Hit songwriters never know when inspiration will strike for lyrics to a song, and that was exactly the case for Bobby Pinson when he started hashing out the new Toby Keith single, ‘Beers Ago.’

“I was painting this old dump truck of mine, and not everybody can say that,” Pinson tells Taste of Country with a laugh. “I didn’t want to spend a lot of money, so I went and got me some spray paint. I was spray painting this old, 1968 Ford Ranger one-ton dump truck. I called up Toby, because he’s always laughing at these phrases I come up with. I was always impressed with Steve Earle [who] had this phrase called ‘Dog House Roses,’ which is roses you bring home if you’re in the dog house. So I always try to come up with those phrases. I called Toby up and said, ‘I got a new one: Rattle Can Red.’ He laughed and got a kick out of it. About 30 days later I came up with [the opening verse].”

I had a hand-me-down ride painted rattle-can red / Secondhand tires with poor-boy tread / Made a lot of almost-love in the bed of that truck / That got stuck a lot,” he wrote in the opening lyrics.

“I brought the whole verse to him and he loved it,” Pinson remembers. “We’ll do that a lot … he’ll start a verse and save it or it will still be around when I get there. We’ve just had a relationship so long that we kind of know what sounds like the other guy, so we’ll make sure those songs are still around when we get back together. I took it to him, and we just love that song.”

And we spent what little money we had / On Wintergreen Skoal and main street gas / Go get your girl, go make the drag / If you’re lucky, you can take ‘er ‘cross the railroad tracks / Where the man in the moon works his magic / On the second runner-up of the 4-H pageant / Seems like yesterday even though / That was fourteen hundred and fifty-two beers ago,” they wrote in the first of the three evolving ‘Beers Ago’ choruses.

“It’s just a really cool song about remembering things that were a long time ago that just seemed like yesterday,” explains Pinson. “That’s something you do every day. [The song] has a really cool groove, and it’s one of my favorite tracks on [Toby's] record.”

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