Aaron Tippin Recalls the Marital Fight That Led to ‘Kiss This’

Aaron Tippin shot to the top of the charts in the year 2000 with his hit single "Kiss This," from his gold-selling People Like Us album. The song, written by Tippin, along with his wife Thea and Phillip Douglas, was one of the biggest hits of Tippin's career, even though it was actually inspired by a fight between Tippin and his wife.

"I had come off the road, and I was trying to tell her how to cook," Aaron Tippin told The Boot and other reporters at a recent media event. "I am a 'backseat cook'. She was whipping us up something to eat. I said, ‘No, honey, not a smidge of this. Read the cookbook -- it’s right there; it said ‘one tablespoon.’ Boy, she went through the roof.

"I could tell this was going to escalate, so I backed off," he continues. "I said, ‘I don’t want to fight. I just got home. I want to be nice. Tell you what: What do you say we kiss and make up?'"

Recalls Thea Tippin with a laugh, "I said, ‘You know what you can kiss?' Kiss this."

The two quickly realized that their argument was a song idea, but they still didn't imagine that it would become the third No.1 single of Aaron Tippin's career.

"We were trying to get this out of the way," he says. "We really didn’t think it was going to be anything."

According to Thea Tippin, after they turned the song in, her husband's record label at the time, Lyric Street, "begged us to get into more fights."

All joking aside, the 57-year-old country star says that neither "Kiss This" nor any of his other hits would have been as successful without his loyal and devoted fans.

"I contribute it totally to the fans," Tippin tells The Boot. "Music is, when you get into the business, it’s a business. And there comes a time when the radio and the record labels, they think a little different, and you move out of the light. But if you’ve done your homework, and you’ve loved the people that love the music, they keep coming back, and they keep coming back. You’ve got a job. All you’ve got to do is love them.

"For 25 years, I’ve gone out there, and I’ve signed every night, every show," he adds. "I do think it’s because I’ve treated the fans right."

Tippin is spending much of the next few months on the road. A list of all of his upcoming shows is available on his website.

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