Justin Moore  (Audio CD) 
by Justin Moore

"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."

1. "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.'

2. "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."

3. "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."

4. "Like There's No Tomorrow" (Brian Dean Maher, Justin Moore, Jeremy Stover)

"We wrote that probably five or six years ago. I steered away from writing any love songs up to that point. I said, `Man, we've got to write a love song. You can't make a record in Nashville without a love song.' But I was like, `We can't write a sappy, I love you and all this stuff. It has to still be me.' That's one of the most Southern rock-sounding songs on the record.

"It's about making love. Some of the lines are, `Worked hard all week and now you're here with me/ Staring up at a summer sky.' I've been married for two years and I'm gone so much, so I can relate to this song now more than I could then. I'm gone so much and you just don't have time to do some of the things that you used to do together, so it's about taking advantage of the time you do have together and making the most of it."

5. "Good Ole American Way" (Brian Dean Maher, Justin Moore, Jeremy Stover)

"I was at home watching the news with my dad and there was some guy on there griping about why we needed to get back to the Republican way of things. Another guy said we needed to get back to the Democratic way of things. My dad said, `Who cares what way it is? We just need to get back to the good ole American way of things.' I thought, `Man, that's a song title right there.'

"When I came back to Nashville, we wrote that song and that's one of those we wrote in a pretty short period of time. The thing I brought up was, `I wonder what my grandpa was thinking about at the time, paying $100 to fill his truck up?' That was our motivation, what our grandpas' take would be on things.

6. "I Could Kick Your Ass" (Brian Dean Maher, Justin Moore, Jeremy Stover)

"It's obviously tongue-in-cheek. It's not serious, like I'm really going to whip somebody's ass. It's become a staple of our show. It's more or less about a guy who has all the money in the world and he thinks that is going to allow him to just take your girl and take over your world. But the bottom line is, you might have all the money and the cars, but I can whip your ass. Obviously it's a fun song to do live. We close the show with it and we've had a couple of hits. That song holds it own with the radio hits we have."

7. "Back That Thing Up" (Randy Houser, Jeremy Stover)

"I always tell people, `I don't know whether to apologize or say thank you after playing that song.' If you ask my mom, it's about a truck; that's what I told her. But if you ask Randy or Jeremy, it's probably about a rear end.

I thought, `I'm going to play that every night. It's hilarious.' I don't take myself too seriously and I thought it was a lot of fun and something different that I've never written anything like. It was a big song for us and we sold a lot of downloads of that. The struggle for a new artist is to have people recognize who you are. Instead of going, `I like that song. Who does that?,' they go, `Oh that's Justin Moore.' I think a song like `Back That Thing Up' did it for us, where a middle-of-the-road song wouldn't have. We open our show with it."

8. "The Only Place I Call Home" (Dallas Davidson, Justin Moore, Jeremy Stover)

"It's about where I grew up; it's just a little more hard core than `Small Town USA.' It's a little more to the point, maybe, and everything in it is true. `I was baptized in the Baptist church, my old man taught me about a hard day's work. I learned how to love and I learned how to fight.' It talks about how I was looking for something, and my grandpa said, `It's in the drawer in the bedroom.' I walked in, opened the door and there was $300-$400 cash lying underneath a pistol. That is just where he kept his pistol, by the bed, and he kept a little stash of cash there. So that is the next line, `We keep our cash in a dresser drawer underneath a .44.' It was real to me, and I found out it was real to other people as well."

9. "Grandpa" (Justin Moore, Jamie Paulin, Jeremy Stover)

"`Grandpa' is my favorite song that I've ever written. Jeremy, Jamie Paulin and I got together and Jamie grew up in Washington and Jeremy in Georgia. We all grew up on a farm and grew up in places where obviously our dads were our heroes. Both of my grandpas were Superman. I couldn't imagine them ever not being around. I'm very proud of that song.

"I sent a CD to both of them because they have no idea how to download a MP3. It was really the only time I've ever heard or seen my grandpas cry besides my grandma's funeral.

"I could have a 30-year career or be gone tomorrow, but nobody will ever be able to take that away from me, to be able to do that. I lost my grandma and an uncle a couple of years ago and I was at home playing this song acoustic after I'd written it. My wife walked in and I was bawling and I said, `I think I wrote this about my grandpas, but I think I also wrote it about my grandma and uncle.' "The first line is, `You stood on that bank where I got baptized/Gave me a 30-30 when I turned nine.' Actually it was eight, but nine rhymed. I've sat up in a deer stand with my grandpa since I was three years old."

10. "Hank It" (Brian Dean Maher, Justin Moore, Jeremy Stover)

"We got off the road with Hank and Lynyrd Skynyrd and my producer, Jeremy, had just bought a house. I went over to see his house and Brian, our other co-writer, just happened to be there. I said, `We've got to write a song at some point about me going out with Hank Jr. It probably won't ever make a record because it would be so personal and nobody really probably cares, but we have to write a song about that.' It was such a cool experience.

"Our first show that we played on that tour was in Hershey, Pennsylvania, and that is in the song. `A lot of things a country boy learns in life/how to shoot a gun and how to use a knife/But when I pulled into Hershey P-A, and I took my guitar up on the big stage/That night I did the best I could/ Me and my band played pretty dern good/ And I took myself out and sat in the crowd and learned how Bocephus shakes `em down/You've got to Hank it.'"