<\/p>\n
When songwriters pen songs about country music or the lifestyle associated with it, there\u2019s no need to reinvent the tractor wheel. Small towns, honky tonks, trucks, blue jeans and back roads are all standard items to wedge into a song, and help capture the topic. But the story has been told so many times that the real challenge is to explore those stock pieces of country culture with words and phrases that sound just a little bit new.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s kind of overwhelming,\u201d says Shane Profitt. \u201cThere\u2019s so many songs like that. But at the same time, okay, we have some really big shoes to fill, so [you have to] really sit down and try to nail it down.\u201d<\/p>\n
More from Billboard<\/strong><\/p>\n Profitt\u2019s first charted song, \u201cHow It Oughta Be\u201d (No. 16, Country Airplay), was fueled by a number of those items \u2013 cold beer, Mama\u2019s chicken, backyards and the kitchen table \u2013 and it was riding in the top 20 when Profitt went to the home of Australian-born writer Lindsay Rimes (\u201cWorld On Fire,\u201d \u201cHeaven\u201d) to write with Rimes and Matt Rogers (\u201c\u2019Til You Can\u2019t,\u201d \u201cFreedom Was A Highway\u201d) in March 2023.<\/p>\n Profitt thought it was a joke when Rimes greeted him with a standard Aussie hello \u2013 \u201cG\u2019day, mate\u201d \u2013 before he recognized that it was authentic. \u201cI just didn\u2019t know,\u201d Profitt admits. \u201cI think it\u2019s cool as s\u2014.\u201d<\/p>\n Profitt did<\/em> know that it was the third anniversary of Joe Diffie\u2019s COVID-related death \u2013 \u201cHe\u2019s definitely on my Mount Rushmore,\u201d Profitt says \u2013 and he was in a mood to write an anthemic country song. The night prior, Rogers had been working on his taxes, and at his CPA had him pursuing a legal maneuver that was unfamiliar, thus uncomfortable.<\/p>\n \u201cI was dissolving an LLC, and I just couldn\u2019t get LLC out of my head,\u201d he remembers. \u201cWhen we talked about it in the write that day, I was like, \u2018There has to be something here, because you see LLC on everything.\u2019 It\u2019s everywhere you go, because anything that has a copyright or whatever has an LLC with it.\u201d<\/p>\n They explored acronyms and eventually landed on \u201cLong Live Country,\u201d a phrase that seemed well-suited for an anthem. Rimes started building a track with a strong rock backbeat, and they developed a chorus that \u2013 starting with the phrase \u201cHere\u2019s to the blue-collar minimum wagers\u201d \u2013 was one big toast to small-town America. The ideas were familiar, but the actual verbiage \u2013 \u201cBaptist back-row amazing gracers,\u201d \u201cSeptember Saturday SECers\u201d \u2013 was unique enough to make a few clich\u00e9s feel new.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re telling the people almost what they\u2019ve heard before,\u201d Rimes concedes, \u201cbut as long as the lyric is colorful enough, and you have an artist like Shane who lives it, you can pull it off.\u201d<\/p>\n At the end of the chorus, the toast naturally came to its peak moment. \u201cLong live country,\u201d the singer proclaims, though it fell in a way that left space for one more line. That presented a genuine challenge.<\/p>\n \u201cThe hardest part of the song was figuring out how we were going to end the chorus, because it felt \u2013 for lack of a better word \u2013 limp just saying, \u2018Long live country,\u2019\u201d Rogers notes. \u201cI was just gonna repeat it twice, and I couldn\u2019t tell you who said \u2018And country in country songs.\u2019 That feels more complete.\u201d<\/p>\n That phrase celebrated putting both more country lyrics and more country sounds into country music, and they inserted plenty of both into the verses. The text included 40-hour work weeks, helping strangers and dropping quarters into a \u201cjuke,\u201d a word Profitt concocted while thinking about a woman who threw a fit when Shooters \u2013 a bar in his hometown, Columbia, Tenn. \u2013 replaced its coin-driven jukebox with TouchTunes. \u201cShe would play Charley Pride all the time,\u201d he recalls.