Songfacts®:

• This is a duet with Jimmy Buffett, who often sings about the pleasures of not working. In this song, the main character is frustrated at work, and justifies knocking off early by telling himself that it's five o'clock (quitting time) somewhere, so it must be OK.
• The Nashville songwriters Jim "Moose" Brown and Don Rollins wrote this song. Brown is a session keyboard player who also wrote Darryl Worley's "If Something Should Happen." Rollins is a sax player who has also written for Ricky Skaggs and Randy Travis.
• This song spent eight weeks at #1 on the Country charts, and won the 2003 Grammy for Best Country Song. It was the first #1 song on the Country chart for Jimmy Buffett. >>>

  Suggestion credit:
  Julian - Oakland, AR
• In the lyrics, "Make it a Hurricane before I go insane," a Hurricane is a potent cocktail made with lots of rum. Very popular in New Orleans, a few of these will make you forget about work very quickly.
• Don Rollins told The Boot about his songwriter partner: "I wrote that with Jim 'Moose' Brown, who's a session player in town. There was a famous Jim Brown, who was a football player back in the '60s, and I think Jim got the name 'Moose,' because he had the same name as the football player. I was writing with Moose and he was actually playing piano on a record by a guy named Colt Prather, who was a new artist who had signed to Sony at the time. They wanted a Jimmy Buffett-vibe song for that album."
• Here's the story of the song as explained by Rollins to The Boot: "I had the idea of, 'It's Five O'clock Somewhere,' and it just clicked that the idea would do really well with that setting. I floated it out and he said, 'Yeah, I've always heard that saying but I've never heard a song about that.' So we wrote it. It was definitely that 'Margaritaville' feel. Jim and I agreed what the story was, that this was a guy who decided to have a few at lunch, and then decided to stay there. Once that framework was there, then the lyrics were very easy for me. The musical setting of it was more Jim's end of it. That chorus, 'Pour me something tall and strong ...' musically, was definitely Jim's thing.
  The 'What would Jimmy Buffett do?' line in the bridge was there from the beginning. It was me being sarcastic, poking a little fun at the 'What would Jesus do?' bumper stickers. It happened to be exactly the right thing for that situation. That was the way they brought Buffett into the song, it turned out to be the thing to make the song work for that situation.
  We did very few edits on it. Usually, Moose and I will beat a song to death after we write it, but this one we didn't. As I remember, we switched the first verse with the second after we were finished. We both looked at it and went, 'Oh, the first verse is the second and the second verse is the first.' Click. That was it."
• Though earmarked for country recording artist Colt Prather, the song ended up being recorded by Jackson. Rollins explained why to The Boot: "We wrote it in February of 2003 and demoed it in March 2003. My publisher took it to the guy who was producing Colt Prather, and he passed on it immediately. A couple of other people passed on it, then I got the call that it was on hold for Alan, which I thought was strange, because if you hear the demo it's very island-ly. There are acoustic guitars and steel drum samples, very much Buffett. The idea that someone as country as Alan Jackson might be interested in that song never even occurred to me. Then I got wind that he was wanting to do a duet with Buffett, and it made a little bit more sense at that point."
• Trey Fanjoy directed the music video, which was shot in Noblesville, Indiana, and in Jupiter, Florida, near Jackson's home. Fanjoy also directed clips for Jackson's "Good Time" and "Remember When."
• Kenny Chesney also passed on the song. "I think they wanted to not do so much beachy stuff anymore," Moose Brown revealed to 9513. "If we had gotten it to him three years earlier, he probably would have jumped on it, but the timing wasn't right."