Story Behind the Song: Scotty McCreery, ‘Five More Minutes’
Scotty McCreery wrote his single “Five More Minutes” with Frank Rogers and Monty Criswell shortly after the death of his grandfather in January of 2015 and began performing it live later that year; however, it wasn't until an appearance at the Grand Ole Opry in June of 2016 that McCreery truly learned just how well the song connected with listeners. The emotional performance earned the singer a standing ovation — just one of many that the song has received -- and quickly racked up more than 2 million views on YouTube.
McCreery officially released "Five More Minutes" as a single in May of 2017 -- more than two years after penning the personal tune. Below, he tells The Boot how the song came to be.
We sat down at Frank’s house -- Frank Rogers, my producer and co-writer on the song. I was just kind of talking to him about Grandaddy, and [how] there were a few things I wanted to tell Grandaddy that I didn’t get a chance to. I was kind of reminiscing on what we’d do together: We’d golf together and swim together in his pool in the backyard.
Monty was the one who had the idea that you just wish you have five more minutes with them; he had the idea for the song, and I said, yeah, man, that’s the title. We wrote the song around that -- tried to make it pretty autobiographical and pretty relatable to the folks out there.
My favorite thing about “Five More Minutes” is that it’s really a storyteller song. To me, country music is real people singing about real-life things. To me, that’s what “Five More Minutes” is: It’s a song about real-life things ...
When we wrote this song, I tweeted out, when I left Frank’s house, that I just wrote my favorite song that I’ve ever written. I was hoping it would be a single, but I wasn’t entirely sure until things like the Opry happened and we got the standing ovation and people started requesting it. I knew it was a special song when we wrote it, but I wasn’t sure it was a single until we started playing it live.
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