Paisley wrote this good-time summer jam with his frequent songwriting partner Kelley Lovelace and first performed it during Nashville's annual Country Radio Seminar convention in early 2014. "We got an inner tube We got a trailer hitch We're near the river and far from rich But we have got each other and gas in the tank We're laughing all the way to the river bank." Paisley's first performance of the song on national TV was during the ACM Awards in Las Vegas on April 6, 2014.
The song was inspired by growing up 500 yards from the Ohio River. "I was trying to figure out where to go from here, what to write and what felt like what I wanted to do," Paisley explained to The Tennessean. "There's a groove that feels like that and I think we grabbed that groove when we made this track and, more than that, there's a mindset that I am completely ready for after this winter." "I've called myself, for years, a river rat," he added. "My best memories with my grandfather are on that body of water, and my dad and learning to ski. It's kind of like a back-to-basics song, which is really an inner tube and a boat and you've got a theme park."
The song's music video is a party on the river with Paisley and Twiggy the Water Skiing Squirrel. It was directed by Scott Scovill and filmed on a 150-acre body of water in Alabama. Twiggy first came to fame in an act by Chuck and Lou Ann Best, on a 1979 episode of Real People, where he was featured skiing around in a heated pool. Since then there have been several squirrels who've used the name (the rodent equivalent of "Shamu"), popping up on numerous television shows as well as such movies as Anchorman.
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