What I Can't Put Down

Album: Write You a Song (2014)
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Songfacts®:

  • Jon Pardi penned this Country stomper with his producer Bart Butler (Bobby Pinson's "Don't Ask Me How I Know," Thomas Rhett's "Make Me Wanna") and Brice Long (Randy Houser's "Anything Goes" Gary Allan's "Nothing On But The Radio" and "Today"). It finds the singer comparing his craving for a girl to his addiction to whiskey and cigarettes. "We wrote this song last year, and I remember it just kind of poured out," Pardi told Roughstock in March 2014. "I kind of had the line 'the devil wears black and he goes by jack, and he's really good at helping me forget …' I was just kind of rambling on. It's all really about the fun things that I can't put down."

    "The chorus is kind of an anthem of what you can't put down, not in a bad way," Pardi added. "Just about drinkin', smokin', girls and playing music … everything I can't put down."
  • Pardi first played the song during the Justin Moore Outlaws Like Me tour, and the crowd response was a deciding factor when finalizing the track list for Up All Night. "'What I Can't Put Down'… right when we started playing that, man, it was just like a different ballgame after that for the crowd on the live show," said Pardi. "Then guys and girls would be on Twitter [asking for] 'What I Can't Put Down,' or they would remember it. That's stuff you cannot ignore that for an album."
  • The song's music clip was produced by Tacklebox's The Edde Brothers. "We shot the video at Whiskey Bent Saloon downtown (Nashville), which is cool because that's where we started out playing years ago," said Pardi. "Then I got to wear my Manuel jackets again for the performance shots – one with my black jacket and an all-black set-up; the other with my white jacket and an all-white setup. It was really fun to shoot and I think turned out pretty cool."

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