Songfacts®:

• In this song, Tim McGraw is acknowledging the destructive and sometimes selfish side of his personality, which he identifies as "the cowboy in me." This was written by the coveted country songwriters Al Anderson, Jeffrey Steele and Craig Wiseman. Anderson told us he is proud of the song, even though it is not particularly personal to him: "I was just writing the song. Jeff Steele came in with the idea and he had some of it done already, and he and Craig Wiseman just finished it with him. So it has nothing to do with my life. I don't do that that much."
• Anderson told us that he drew inspiration from the trucker radio stations that he listened to as a child when he wrote this song: "My mom used to let me go to sleep with the radio on and I could get WBBD when I was a kid, in Wheeling, West Virginia. It was a trucker station and it came in at night all over the country. So when I was 8, 9 years old, I was glued to that station at night. I fell asleep with it every night."
• Set This Circus Down was McGraw's seventh studio album. It topped the US country chart, as did all four singles from the album: this, "Angry All the Time," "Grown Men Don't Cry" and "Unbroken."