Anderson recalled: "Brad called me one day on the phone, and said, 'I've been listening to this "Whiskey Lullaby," what would you think if I brought a girl to sing on that second verse?" And I said, 'I've never thought of that. Then Brad Paisley heard the tune and spotted its potential as a duet. However, he added, "people weren't lined up down the street looking for double-suicide drinking songs, so it sat on the shelf for five years."ĭixie Chicks were the first act to have the song on hold had but their career imploded in the meantime. Jon loved that line so we wrote it down and then he said, "Here's a line here: 'He put that bottle to his head and pulled the trigger.'" I said, 'Well, let's forget about the 'Midnight Cigarette.' Man, you've got the perfect idea for the song there.' And it just kind of flowed there."ĭuring an interview included in Nashville Songwriter: The Inside Stories Behind Country Music's Greatest Hits by Jake Brown, Anderson said that he and Jon Randall wrote the tune back in 2000 as something to be sung by one person. "I went to the writing session with the idea to write a song called, 'Midnight Cigarette.' Basically that turned out to be the first line of 'Whiskey Lullaby': 'She put him out like the burnin' end of a midnight cigarette.' That was what I wanted to write the whole song about. He said, 'Man, I'm sorry for the way I've acted the last couple of weeks.' And his friend said to him, 'That's alright Jon, I've put the bottle to my head and pulled the trigger a few times in my life.' So when Jon came to the writing session, that was fresh on his mind." When he decided to sober up and come back and join the living again, he apologized to his friend. And he went over to a friend's house and crashed for a couple of weeks. He had gotten a divorce and lost his writing deal and his record deal all within just a day or two of each other. Jon was going through some pretty rough times back then. Anderson told AOL's The Boot the story behind the song: "Jon Randall and I wrote the song together. Many naysayers may have believed that a song so inherently sad, with such a negative view of drinking, wouldn’t stand a chance of success at radio, but they were proven wrong.įor more on Bill Anderson and a review of Jake Brown’s Nashville Songwriter, check out this link.The song was written by Bill Anderson and Jon Randall and was inspired by a difficult time that Randall was going through including a divorce from country star Lorrie Morgan. It won the Country Music Association Song of the Year award for the writers, Anderson and Randall. Krauss was enlisted, and the song became a top 5 hit on country radio, and a standout cut on Paisley’s double-platinum album Mud on the Tires. Who do you have in mind?’ And he said, ‘Well, I think there’s only two people who could do it, and I would like to have one of those: Alison Krauss or Dolly Parton.’ And I told him, ‘Well, you don’t have to ask my permission to do that, because I love them both!’” “Then Brad Paisley heard it – and we did not write the song as a duet, it was written just as a song to be sung by one person – and Brad called me one day on the phone and said, ‘I’ve been listening to this ‘Whiskey Lullaby,’ and what would you think if I brought a girl to sing on that second verse?’ And I said, ‘I’ve never thought of that. And then, of course, the line that everyone remembers is, ‘Put the bottle to his head and pulled the trigger,’ so that was probably an example of cowriting in its purest form, where both people contribute pretty much equally to the process.” And he loved that idea, and had been going through a lot of personal things in his life … he said, ‘Well, I put the bottle to my head and pulled the trigger a few times,’ and next thing I’m going, ‘Forget the midnight cigarette! I love put the bottle to the head and pulled the trigger!’ So what we did was we combined my line, ‘She put him out like the burning end of a midnight cigarette,’ as the opening line of ‘Whiskey Lullaby,’ and it worked really well. “Jon Randall and I got together to write one morning, and I came in and said, ‘I’ve got an idea to write a song called ‘Midnight Cigarette.’ Can you imagine a cigarette just sitting on an ashtray at midnight? Nobody’s smoking it or paying it any attention, and it just sort of burns out and goes out all by itself, and liken that to a relationship – it wasn’t like you hit a wall or anything, it just burned out, it just went away. Written by one of country music’s actual living legends, Bill Anderson, and Jon Randall (Gary Allan, Dierks Bentley), “Whiskey Lullaby” was a great example of a true songwriting collaboration, as Anderson recounted to author Jake Brown in Brown’s 2014 book, Nashville Songwriter.
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