Songfacts®:

• Capitol Records needed a single for Keith Urban's seventh studio album, Get Closer, so the Australian country artist brought in a couple of songs to consider. When "Put You In a Song" was selected, Urban took back the other, which was this song and re-recorded it keeping only the original vocal. The track that appears on the album is this revised version.
• The song was written by Chris Lucas and Preston Brust of the country music duo LoCash Cowboys plus Jaren Johnston, who is the vocalist and guitarist of the rock band American Bang.
• Urban told The Boot: "I come from playing in a three-piece band and this is a loose, Georgia Satellites kind of song. It's rootsy and cool and it's got good swagger, and I thought it'd be really fun to play live."
• This was the first song the trio wrote together. Brust recalled to Taste of Country: "Chris and I had just gotten signed to Sony/ATV Music Publishing, and they wanted to hook us up with different writers for co-writes. One of the co-writers they thought would be cool to write with us was Jaren. The night before we wrote, I tried to research Jaren a little bit because I wanted to know what kind of style his band had. I found out that he's a rocker. It was a really cool, fresh rock 'n' roll sound. I thought how cool would it be to write a song and get it on American Bang's next album."
  
  "I began to think of lyrics and hooks and melodies that lent itself to the rock world," he continued. "Meanwhile, Jaren had been listening to some LoCash Cowboys stuff and was probably trying to get a LoCash cut. I guess that's what you get when you mix American Bang with Locash: a rockin' Keith Urban song."
• It was Johnston who came up with the original concept for the song. "Jaren had this awesome idea about a blackbird with a broken wing, hiding from the world," Brust told Taste of Country. "He had worked out this idea for a song already. He had a hook and some of the lyrics for the hook. He played us the idea, and we were like, 'Whoa! That's awesome!' We ran with it, and we started filling in the blanks."
• When asked by American Songwriter magazine to describe his songwriting process, Jaren Johnston said it's different each time. "I have a little studio room in my house that has an awesome vibe," he explained. "Sometimes I write to a loop in GarageBand and other times I just start with an acoustic idea. I write with Tom Douglas once a week and we just sit in his writing room and it's completely organic. Just two dudes, an old Gibson, and a piano. Then I take the song home and do a simple work tape in GarageBand. On the other hand, when I worked with Keith we had an old 808 drum machine and a couple Tele's. Both situations usually end with me going home and doing a work tape."
• This was the first hit song for LoCash's Preston Brust and Chris Lucas. It came five years before their first Hot 100 entry as a duo with "I Love This Life."
  
  "We had 'You Gonna Fly' on hold for two years," Lucas told Baltimore magazine. "We wrote it and didn't think anything of it, and then Keith calls one day and says, 'Hey man, I want to cut the song' and we're like, 'Holy cow!' Then you hope he makes it a single, and he did make it a single, and it changed our lives. Four months later, Tim McGraw called for 'Truck Yeah.'"