Songfacts®:

• This is a track from ZZ Top's fifteenth album, La Futura, which was co-produced by vocalist Billy Gibbons and knob-twiddling legend Rick Rubin: The song was penned by Gibbons with American rock, country, and blues musician Tom Hambridge. "That was the second composition that came out of the collaboration with Tom Hambridge," Gibbons recalled to MusicRadar.com. "I went back to Malibu with Rick during the final two weeks of review. He and I both liked it. It was sitting there and Rick didn't want to let it go – he liked it, but he couldn't figure out what it needed.
  
  We were in the control room," he continued, "we played it and played it, and suddenly I stumbled upon the lead line, 'I don't want to lose you.' Instantly, we retitled it. I took a few minutes and rewrote the lyrics, and there you have it.
  
  It was funny, though, because I had to call my buddy Tom, who by this time was in Chicago. 'Well, I trashed another one of our songs, Tom!' [laughs] And he said, 'Hey, if you trashed if like you did the other one, you've got my blessing.'"
• Gibbons' guitar solo was inspired by a British legend: "Before cutting the solo, I had been listening to Keith Richards," he told MusicRadar. "I talked to him, and we were discussing songs that left him in mysteryland. One was a song originally done by Bo Diddley called 'Crackin' Up.' The Stones' version is great, but Keith was talking about the eight bars, how Bo gets the guitar upside down and backwards and then magically gets out of it. Keith said, 'It's one of those happy accidents. I've been trying to do that for 40 years.'"
  
  "Two Stones songs have done that to me," he continued. "There's 'Start Me Up' – it's very difficult to find the downbeat in the intro until they finally kick it in – and the other one is a Keith solo song called 'Take It So Hard. Man,' it's so riveting! So it was a Keith Richards-inspired day of soloing, which means… it just happened!"