Songfacts®:

• In this song, Tucker Wetmore thanks his dad for showing him what not to do in a father-son relationship, like getting drunk, never settling down, and leaving the kid with nobody to throw a ball with.
  
  "It's an entire entirely true story," Wetmore told American Songwriter. "Just who I am, my upbringing and the stuff that I've lived through."
• Wetmore's parents divorced when he was 10, and he was raised mostly by his mother. His father, Robert, was absent for most of Tucker's life, which he sings about in this song. When he wrote "What Not To," he hadn't had contact with his dad in years. On one of their last phone calls, Robert said he no longer prays, which made it into the song with the lines:
  
  Momma said you don't pray no more
  Breaks my heart so I do it for you
• Wetmore wrote the song with Jacob Hackworth, Chris LaCorte, Chase McGill and Jameson Rodgers during a songwriting retreat at a lake house they rented in Lynchburg, Tennessee.
  
  "We were out there for three or four days, and the last day, we were all pretty beat because we were writing five or six songs a day, and that gets pretty tiring," Wetmore told American Songwriter. "We didn't really feel like writing all that much the last day, so we just started talking about life and family. We're all just sitting around this living room couch and just hanging out, and my buddy starts talking about his relationship with his father. Then my other buddy starts chiming in with his. Then I start chiming in with mine. We sat there and just talked about life for like an hour and a half, then we looked down after we got done talking, and we had this piece of paper with a song on it right in front of us. So we made up a guitar riff to put over what we had just talked about, and it sounded pretty decent. We're like, 'Hey, this is really cool and it's real.' It was the hardest song I've ever been a part of, but the easiest in some senses because it just wrote itself, and it's all true from top to bottom."
• "What Not To" is the title track to Wetmore's debut album, which includes the hits "Wine Into Whiskey" and "Wind Up Missin' You." The album established him as a rising star in country music, but that wasn't his first career choice: Wetmore wanted to be a professional football player but an injury killed that dream.