Songfacts®:

• Ashley McBryde stopped drinking in 2022, but that didn't stop her from releasing "Cool Little Bars," an ode to honky-tonks and dive bars, on her 2023 album The Devil I Know. She also has a song on the album called "Whiskey And Country Music." The way McBryde sees it, she did enough drinking to supply her with a lifetime of songs.
• The bar that inspired this song is Losers in midtown Nashville, one of McBryde's favorites. As stated in the first line of the song, they have a cigarette machine and shuffleboard, throwbacks to before bars went all classy and got boring. McBryde doesn't like everything about Losers though: it bothers her that they allow those annoying bachelorette parties.
• McBryde wrote this song with Lainey Wilson and Trick Savage. "We were thinking of different places in town and different places I played in Kentucky," she told Taste Of Country. "There was a place I played in Kentucky where, it's not that the doors didn't work right on the bathroom stalls, there weren't any doors. Places like that are fewer and farther between. They're getting knocked down so people can park there and go to much more sterile gathering places, so we thought we'd celebrate cool little bars. The chances of me having a song about a very interesting drinking establishment on my record is pretty high."