David Lee Murphy was playing guitar at his kitchen table one morning when this song "came out of nowhere." He recalled to The Boot: "I had the idea for that song, but I hadn't ever done anything with it. I just remember being at my house the second day [of recording]. We started recording on Monday, and Tuesday morning, I was drinking coffee at my kitchen table. I started playing the opening chords on my guitar for 'Dust on the Bottle.' It just came out of nowhere. The song just fell out in like 15 minutes.

I called Tony Brown, who was producing my record, and I told him, 'Man, I just wrote this new song!'" Murphy continued. "We had all the songs picked out already for the album. He told me to bring it in and play it for him that day. When he heard the song, he said, 'Man, we've got to cut this.' So we cut it, and what's on the record is the first take of the song. A lot of the vocals on it were the first time I sang it. It was really a special song, and it still is to this day."

Released as the fourth single from Out with a Bang, the song spent a week at #1 on the Country chart in late 1995. It remains Murphy's only chart-topper as an artist, but he has clocked up a number of #1s as a writer, starting with Kenny Chesney's 2006 single "Living in Fast Forward."