Songfacts®:

• The lead single from Garth Brooks' In Pieces album, "Ain't Goin' Down ('Til the Sun Comes Up)" was written by the singer with Kent Blazy and Kim Williams. It spent a week at the summit of the US country chart and also peaked at #13 in the UK.
• The song was written by the trio while sitting out on the back porch of Kent and Sharon Blazy's house. They came up with this story of a teenage boy and girl who defy their parents and escape their houses to stay out all night. Kent Blazy recalled to Bart Herbison of Nashville Songwriters Association International:
  
  "A lot of times when Garth comes in, he has an idea on how he wants something to be on a record. He came in and there was no pressure. He said, 'I want to write the first single off the new record, and I want them to be shotgun lyrics.' OK.
  
  I mean, I kind of figured he was thinking Chuck Berry or something like that. And so he just kind of threw out this idea, telling the whole story. And we had Kim Williams with us. Any time we got together, Kim was always the risqué one.
  
  We always blamed it on him. We just started laughing, writing, and Kim filled up a notebook full of lines. Then we finally went through, cleaned them up and got it the way we wanted. We told the whole story, and we worked all day 'til we were sunburned. Because we had to go outside and work."
• Trisha Yearwood sings harmony vocal. At the time she and Brooks were close friends and frequent collaborators, (Yearwood was married to Robert "Bobby" Reynolds, a bass player for The Mavericks). After they divorced in 1999 she and Brooks started dating and they eventually married in 2005.
• Brooks has frequently collaborated with Blazy and Williams. He wrote "If Tomorrow Never Comes" and "Somewhere Other Than The Night" with Blazy, and "New Way To Fly" and "Papa Loved Mama" with Williams.
• The songwriters were fretting over how Garth would manage the machine-gun delivery live and still be able to breathe. Garth recalled in his 2017 book, The Anthology Part 1: The First Five Years: "What we didn't know as we were doing it was that the lyric was becoming the cadence of the song, it was becoming the rhythm of the thing, the beat. You know, 'You better get your red head back in bed before the morning,' that red head becomes a push in the song, and it's funny because the whole studio band picked up on that immediately, that the lyric was the cadence, and they followed that cadence through it all."
• Chris Leuzinger had already laid down all his guitar work when Terry McMillan was brought in to add his harmonica. When Leuzinger heard McMillan's work, he redid all of his guitar parts to compete with McMillan's playing.
• In Pieces was Brooks' third album - following Ropin' The Wind and The Chase - to debut at #1 in America. By August 2020, it sold more than 10 million copies in the US.
• The album title was inspired by a discussion Brooks had with his engineer Mark Miller about the goal of an album. Miller told him: "An album reveals who that artist is at the time they are making the album, and you're going to have to give a piece of yourself in every song." The idea helped bind an album full of diverse songs together, from this fast-paced country tune to the samba-inspired "The Night Will Only Know," to "One Night A Day," which features a sax solo.