Songfacts®:

• If Waylon Jennings, the Rolling Stones, and Kings of Leon produced a child, that child would be "High Rise Jeans" - at least, that's how actor/vocalist Luke Grimes sees it.
  
  "High Rise Jeans" is a fun romper about being chewed out by a lady and then left mesmerized by the sight of her caboose strutting off in high-rise jeans. It's the kind of song people pop onto honky-tonk jukeboxes to sing and dance to.
  
  In his interview with American Songwriter, Grimes talked about writing the song with his producer Dave Cobb and the songwriter Jessie Jo Dillon. "We needed a tempo song, something fun, something a little more raucous, because the album's missing it and because that's a part of my personality at times," he said. "We were playing around. We tried a few different things that were more tempo. Some of those got cut, and then pretty late one night, Dave and the bass player and I were just sitting around sort of jamming on something that sounds like Waylon and the Rolling Stones and Kings of Leon had a baby. I was like, 'That's the best baby ever.'
  
  So we started doing that and then I was coming up with the melody. And then those words, 'I hate to see you leave, but I love to see you walking away,' fit. And Dave was like, 'That it. You've got to do that.' The next morning, me and Jessie Jo finished the lyrics."
• Jessie Jo Dillon co-wrote many of Grimes' songs. In his American Songwriter interview, he said the album couldn't have come together without her. "She's brilliant," he said, going on to explain her singular talent for grasping the energy that an artist is trying to get across and building a song around it. She grasped his intention with "High Rise Jeans" instantly and made it a reality.
• The song is on Red Bird, Grimes' second album, following his self-titled debut in 2024. Grimes entered the music scene having already established himself as an actor, playing roles in Fifty Shades of Grey, American Sniper, the Yellowstone series that ran on Paramount from 2018 to 2024, and the 2026 CBS series Marshals.
• The song's co-writer and producer, Dave Cobb, is a Nashville production and songwriting staple with a long list of credits. He produced Oliver Anthony's Hymnal of a Troubled Man's Mind, which features the viral single "Rich Men North Of Richmond." Cobb also provides percussion and guitar on Red Bird.
• High-rise jeans sit at or above a person's waistline, usually covering the navel, giving the body a lean, elongated look.