Wanted Me Gone

Album: Turn It Up (2014)
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Songfacts®:

  • This Southern rocker was penned by Josh Thompson with Brett and Brad Warren. The Warren brothers' other credits include Dierks Bentley's "Feel That Fire," Tim McGraw's "Felt Good On My Lips," Toby Keith's "Red Solo Cup" and Keith Urban's "Little Bit Of Everything."
  • The song tells the story of a man who decides to move on from the relationship he originally didn't want to leave only for his old flame to decide she wants to get back together.
  • The music video was directed by Nashville videographer/video editor and audio engineer Tom Dyer and shot at Thompson's house. No props had to be purchased for the video – all the items featured were Thompson's, including the wall-mounted fish that he'd caught during a trip to Lake Okeechobee. "I definitely had the most fun I've ever had shooting this video," Thompson told Country Music Is Love. "It tells the story of the song perfectly, and you can't go wrong with spending the day sitting in a lawn chair with a beer."
  • Thompson told Roughstock the story of the song: "I had the first three lines of the song written already, before we got together to write," he revealed. "I woke up on my couch, and there was an outdoor channel on … something about Dale Earnhardt. It was like 3:30 a.m. I heard some guy use the term he put the pedal to to the firewall. So I wrote that down. My eyes rolled to the back of my head, and I went back to bed."

    "I got up the next morning and wrote those lines, 'I put the good in front of bye, y'all. I put a hole through the dry wall. Pedal to the firewall,'" Thompson continued. "I had those lines for two or three weeks, maybe. I sang them when I sat down to write with the Warren Brothers. They loved it, of course. It kind of went from there. The whole wanted me, wanted me, wanted me, wanted me thing just kind of fell out. That was it. From there, I was hooked. We were all in because we thought it was catchy and hooky, and it was just kind of fun, too."
  • For the second verse, Thompson ad-libbed a line about a boat engine - "screaming like an Evinrude outboard" - that he thought would be a placeholder. However the lyric made the trio laugh, so they decided to keep it. "We were wondering if everyone would know what an Evinrude outboard is," Brad Warren noted to Billboard magazine. "And I said, 'If you don't know what an Evinrude outboard is, you shouldn't be listening to country music.' The writing session was finished in a scant two hours."
  • Co-Producer Cliff Audretch III organised some background singers for the "wanted me gone" chorus but there were a number of no-shows and only the Warrens and Audretch made it in. The trio sang the chorus several times in a studio kitchen and stacked the performances so they sounded like gang vocals. "The song has a bit of a party vibe," observed Audretch to Billboard magazine. "For that to be the way the gang vocals went down, it was appropriately less than perfect - pretty lo-fi, really."

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