Songfacts®:

• This fiddle-and-steel drenched song finds Jon Pardi singing of flirting under neon lights. After noticing a girl sipping her drink alone, he shuffles over and buys her a drink. Now, Pardi is in seduction mode, telling her this might be her "last night lonely."
• Dylan Marlowe, Joe Fox, and Jimi Bell penned this honky-tonk heater. They are three emerging artists who cold-emailed Jon Pardi a video of "Last Night Lonely."
  
  Pardi is keen to champion young songwriters. "I love the song," he told Apple Music. "See, that's why, when you get videos like that, that's why you record outside music, because they may get another publishing deal. They may get a record deal. You never know what it's going to do for them."
• The three songwriters penned "Last Night Lonely" in 2020 at Joe Fox's studio at Liz Rose Music. It was Fox who suggested writing about a man hitting on a woman by listing various ways tonight might be the last night of lonesomeness.
• The song starts with the woman's "last drink from a stranger in a bar," introducing her journey with the guy. "It's just really from that very moment of meeting a girl in a bar, maybe she's got her heart broke, and from that very first instance, progressing through the night and all the last times as you're getting to know her," Jimi Bell told Billboard.
• Dylan Marlowe intended to cut "Last Night Lonely" himself and asked his co-writers not to pitch it. However, Fox had a co-writing session with Pardi's producer, Bart Butler, lined up. When Fox arrived at the session, Butler mentioned Pardi needed more songs for his next project, and asked if he had anything suitable. Fox emailed "Last Night Lonely" to Butler that evening, and the producer immediately gravitated towards the track.
  
  "It had the lyric, it had everything," Butler told Billboard. "We always cut everything a click or two faster - sometimes three to four clicks, depending on the song - and I think we went two clicks faster than the original. It just needed a little goose in it, a little bit bigger drums and Jon's swagger."