Missing Me Some You

Album: That Don't Make Me a Bad Guy (2008)
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Songfacts®:

  • Keith wrote this song from the perspective of a soldier on duty in the Middle East, during a USO tour of Afghanistan, close to the Pakistan border.
  • Keith told AOL about the original inspiration for this bluesy number: "I was at a base that was so under fire that they had no lights on the base at night. I always go outside and hang out with the troops a little bit when you're not signing autographs and doing all that stuff - exchanging coins, patting each other on the back. When we're all just sitting around, enjoying our time, I'll fire me a big cigar. They'd let you do that, and they also gave you a little blue-light necklace that shines a little spot of blue at your feet, where you can go to the men's room.
    I was standing out there, and you could see a firefight going on in the mountains, and I said, 'What's the firefight just north of here?' The soldier says, 'That's not north, sir, that's east. That's the Pakistan border.' I said, 'Well, there's the North Star, right above it.' And he goes, 'How do you know that's the North Star?' I said, 'Because right there's the Big Dipper.' He said, 'Wow, I never noticed it, but the stars here look just like they do back home.' I said, 'Of course, they do.' We ended up talking – he'd been on 15-month deployment, he was getting to go home in three months. He hadn't seen his fiancée in 15 months. He reached down - you know, they carry everything on them - and dug into his battle gear and said, 'That's my baby, and I can't wait to see her again. I hope she still loves me.' I just took all that and absorbed it. Being as I went in a blues direction, I needed me a really blues hook. When it rolled out - 'Missing Me Some You' - I knew it was something I wanted to finish."
  • This has a vintage Muscle Shoals/Memphis feel. Other Keith recordings like the Philly-soul inspired "A Little Too Late" seem to reveal a love of R&B. AOL asked Keith if this was the case. He replied: "It's more a Stevie Ray Vaughan/Fabulous Thunderbirds kind of influence. I'm from Oklahoma. Texas wouldn't claim me because they only claim their own, but I played all the bars in Texas 90 percent of the time that I played. I was around Austin a lot, saw a lot of blues bands. My first booking agent and independent record deal was in San Antonio. And my grandmother's band played a lot of blues in their repertoire, when she owned her nightclub. So it would've been more a Stevie Ray Vaughan, ZZ Top, Fabulous Thunderbirds thing, from working so much in Texas. I'm only 190 miles north of Dallas."

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