Music

Thomas Rhett’s new single makes only a passing reference to a truck, but it’s loaded with pickups.
The foundational electric guitar played by songwriter John Byron (“Last Night,” “Pour Me a Drink”) required a pickup to produce a sound. The protagonist in the plot, singing to a woman around closing time at a club, is trying to make a pickup. And the phrases in the singalong chorus generally start on the second beat of a measure, leading to the downbeat of the next bar; thus, they’re built from musical pickups.

As a result, “After All the Bars Are Closed” uses pickups in hopes of yielding a pickup.

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“I would have never thought about that in my whole existence,” Thomas Rhett says.

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To be fair, the singer-songwriter doesn’t actually think of it as a song about a barroom pickup. Instead, he relates it to the early days of his relationship with now-wife Lauren, when he was playing music and attending David Lipscomb University in Nashville while she studied nursing at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. There were so many other obligations in their lives that they often had only a two-hour window after midnight for themselves.

“Anytime I write a song, whether it’s [about] heartbreak, love — whatever — I’m either looking at my present day with my wife, or I’m kind of looking back into when we first started dating,” he says.

Lauren wasn’t the original muse, though, for “After All the Bars Are Closed.” Byron was working with pop songwriters Jacob “JKash” Kasher (“Love Somebody,” “Sugar”) and Jaxson Free on March 10, 2023, in Miami, and he landed on a finger-picking guitar pattern that ends with a twisty riff. They began sifting through potential titles, and when they came upon “After All the Bars Are Closed,” it had a classic ring to it.

“It’s like [Semisonic’s] ‘Closing Time,’ but kind of a country way to say that,” Byron notes.

Instead of the standard verse-chorus-verse-chorus format, they used the title as the opening line, getting to the hook immediately. That tactic was used frequently in some previous eras — Willie Nelson started with the hook on two of his most valuable copyrights, “Crazy” and “On the Road Again.” Larry Gatlin employed that approach in most of The Gatlin Brothers’ hits in the ’70s and ’80s.

“What’s funny about Larry is, his wife was one of my second-grade teachers,” Byron recalls. “I definitely listened to a lot of Gatlin Brothers.”

Opening with the title has an obvious advantage in an era marked by short attention spans.

“If you can get to the hookiest part of the song first, it can really draw people in,” Byron says. “If you think of ‘Cruise’ by Florida Georgia Line, if that song had started with the verse, I don’t think it would have been nearly as big. [They sang] the most iconic part of the song right off the top.”

While the melody of the “Bars” chorus started on the second beat of a measure and ended on the downbeat of the next bar, the verses had their own unique structure. The bulk of the phrases in those stanzas start after the second beat and end before the next measure — they’re compact and tucked completely between the song’s defining beats.

As Byron, JKash and Free developed those musical parts, they saw the characters as romantically unconnected.

“Whenever me and Kash are together, we always want to make sure it’s as swaggy as possible, so most of the time, in our heads, it’s two people who aren’t together,” Byron says. “I actually think it’s cool that TR did it, because him and Lauren are together. And so I think it’s a cool, fresh way for TR to pick up his wife.”

Thomas Rhett and songwriter-producer Julian Bunetta (Kelsea Ballerini, Sabrina Carpenter) had meanwhile been listening to some ’50s and ’60s recordings, many of which started with the hook and got to the chorus three times in just two minutes. The hook-first nature of “After All the Bars Are Closed” intrigued them during a writing retreat at Lookout Mountain near Chattanooga, Tenn., when Byron introduced a rough version of the song.

“It’s like a ballad dressed up as a midtempo bop,” Bunetta says. “But actually, when you break it down and just sing it on guitar, it’s a really tender, sweet love song. I love when things aren’t always what they seem on the surface.”

Thomas Rhett and Bunetta tweaked a few melodic passages and changed some lyrics, in particular adding new words on the final chorus, where the post-midnight theme inspired a “dark side of the moon” line. It may lead listeners with a classic-rock background to think of Pink Floyd. “When I heard that line, my brain went to Pink Floyd,” the singer-songwriter agrees.

Bunetta and Dann Huff (Kane Brown, Keith Urban) co-produced a tracking session for “Bars” at Backstage in Nashville, testing its flexibility by trying a range of styles. Bunetta rejiggered the chord progression for one take, they tried playing it without the original guitar riff on another, and they even did a version with a Hall & Oates vibe.

In the production’s early going, they settled on a rendition that was “extremely Western, like if me and Midland sort of had a baby,” Thomas Rhett says. “Me and Julian both lived with it for a couple of weeks, but it just didn’t give us the same emotion that the original did.”

They mixed and matched parts from those various takes for the album, though Bunetta eventually adopted a less-is-more attitude about the arrangement, built primarily around Byron’s guitar work on the demo.

“The more I tried to add, the less I liked the song, the more the emotion got buried, and the more his voice got buried,” Bunetta says. “It just wasn’t as effective, so I tried to keep it sparse and keep it all about his voice, [with] a couple of those little colorful, electric bits on the left and the right side.”

The album version had a pop edge to it, with Byron’s harmony parts from the demo providing loose background vocals. Bunetta “could turn a fart into a BGV,” Byron says with admiration.

As the track began to emerge as one of the most popular in streaming from the About a Woman album, Rhett’s team determined a different mix — “The Last Call Version” — was in order for a radio release. Drummer Jerry Roe was brought in to give the percussion a stronger human presence, and some of steel guitarist Paul Franklin’s part from the original session — including a waterfall intro — were unmuted.Valory released “Bars” to country radio via PlayMPE on Feb. 6. It’s at No. 39 on the Country Airplay chart dated March 15 in its third week on the list as programmers pick up on it.

“It’s sneaky because the music is very ‘now’-sounding, but there’s something about the way that that song sort of teleports you, and it makes you feel nostalgic,” Thomas Rhett says. “It makes you feel kind of like you want to dance, but also just kind of like you want to be with the person that you love. It doesn’t happen very often where a song checks all those boxes.”