From an sonic perspective, you’ve got to love the tremendous meatiness of this drum sound, and especially the fat, driving snare. And it’s a great example of how tuning the snare to the key of the track can really pay dividends in this respect, because it means that the drum’s fundamental tone can be mixed higher in pure engineering terms (for stronger, weighter punch) while remaining subjectively well blended with the backing because it doesn’t clash with the song’s harmonic progressions. To demonstrate what I mean, let me provide a little audio comparison. First, here’s a short section of the song’s introduction, exactly as released: play_arrow | get_app And now, here’s the same piece of audio, but this time with narrowest little notch filter removing just the snare drum’s fundamental frequency: play_arrow | get_app It makes a surprisingly big difference to the apparent power of the drum!

Besides that, though, this song also showcases some of the most time-proven songwriting workhorses in country music, so it’s worth a good listen if you’re just starting to write your own songs. For a start, there’s the drop chorus at 2:46, a classic means of clawing back some arrangement headroom for the final chorus if you’ve decided (as they have here) to go guns blazing into the middle section. Then there’s the old faithful V-vi interrupted cadence at 3:15 (going from A_b to B_bm), fulfilling its accustomed role of dovetailing in an extra hook line (“Drinking Jack all by myself / He’s choosing Texas I can tell.”) before the end of the song. And budding arrangers also shouldn’t miss the judicious use of section trucation (at the end of the first chorus) and extension (at the end of the middle section), as well as the splendid moments of word-painting from the second-verse guitars following the phrases “mountain rain” (1:27) and “Memphis blues” (1:34).