When songwriters pen songs about country music or the lifestyle associated with it, there’s 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.
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“It’s kind of overwhelming,” says Shane Profitt. “There’s 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.”
Profitt’s first charted song, “How It Oughta Be” (No. 16, Country Airplay), was fueled by a number of those items – cold beer, Mama’s chicken, backyards and the kitchen table – and it was riding in the top 20 when Profitt went to the home of Australian-born writer Lindsay Rimes (“World On Fire,” “Heaven”) to write with Rimes and Matt Rogers (“’Til You Can’t,” “Freedom Was A Highway”) in March 2023.
Profitt thought it was a joke when Rimes greeted him with a standard Aussie hello – “G’day, mate” – before he recognized that it was authentic. “I just didn’t know,” Profitt admits. “I think it’s cool as s—.”
Profitt did know that it was the third anniversary of Joe Diffie’s COVID-related death – “He’s definitely on my Mount Rushmore,” Profitt says – 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.
“I was dissolving an LLC, and I just couldn’t get LLC out of my head,” he remembers. “When we talked about it in the write that day, I was like, ‘There has to be something here, because you see LLC on everything.’ It’s everywhere you go, because anything that has a copyright or whatever has an LLC with it.”
They explored acronyms and eventually landed on “Long Live Country,” 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 – starting with the phrase “Here’s to the blue-collar minimum wagers” – was one big toast to small-town America. The ideas were familiar, but the actual verbiage – “Baptist back-row amazing gracers,” “September Saturday SECers” – was unique enough to make a few clichés feel new.
“You’re telling the people almost what they’ve heard before,” Rimes concedes, “but as long as the lyric is colorful enough, and you have an artist like Shane who lives it, you can pull it off.”
At the end of the chorus, the toast naturally came to its peak moment. “Long live country,” the singer proclaims, though it fell in a way that left space for one more line. That presented a genuine challenge.
“The hardest part of the song was figuring out how we were going to end the chorus, because it felt – for lack of a better word – limp just saying, ‘Long live country,’” Rogers notes. “I was just gonna repeat it twice, and I couldn’t tell you who said ‘And country in country songs.’ That feels more complete.”
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 “juke,” a word Profitt concocted while thinking about a woman who threw a fit when Shooters – a bar in his hometown, Columbia, Tenn. – replaced its coin-driven jukebox with TouchTunes. “She would play Charley Pride all the time,” he recalls.
Given the Diffie anniversary, Profitt slipped a “John Deere Green” water-tower reference into verse two, and they put another unique spin on the small-town checklist by mentioning Rust-Oleum. “It’s just a strange brand of paint, but it fits so well in the line,” Rogers says. “Those, to me, are the little nuggets. [If] you say, ‘Oh, this song is stock,’ I’d be like, ‘Okay, when the hell’s the last time you heard a song with Rust-Oleum?’”
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. “Mine’s probably more like a ‘70s rock thing,” Rimes says. “And theirs is more like a country thing.”
Profitt was signed, at the time, to Harpeth 20/BMLG, but when that deal ended, he brought “Long Live Country” – along with plenty of other material – 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’ demo, but wanted more country flavor, putting Willmon on a creative tightrope.
“You don’t want to reinvent it,” Willmon says. “If they really love the demo, you kind of got to stick to it.”
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.
Profitt visited Willmon’s 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’s vocal booth, Willmon put Profitt in the center of the big room and covered some baffles with ultra-country material to control the sound.
“We set up these little panels, and I covered them up with these old quilts,” Willmon says. “We’ll set the mic up in the living room of this cabin. And we purposefully didn’t add the second floor on half of the cabin, so there’s a loft in one side, but it’s a two-story cabin, and it’s 25 feet from the floor of this cabin to the to the top, and so you get this incredible, warm, natural reverb.”
Triple Tigers released “Long Live Country” to country radio via PlayMPE on June 30, and it’s 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.
“I always try to be different,” Profitt says, “but not too terribly different. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
