Songfacts®:

• Some girls go for guys with fancy cars or expensive watches, but in the South, you'll find some who can't resist a guy with a sweet tractor. In this song, Kenny Chesney is plowing the fields when one such lovely lady gets his eye. She's into him, and he knows why: she thinks his tractor's sexy.
• When you have kids, going to the farm supply store without them can be a hot date. That's what happened to the Nashville songwriter Paul Overstreet, who wrote this song with another Nashville cat, Jim Collins. At the time, five of Overstreet's six kids were still living at home.
  
  "They just kept us busy all the time," he said in a Songfacts interview. "So this day we left them at home with the nanny and went off looking at farm equipment. As we left the co-op, she flipped the little divider up and started getting frisky. It was like when we were dating. We went over to some friends' house after we left, and they said, 'Are you writing any new songs?' I went, 'Yeah, I got one I'm working on called 'She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy.'' Because we were looking at tractors.
  
  She turned red and didn't say anything, but they started laughing really hard, so I thought maybe there was more to it than just a joke. So the following Monday, I had a writing appointment with a couple of guys. We were struggling to find an idea so I threw that one out there. One of the guys said, 'I don't want to write that dumb stuff, let's write something serious.' So we didn't write it. Then after the session the other writer, Jim Collins, called me and goes, 'Man, I want to write that idea with you.'"
• Tim McGraw had first crack at recording this song. Before it was even written, Jim Collins told his publishing company about the title, and when McGraw's people heard it, they put a hold on the yet-to-be-written song. "Tim McGraw wants to put a hold on that song. We better write it," Collins told Overstreet.
  
  They wrote and demoed the song, but McGraw didn't record it, so they pitched it to Chesney, who loved it. He included it on his fifth album, Everywhere We Go, and it became one of his most popular tunes.
• Chesney and his producers, Buddy Cannon and Norro Wilson, kept the vibe lighthearted when they recorded the song. "I just laugh every time I hear it," Chesney said. "We just tried to go in and have the most fun with it in the studio as we possibly could."
• Martin Kahan directed the music video, which shows Chesney working on the farm, attracting lots of tractor groupies. It spawned lots of tribute videos as guys re-created it on their own tractors.
• In the 2016 episode of The Ranch, Ashton Kutcher's character sings this as he drives a tractor down a road. That same year, the song showed up in the movie Jack Reacher: Never Go Back.
• Jim Collins has written his share of serious songs, including "The Good Stuff" for Chesney and "Then They Do" for Trace Adkins, but as he puts it, "I'll always be the tractor guy."
  
  His co-writer Paul Overstreet also has a lot of sincere songs to his credit, including "Look At Me" by Carrie Underwood and "Forever And Ever, Amen" by Randy Travis, but many prefer his more comedic songs like this one and Black Shelton's "Some Beach."
• In 2009, Jim Collins landed another "tractor" hit when Jason Aldean took "Big Green Tractor," a song Collins wrote with David Lee Murphy, to #1 on the Country chart.
• In 2000, after Kenny Chesney was arrested for riding off on a police horse in Buffalo, New York, Cledus T. Judd released a parody of this song called "My Cellmate Thinks I'm Sexy." Chesney was eventually found not guilty; he said the "horse incident" was a big misunderstanding that started when the daughter of a police officer suggested he sit on her dad's horse.