Kip Moore

Up All Night

Label:

MCA

Format / Edition(s):

Album

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Kip Moore

Up All Night

Cut By Cut

“I wrote this with Keifer Thompson from Thompson Square. We happened to be talking about first times that particular day. We were talking about high school days and the places that you went and the time that you shared. Most everybody from high school can think of one person that they shared their high school days with. That is usually when your first times happened.

“That led to us realizing that so many things were your first times with that person. In high school, a girl I was seeing didn’t have the most desired home life. There was some anger about that with her, having to grow up fast and acting older than she was. Sometimes I would butt heads with my family or whatever. When I look back on it, I realize that they were trying to communicate with me. But at the time, my relationship with her provided us both with a safe harbor from our worlds, a getaway car from everyday life.

“This song is about two teens finding refuge in each other. We were able to block out the outside world. When we got together, that pent-up frustration would come out in a physical way. We understood each other because we both had those feelings pent up. It is how we connected on that level and why the spark was there between the two of us. It was quick and fleeting, fast and furious, while you were in it. But that is who I shared some first times with and then it was gone.”

“Blair Daley said, ‘I’ve got this title ‘Beer Money,’ but I don’t know exactly what to do with it.’ We laughed and joked around about the idea. I know where I grew up in south Georgia, nobody had any money in high school. It was a lot of middle-class to lower-class kids that we all ran with together. That is what the weekends were about: there was nowhere to go and there were no clubs, so it was all about who has the money to come up with the beer and where can we go. It was the same thing in college: you are holding out spending money on food so that you’ve got enough money that weekend to go to the beer store and have a good time. I think that is the way small-town America still is everywhere. Until you get a certain age and start working a job that pays you some money, you are just trying to keep that last little bit of money together to have some beer money for the weekend.

“I think the title completely throws you off from what the music is, and I like that about it. When you look at the title, the music is a very unexpected twist. It’s an easy-going feel-good song for people who are sitting in that town with nothing to do. That is the town that I grew up in. There was nothing to do, nothing to choose from, and a lot of times you felt like banging your fist against the wall, and the only release that you had was the weekend to go have a good time with your friends and your girlfriend, and you wanted to go and have some beers. That is what the song is. It’s just a feel-good release of that small-town America life and what it’s like growing up.”   

 
3.  “Somethin’ ‘Bout a Truck” (Kip Moore and Dan Couch)

“That fell into our laps after we had already written a song that day. Dan started walking out of the room while I was playing that groove to the song. I thought he was gone, but he popped his head back in the door and he spit out the first line. We sat down and started goofing around. He called his wife and said, ‘I’m going to be about an hour late.’

“The cool thing about Dan is that he will let me run with things that other writers might not let me run with. We wrote four verses before the chorus ever came out. But it ended up making the song unique. We kept kind of building on the theme.

“I think anybody that comes from a small town has lived that song. I lived that song 5,000 times growing up. When you are from a small town like I am, there’s not a whole lot to do. You have to make your own fun and there’s a lot of sitting in fields, and a whole lot of Bud Light and fishing poles. It’s real hot in south Georgia, so all of the girls were wearing sundresses.  It was all you needed back then – a truck bed, beer, a radio and good company with you. It’s a fun song that everybody lived at a young age.”


4.  “Everything But You” (Kip Moore and Trent Summar)

“I lived in Hawaii for awhile and I lived on the East Coast before that. I got the idea for ‘Everything But You’ when I was living in Hawaii.  My best buddy, P.J. Brown, and I would camp out at waterfalls and these amazing beaches and be the only ones there. I would think to myself how when you were there as long as we were that it was almost a sad thing. You were in these amazing spots , but no matter how beautiful it is around you, unless you’ve got people  with you that you care about, it amounts to nothing. It was a lonely kind of feeling. I have bounced around a lot since I was 17 and I’ve been in some cool places, but I’ve been on my own a lot. I like it like that, but again, it can become a lonely thing if you don’t have people you care about around you. We were created to share those things with people.”
 

 5.  “Crazy One More Time” (Kip Moore, Aimee Mayo and Chris Lindsey)

“‘Crazy One More Time’ is a special song for me. I’d had that guitar riff for a long, long time. The music always felt very special to me; it felt happy, sad and emotional. The music in that song is the most dynamic for me on the entire album and has the most feelings in one song for me. I can get really happy listening to it. It has this melodic thing that makes you feel good, yet it tugs at your heart at the same time.

“I am not married and nowhere close to it, but even for those who marry, there are those memories of that one person. I had known somebody in college and we had always had a thing for each other. I went years without seeing her and then the second we saw each other again, we didn’t miss a beat. We were right back in that place, that moment.  It might always be that way, even if you have moved on and are with somebody else.  Sometimes there’s a certain special connection you have with people. I don’t think it ever dies, when it’s a real thing. Sometimes souls are intertwined. It doesn’t mean that you are meant to be together, but I don’t think it ever dies.”


6.  “Where You Are Tonight” (Kip Moore, Blair Daly and Troy Verges)

“I have been so focused on what I’ve been trying to do for so long that I’ve pushed a lot of good things away from me. I know a lot of good people have tried to get into my life, but I’ve kept the door shut because it’s easier for me to focus on what I’m trying to do. I had done that in particular in this case. For me, that song sprung about by questioning yourself on whether or not all of it is worth it and whether I’m going about it the right way--shutting people out and doing this all on my own. It was one of those cases where we quit talking and your mind is dominated by the fact that you let a good thing go. There’s a distance between the two of you. Is that gap too far to bandage up? Is there any bridge between the gap? This song is an inner battle of trying to let go of something.”
 

