Story Behind the Song: Billy Currington, ‘Drinkin’ Town With a Football Problem’
During the summer of 2014, Elizabeth Elkins and Vanessa Olivarez -- together known as Granville Automatic -- and Aaron, Brian and Clara Henningsen -- together known as the Henningsens -- teamed up for a writing session. As a group, they wound up penning "Drinkin' Town With a Football Problem," which Billy Currington released as the second single from his Summer Forever album, in June of 2015. Below, Elkins and Olivarez recount to The Boot how the song came to be.
Elizabeth Elkins: When we were on the road, we heard that song "Independence" that [the Henningsens] wrote for the Band Perry, and we were like, "Who wrote this? This is great! We've got to write with these people." And so we figured out the Henningsens ... and they are all huge history buffs, and they were just like, "Wow, we really like what you guys do as Granville Automatic; let's just get together and write."
This was before our publishing deal, so we were kind of plugging along on our own, and we got together with, first, just Brian: He came over to the house, hung out, and we figured we were gonna write a history song, just because we all loved it so much. And I had a list of titles -- we all keep our title list -- and I had said ["Drinkin' Town With a Football Problem"], that a lot of people in town had passed on, didn't like, and Brian was just like, "Okay, that. We've got to write that."
... We spent the rest of that day working on it a little bit, and then he brought Clara and Aaron in later on, so the next time, we got together to finish it ... It took us two full days to write it, and we just really wanted to capture all those little different people you see at a football game on a Friday night in a small town, and just that idea that, no matter what all the differences between these people were and what role you had in high school, whatever, everybody just kind of came together on that Friday night. Brian really brought in the feel of his little town, and I think Vanessa came up with that "Hey, y'all" part at the top, and it was a lot of fun. They're so fun to write with.
We had no idea -- later on, we got an email from Aaron saying, "Guess what, Billy Currington has it on hold," and we were like -- we were just blown away.
It was just one of those "right time, right place"s -- two long summer days, summer of 2014, just here at the house.
Vanessa Olivarez: "Drinkin' Town" was part of an interesting situation, just because we didn't expect it at all. I mean, usually the people who are lucky enough to have cut deals, you know, they've already gotten a little bit of a name for themselves and are a little established, and while we were bustin' our a--es -- pardon my French -- for a couple of years, we were excited to get to write with the Henningsens, because they had already built a name for themselves, and we'd been trying to kinda make our stamp on Nashville. So we were really excited to write with them, and the process behind writing it ended up being a lot of fun ...
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