Songfacts®:

• This country tearjerker follows a young boy whose soldier father has died. He walks into a toy shop carrying a photograph of his late papa and asks the toymaker to build him a new dad.
  
  Maybe you could bring him back
  If I walked in with him, it'd sure make my mama happy
  If you could build me a daddy
  
  Luke Bryan released the ballad on June 12, 2020, in time for Father's Day a week later.
• Bryan warned listeners the song will tug at the heartstrings: "I've played this song for a lot of my hardcore buddies and it chokes them up, he shared, "I think that's the beauty of country music, to really make you feel emotional."
• The song was written by:
  
  Jake Mitchell (Luke Bryan's "Born Here Live Here Die Here," Hardy's "One Beer").
  
  Josh Thompson (Jason Aldean and Miranda Lambert's "Drowns the Whiskey, Luke Bryan's "One Margarita").
  
  Brett Tyler (Chris Young's "I Know A Guy," Florida Georgia Line's "Y'all Boys").
• Michael Monaco filmed the music video south of Nashville. The clip shows Bryan performing the song alone in an empty, run-down house. At the end, his two sons run up and hug their daddy.
• Luke Bryan performed "Build Me a Daddy" on TV for the first time during the June 18, 2020 episode of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon: At Home Edition.
• Luke Bryan's sister Kelly passed away unexpectedly in 2007, followed by her husband in November 2014. After the death of his brother-in law, the singer and his wife took in their 13-year-old nephew, Tilden (Til). Bryan told the Los Angeles Times that because of the tragic events in his own life, he was totally able to connect to the song.
  
  "I didn't go in there and do 25 vocal takes on it," he said. "I think I did four, and there were even some that my engineer was like, 'Man, we really can use 95% of this vocal.' That tells me I've connected emotionally with the song; I'm really just channeling it."
• Brett Tyler originally came up with the idea for "Build Me A Daddy" inspired by a writer he loves named Rick Bragg. He'd tuned into a YouTube interview with Bragg where the author talked about his book Ava's Man, which he wrote about his grandfather, a man he never met.
  
  "He was basically putting together this book based on other people's stories," Tyler explained to American Songwriter. "In the interview, he said, 'It was like I was trying to build my grandfather from the stories of people in town who grew up with him.' Sometimes an idea hits you like that, and it makes you think of something else. It made me think about a child's perspective of missing his dad."
  
  Tyler could see the scene in his head even before he wrote it. "I pictured a kid going into this store and asking this toymaker to build him his dad because he's gone," he said. "I could see the scene in that movie, where something like that would happen. It gave me the language for the kid. A kid uses language like, 'Make him 10 feet tall. Make him like Superman,' because that's how a kid would describe his dad. It was fun to get into the character and the mindset of a child. It helped paint that song."