Songfacts®:

• "Shoot The Bull" is a rowdy, good-natured barroom duet that pairs Cody Johnson and Luke Combs in full unwind mode, turning a simple night of beers and jukebox country into a small celebration of friendship, work-worn lives and the comforting predictability of a well-used dive bar.
• The premise is straightforward: after carrying the weight of everyday responsibilities, the two characters agree to set it down for a few hours, crack open some "silver bullets" (Coors Light), and settle into barstools that have long since given up pretending to be ergonomic. From there, it's all about letting the jukebox do the heavy lifting, with George Jones ("the Possum") turned up loud enough to satisfy both nostalgia and any nearby health-and-safety officer who has long since stopped asking questions.
• The title comes from the Southern phrase "shoot the bull," meaning to sit around talking idly with friends. No bulls are harmed in the process, which is just as well, as the paperwork alone would likely ruin the mood. It's a tradition deeply embedded in country songwriting, where conversation is often treated as a competitive sport with no clear winner but plenty of repeat customers.
  
  Justin Moore used the expression in a similar spirit in "Til My Last Day," securing its place in the genre's vocabulary of easygoing companionship.
  
  Baby I might meet all my friends
  Shoot the bull, have a beer or two
• The "silver bullets" reference to Coors Light taps into another piece of barroom folklore: the beer's distinctive silver cans, a design so self-explanatory it has done most of the branding work for several decades. By the early 1990s, the nickname had spread far beyond college campuses and into country music, where it sits comfortably alongside other cherished rituals like over-tipping the jukebox and insisting that the last song was definitely louder in 1987.
• The song was written specifically for Johnson and Combs by Ray Fulcher, Casey Brown, Josh Phillips and Drew Parker, writers who clearly understood the risks of tailoring a song too precisely. "If you take that chance and an artist is like, 'I'm not really comfortable with the representation of myself in this song' or whatever, there goes your song, because you can't really pitch it to another artist. But Luke was like, 'There's no way we can't do this song.' So, it was a done deal," Johnson told Billboard.
  
  He added that lines about "tattooed knuckles, gold plated buckles and me talking about this wild card band selling out every seat" literally sounds like him and Combs "sitting in a bar, just shooting the bull."
• Ray Fulcher, a longtime Luke Combs collaborator, brings his experience in sharply observed storytelling from hits like "When It Rains It Pours," "Even Though I'm Leaving" and " Love You Anyway."
  
  Josh Phillips has several cuts with both Johnson ("Dirt Cheap," "Blame Texas") and Combs ("The Man He Sees In Me," "Giving Her Away").
  
  Drew Parker continues his run of Combs co-writes that includes "1, 2 Many," "Forever After All" and "Doin' This."
  
  Casey Brown is a Nashville writer/producer who has frequently written for Russell Dickerson and Jelly Roll.
• "Shooting The Bull" appears as Track 12 on Banks of the Trinity, Johnson's autobiographical 16-song album named for the Trinity River near his hometown of Sebastopol, Texas. Much of the record looks inward, but this track zooms out just far enough to catch Johnson and Combs in their natural habitat: sipping a cold one and talking nonsense with the conviction of men who have temporarily solved most of life's problems over the course of a single chorus.
• Produced by Trent Willmon, the track leans into a loose, groove-driven barroom feel, funky enough to move a little, restrained enough to avoid spilling anyone's drink. Willmon, a West Texas native and longtime Johnson collaborator, lets the duet do what it clearly came to do: talk, laugh, and delay responsibility for as long as the jukebox holds out.