Crushin' It

Album: Moonshine In The Trunk (2014)
Charted: 65
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Songfacts®:

  • This is the opening track from Moonshine In The Trunk. Paisley's previous album Wheelhouse had disappointing sales and was the Nashville star's first-ever record not to generate a #1 single. Paisley alludes to the drop-off on this testosterone-filled cut about letting loose for the weekend, singing, "I guess I've been in a dry spell, but that's about to change."
  • The song is a feel-good anthem full of frat-boy energy. Paisley told People he tried to reflect the bro-country cliché on Moonshine In The Trunk, but with a twist. "There's a lot of stuff on the radio about, you know, put your tan legs on the dashboard and we'll roll around in the truck and go party," he said. "This album was my idea of doing music that fits in this landscape but doesn't pander to that because one of my frustrations with radio now is lyrics. It's like, 'Guys, come on!' – and specifically, yes, guys, cause there are no girls! We can say something too. There are phrases that are totally cliché that we as songwriters owe it to ourselves to not use again."

    "I'm not saying the songs are bad, I'm just saying that we as writers can do better," he continued. "And when we come around to a little more diversity lyrically on the radio, we can go back and say the word 'tailgate' again and not have people cringe. It's everything in moderation."
  • Penned by Paisley with Kelley Lovelace and Lee Thomas Miller, the song tells the story of a man looking for a change of fortune. "This is a moonshine jar-half-full kind of song for people who work hard and play hard," Paisley said.
  • The song's music video was created by Brad Paisley and features cartoon animations of numerous country singers as superheroes. The clip includes animated versions of Paisley himself as Steel Moonshiner, Keith Urban as Captain Australia, Kenny Chesney as Agua Man and the Zac Brown Band are the Zoro Brown Bandaleros. Other stars that appear in cartoon form include Blake Shelton, Luke Bryan, Darius Rucker, Jason Aldean, Carrie Underwood, Miranda Lambert, Dierks Bentley, Florida Georgia Line, Little Big Town, Rascal Flatts, Eric Church, George Strait, Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, Jimmy Kimmel, and Guillermo.

    Paisley told reporters that he spent "three to four hours a day for a couple of weeks" drawing the cartoon. "I was trying to do it to where everybody would laugh," he added. "My goal was that anybody in it would go, 'That's really funny,' as opposed to, 'I hate you.'"

    As for how he came up with each star's cartoon likeness, Paisley revealed: "There have to be identifiable traits for it to be funny. It's like 'How do you capture Luke (Bryan)?' With Luke, it's the teeth. Once I got that smile, that's Luke Bryan. With Blake (Shelton), it's just goofy. Just draw goofy. Drawing these people was really fun, and also knowing that they didn't know I was doing that. Then one by one, I texted them their photos."

    "There were some hilarious exchanges," Paisley continued. "The text I sent to Keith Urban was like, 'You want a laugh?' and he was like 'Sure.' So I sent him this picture and he was like 'Is that an emoji app?' I was like, 'No, that's you and I drew it!' He's like 'Oh. Why? You're just sitting around drawing pictures of me?' And I was like 'No, no, I'm doing a … nevermind. You'll see."

    "And for Darius (Rucker) I just wrote, 'Hey Darius, I'm drawing a cartoon of everybody. If you could have super powers what would you want?' And he just wrote back, 'Flight and super strength, thanks.'"
  • The animated clip came out much better than Paisley's original idea. "I only did it because we had a video idea that was entirely too elaborate to ever probably pull off," he said. "It was breaking Guinness World Records and dropping huge things on big beer cans, and in retrospect it would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and I don't know that we'd be talking about it like this in a fun way... And this one cost $906."
  • Brad Paisley told AZ Central the song, "is about [how] I'm not good at anything, or at least I don't feel good at anything right now."

    "You know that feeling you get in the middle of the week of 'I can't do anything right' or 'It's not going my way?' But every week ends with a Friday, and that's where we excel, I think, at country music," he added. "I see people at the end of long weeks. That's when I have my therapy session with them. I stand there, looking out at them, and they're like, 'Can you help erase what my boss said to me on Wednesday?' That's our job. And it flavored a lot of the record that way."

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