Songfacts®:

• Highway 61 runs from Minnesota to Louisiana, covering about 1,400 miles. Bob Dylan made the road musically famous with his album and song "Highway 61 Revisited," but for the Country singer Steve Azar, the highway has special meaning as well. His mom grew up on Highway 61 in Mississippi, and his cousin owns the famous restaurant Abe's Bar-B-Q, which is located on the corner of 61 and Route 49.
• Azar wrote this song with James House, who is also a Nashville-based singer/songwriter. Says Azar: "It's the first song we'd ever written together. We hadn't contacted each other in two years. And I saw his wife, who's a very respected music person in Nashville, in the studio world. She deals with all the acts coming in from all over the place and takes care of them and gets their studio and everything lined up around the show when they're making records. But I saw her when I was right off the Bob Seger tour, and she said, "Hey, James is working on a new project." I said, "I'd love to see him again." So we reconnected. And then we saw each other just about every day for a year. I don't know if I gave him a key, or if he just knew to pick the lock. All I know is I'd be down here in my studio, and all of the sudden I'd turn around and he'd be there. But I think we wrote 35 or 40 songs that year. We became very comfortable with each other, and it was a perfect fit. Every day we'd start writing one song, and then we'd come back the next day, record one, and then we'd work on the second one, and then we'd start another. It just became an ongoing thing."