Songfacts®:

• Mary Gauthier was given up by her birth mother and adopted by a couple from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where she grew up. It was a tumultuous household, and her adoptive father was an alcoholic. In this song, she describes a typical night at home, with her father drinking and her mother crying.
  
  Mary developed her own drinking problem and found herself in and out of detox centers in her youth. She took some classes at LSU and opened her own restaurant, but it was songwriting that gave her a clear direction in life. Her first album was released in 1997, and two years later Drag Queens in Limousines earned a 4-star rating from Rolling Stone. "I Drink" became her signature song, and she recorded a new version for her 2005 album Mercy Now.
• Blake Shelton recorded this for his 2004 album Blake Shelton's Barn & Grill. It's one of the few Gauthier songs to earn a cover, possibly because she doesn't spend much time selling her songs to other artists, even though she lives in Nashville. Mary told us: "The thought of going up and down music row looking for a publisher again, it just intimidates me and like you said, I'm not what you would think of as a Nashville character, and in order to go do that I have to go shake hands with a lot of those guys. It's just intimidating."