Songfacts®:

• Little Big Town's Karen Fairchild both co-wrote and sang lead vocals on "Summer Fever." She penned the song with:
  
  Englishman Sam Romans who has also contributed to UK hits for Naughty Boy ("Home") and Clean Bandit ("Tears")
  
  Nashville songwriters Cary Barlowe (Lady Antebellum's "American Honey," Florida Georgia Line's "Sun Daze") and Jesse Frasure (Jon Pardi's "Dirt on My Boots," Chris Lane's "Fix").
• Frasure also co-produced the track with Shane McAnally (Miranda Lambert's "Mama's Broken Heart", Sam Hunt's "Body Like a Back Road"). This was a shift for Little Big Town, as Jay Joyce had been their producer for most of the 2010s.
  
  "I dare you to sit still when this song comes on... it's impossible," said McAnally. "I don't even dance, but something comes over me when this thing kick."
• Little Big Town opened the 2018 CMT Music Awards on June 6, 2018 by performing the summer-ready jam live for the first time. It was released the same day to radio and digital platforms.
• The TK McKamy-directed video was shot along Florida's 30A coastline and features Karen Fairchild, Kimberly Schlapman, Jimi Westbrook and Phillip Sweet cycling through Watersound Beach, and strolling along the boardwalk. The four Little Big Town members end up at a beach party where they dance under strings of colored lights alongside co-writers Jesse Frasure and Cary Barlowe.
• When Karen Fairchild was writing the song with RØMANS with Cary Barlowe and Jesse Frasure, she recalled the days when she'd escape school in Alabama to go on a road trip to the Florida beach.
  
  "We thought, well we should just go all the way and describe what it's like if you go to Panama City on Spring Break or on vacation," she explained to ABC Radio. "For me in college at Samford, I used to take the long weekends with the girls and go to the beach."
  
  "You start to smell the salt in the air," Fairchild added. "You know you're getting to the beach."
• The song tips the hat to the Bee Gees '70s sound, thanks to Little Big Town's performance at the Grammy-organized brothers Gibb tribute concert, which followed the 2017 Grammy Awards. "We've always loved seventies..." Jimi Westbrook said. "You can go back to all of our records and there's those sunny California harmonies that we've always been attracted to. And our vocal blend lends itself to those kinds of things. So it was fun to go there."
  
  "And I just love the breezy feel of it," he added. "It just makes you feel good. It makes me happy and I can't help but dance."
• Karen Fairchild already had the word "fever" written down when she walked into the Rhythm House headquarters in August 2017 for a songwriting session with Jesse Frasure, Sam Romans and Cary Barlowe. As the trio started playing with melodies and syllables, the phrase "Summer Fever" emerged as a complement to the foundational track that Frasure, Romans and Barlowe had already prepared. The rest of the warm weather storyline came quickly.
  
  "We wanted the song to feel very nostalgic and also feel heart-connected to people when you think back about summer loves or that moment when you were seeing people you only see in the summertime, and just that salt in the air," Fairchild told Billboard. "That feeling of summer and freedom and no more school - that was a good feeling."