something about getting kicked in the face by a horse. Everybody is always like, ‘No way.’ I said, ‘That’s my excuse for why my face looks like this.’

"Small Town USA"
(Brian Dean Maher, Justin Moore, Jeremy Stover)

"I believe it was the first or second song the three of us had written together. It was seven years ago. I was just talking about missing home because I had only been here for six or eight months at the time. I obviously didn’t have anything going on really and I was like, ‘Man, I feel like I’m walking on quicksand here. I just miss home and want to go home.’

"Some of the songs you write you go, ‘Eh, maybe it’s all right,’ and later you find out that it’s really cool. That was one of those songs where I remember going, ‘That’s a special song. I think it can be a big song for us at some point.’ That’s the days you leave the writing room pretty happy."

"Backwoods"
(Justin Moore, Jamie Paulin, Jeremy Stover)
"‘Backwoods’ is one of the newer songs on the record. We were in Jeremy’s house and we were discussing my keyboard player, who grew up in Eastern Kentucky. My guitar player also grew up in Eastern Kentucky. We’ve become really good buddies. I went up to where he’s from, Pike County, Kentucky. I thought I grew up in the backwoods! I found out that they grew up in a holler called Greasy Creek. I came back and said, ‘Y’all would not even believe how backwoods this is.’
"One of us just started playing the melody, the guitar stuff on it, and Jeremy just started rambling, ‘Rifle on my gun rack, hanging in my back glass.’ That was one of those songs that we wrote in 30 or 40 minutes. We wrote it and were like, ‘It could be cool,’ and when we demoed it, we loved it. It’s a fun song to play live."