Creek Don't Rise

Album: not on an album (2020)
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Songfacts®:

  • Dating is a tricky business when you're a Southern boy who's strapped for cash. Country singer Payton Smith finds himself in this situation in this humorous tune, which has him planning a night-time fishing adventure with his date. In order for the romantic rendezvous to occur, lots of things that could go wrong need to go right - his truck needs to work and that hole better still be in the barbed-wire fence. But he especially hopes the "creek don't rise."
  • Written by Smith and Nashville songwriter Casey Beathard ("No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems"), this was inspired by a real date-gone-wrong. "This girl and I were having coffee and we went to get back in my truck and the battery had died. So it turned into an hour of trying to figure out how to charge my truck battery," Smith recalled in a 2021 Songfacts interview. "I told my co-writer Casey Beathard about it the next day, and he started singing the first line of the chorus."
  • Smith got bitten by the country-music bug at 5 years old after he watched Keith Urban perform on the CMA Awards, a moment that indirectly inspired this tune. He told MusicRow magazine: "I had this toy guitar at the time and I must have spent the next two weeks just torturing my guitar trying to do what he did. It affected me just seeing how much energy he puts into a song. When I started writing I wanted to write with that live energy approach to a song, so that's how we approached this song."
  • Smith's released his debut EP in 2019, featuring the lead single "Like I Knew You Would."

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