7.  “Hey Pretty Girl” (Kip Moore and Dan Couch)

“‘Hey Pretty Girl’ for me is where I think every man and woman desires to be at some point in their life. I am not there and I don’t really desire to be there now. I have other things to get out of my system and a lot of road ahead of me and I need to be focused on just that. But I’m not going to fool myself. At some point you are going to desire to have that person that knows you inside out and cares about you.

“I tried to paint the best picture of what that really was. You want someone that you’re going to want to take home and show your friends and family. The reference to planting roots in the apple trees is a metaphor for planting roots together. It’s all about starting a life together. At some point, I’m gonna want kids and I tried to draw on that and what I wanted that to be like. I’m not there right now, but there will come a time for that. Everybody at some point wants to feel that special thing for somebody else and wants to have it reciprocated.”
 

“‘Reckless’ is semi-autobiographical of my life. There are some alterations. I always thought I would be a big basketball player – my thing was to play in college -- so I twisted that around. I made that baseball because I did play baseball. But it’s a close autobiography of my life. With the beach right there, I guess surfing was the logical next move that was kind of my thing. I didn’t know what to do next and I was living on the coast, so I quit playing golf and started surfing, bouncing around different coastlines. I played the whole bar band scene so I bought an old guitar.

“When I first moved to town, I bought this guitar because I had sold my other one, and there was a big old guy behind the counter who told me he could teach me to play all of these fancy licks. I will never forget that guy. Then you cut your teeth playing in places around town, and a lot of times nobody is there when you are playing. Somebody else is always trying to tell you how to be and what you should be singing about and wearing. I just broke the song down to my journey to this point. It’s a direct portrait of what I’ve gone through to get to where I am now.”
 

“‘Up All Night’ is about not accepting that once you grow up you can’t live the same way as when you were younger. It’s refusing to give into age and what people say you’re supposed to do at a certain age. It’s about capturing life in the moment. A lot of people are scared to be that way. You feel like you reach a certain age and you can’t do anything in the spontaneous nature that you did when you were in your teens or early 20s. It’s about not relinquishing that and holding onto that innocence of what youth brings.

“We got the idea after I started talking about having some friends out the previous night and we sat outside around a fire pit.  I was talking about how we had a couple of bottles of wine that we passed around and some girls were dancing and we played guitar.  I was saying what an awesome night we had the night before, when we stayed up until three or four in the morning just messing around. It makes you feel alive and really young again. That moment came from a spontaneous moment of us sitting around the house playing guitars and saying, ‘Let’s start a fire, play some music and get some people over and have a good time.’”
 

10. “Fly Again” (Kip Moore, Dave Lapsley and Dan Couch)

“We were doing a soundcheck for a show in Pennsylvania and Dave started playing the guitar lick for the song. I started free-styling, spitting out some words on top of it. I spit out that first verse, ‘I think I’m gonna take me a ride.’ I had to wrap my head around exactly what I was saying. We loved the melody and the guitar riff, and I got my little hand recorder and I recorded it. I sat on the van that whole eight-hour drive back to Nashville and started writing the lyric.

“I didn’t have the last verse. I was struggling with it. Everything that I wrote felt contrived and that’s why I brought Dan Couch in. I said, ‘Man, I need help in this last verse,’ and he came right in and we sat down for two or three hours and we came up with it. 

“It’s one of my favorite songs on the record. It’s actually a sad lyric, but the music is uplifting. It’s funny when we play it because people get so rowdy. People get more into that song than any song I have just about that people don’t know. (Of course, ‘Somethin’ ‘Bout a Truck’ gets the biggest reaction.) People get so wild. I think this song strikes such a chord with people because when a relationship goes wrong and you really cared about somebody, it’s such a hard thing to get past.  Sometimes those really sad songs are good and people need to hear them, but sometimes you need to hear that other thing that’s like, ‘I’m going to get through this.’ That is what this song is. It’s a really sad lyric with a happy melody.

“I feel like in a break-up there are three stages: the first stage is you are really sad. The next stage is you are really angry and the third stage is you don’t give a shit anymore. That is what this song is, that third stage of ‘I’m gonna get past this whole thing.’ I’ve been in that place and I just tried to draw on how I felt when I was in that place when I was writing that song.”
 

11. “Faith When I Fall” (Kip Moore and Brett James)

“I wrote that the day after I was offered the record deal from MCA Nashville. You get so used to not getting what you want for so long; you get used to getting your teeth kicked in. I know everybody sacrifices a lot, but I felt like I had sacrificed so much to get to where I was trying to be. 

“I’m a spiritual person and I have my faith. I spent many nights praying for the faith and strength just to keep me going and keep me at it because so many times I wanted to go home because it seemed pointless. I was just talking about that with Brett and saying that even though I had gotten to where I’d wanted to be, now there’s a whole other place I want to go and there’s a whole other journey and climb. I think the song is not just about music, but the climb itself. Whatever you do for a living, whatever dreams you have, it’s a constant fight. Once you get that, you want something else.

“The song was a thank-you to the prayers I’ve prayed over the years and then the asking part of it to keep me going. It was thank you and a request all in one. Because I know I am not there. I know I don’t walk the straightest line at times, but I always believe, even when I’m not walking a straight line.”

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