Songfacts®:

• This drinking song was released as the third single from Garth Brooks' Sevens album. It spent one week at #1 on the country chart in May 1998.
• The song was written by Shawn Camp, Benita Hill and Sandy Mason. It finds Brooks singing of a man with "the heartaches that love often brings." He heads down to the beach and drowns his blues with a couple of Piña Coladas.
• Hill told the story of the song to The Tennessean. "Sandy Mason and Shawn Camp and I got together to write," he recalled. "We had written a bunch of songs before we wrote that one, and we got together on this one day, for another writing session. It was a really cold, gloomy day. It was February, and it was just really yucky. We just fantasized about how nice it would be to be at the beach and have a piña colada, or maybe two, one in each hand."
• Hill was surprised when Garth Brooks decided to record their tune. "We wrote that pretty quickly. Made a little demo of it, and Sandy actually pitched it to [producer] Allen Reynolds," Hill said. "[Reynolds] goes, 'I think I'm going to play that for Garth.' When [Mason] came back and told me, I was kind of dumbfounded, because I didn't think that that would be anything that Garth would do, but he did."
• Shawn Camp also played an acoustic guitar on this song.
• The Piña Colada is the national drink of Puerto Rico and National Piña Colada Day is celebrated on the islands on July 10th every year. A sweet cocktail made with Rum, Cream of Coconut and a splash of freshly pressed and strained Pineapple Juice, it is usually served either blended or shaken with ice. The drink was introduced to an international audience after Rupert Holmes released his 1979 US #1 hit "Escape (The Piña Colada Song)."
• Brooks performed this on Saturday Night Live when he hosted an episode on February 28, 1998.