<\/p>\n Given the Diffie anniversary, Profitt slipped a \u201cJohn Deere Green\u201d water-tower reference into verse two, and they put another unique spin on the small-town checklist by mentioning Rust-Oleum. \u201cIt\u2019s just a strange brand of paint, but it fits so well in the line,\u201d Rogers says. \u201cThose, to me, are the little nuggets. [If] you say, \u2018Oh, this song is stock,\u2019 I\u2019d be like, \u2018Okay, when the hell\u2019s the last time you heard a song with Rust-Oleum?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Rimes produced a big-sounding demo that captured the energy Profitt had envisioned, though the master version would reflect the title a little more strongly. \u201cMine\u2019s probably more like a \u201870s rock thing,\u201d Rimes says. \u201cAnd theirs is more like a country thing.\u201d<\/p>\n Profitt was signed, at the time, to Harpeth 20\/BMLG, but when that deal ended, he brought \u201cLong Live Country\u201d \u2013 along with plenty of other material \u2013 to his next contract with Triple Tigers. He tapped Trent Willmon (Cody Johnson, Ian Munsick) to produce three songs on a trial basis Feb. 3 at the Curb 43 studio on Music Row. Profitt was enamored with Rimes\u2019 demo, but wanted more country flavor, putting Willmon on a creative tightrope.<\/p>\n \u201cYou don\u2019t want to reinvent it,\u201d Willmon says. \u201cIf they really love the demo, you kind of got to stick to it.\u201d<\/p>\n Drummer Evan Hutchings drove the rock-tinged power in the track, while guitarist Justin Ostrander modified the original instrumental signature lick, adding a few more notes to the end to make it more seamless. Acoustic guitarist Tim Galloway overdubbed a banjo part, hidden deep in the background, and steel guitarist Scotty Sanders took over on the back half of a solo section that started on electric guitar.<\/p>\n Profitt visited Willmon\u2019s home at a later date to do the final vocals in an 1820 log cabin that Willmon had transported to his property from its original location in West Virginia. Instead of recording in the cabin\u2019s vocal booth, Willmon put Profitt in the center of the big room and covered some baffles with ultra-country material to control the sound.<\/p>\n \u201cWe set up these little panels, and I covered them up with these old quilts,\u201d Willmon says. \u201cWe\u2019ll set the mic up in the living room of this cabin. And we purposefully didn\u2019t add the second floor on half of the cabin, so there\u2019s a loft in one side, but it\u2019s a two-story cabin, and it\u2019s 25 feet from the floor of this cabin to the to the top, and so you get this incredible, warm, natural reverb.\u201d<\/p>\n Triple Tigers released \u201cLong Live Country\u201d to country radio via PlayMPE on June 30, and it\u2019s gotten off to a good start at numerous stations, including WTQR Winston-Salem, N.C.; KHEY El Paso, Texas; and KBAY San Jose. The song conveys its familiar country properties with its own unique language.<\/p>\n \u201cI always try to be different,\u201d Profitt says, \u201cbut not too terribly different. If it ain\u2019t broke, don\u2019t fix it.\u201d<\/p>\n Best of Billboard<\/strong><\/p>\n Sign up for Billboard’s Newsletter<\/a>. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook<\/a>, Twitter<\/a>, and Instagram<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When songwriters pen songs about country music or the lifestyle associated with it, there\u2019s no need to reinvent the tractor wheel. Small towns, honky tonks, trucks, blue jeans and back roads are all standard items to wedge into a song, and help capture the topic. But the story has been told so many times that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1949511,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[22846,318662,340809,340808,316826],"class_list":["post-1949510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-country-music","tag-matt-rogers","tag-rimes","tag-shane-profitt","tag-trent-willmon"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Shane-Profitt-Puts-a-Fresh-Coat-Of-Paint-on-Familiar.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1949510","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1949510"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1949510\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1949511"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1949510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1949510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1949510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}