Songfacts®:

• On this duet with Shelton's fiancée Miranda Lambert, a couple hatch a harebrained scheme. It involves the female faking her death so the pair can elope and get married without drawing her father's wrath. "I am extremely excited about the duet with Miranda," said Shelton. "It is the exact type of duet our fans would expect us to do. We sing about being crazy in love and running away."
• Shelton told The Boot how he and Lambert came to record this song: "That song was pitched to me by [my producer] Scott Hendricks; it's a Chris Stapleton song. I was sitting next to Miranda on my bus and I said, 'Listen, what do you think about this song?' She flipped out over it. She said, 'That could be a great duet.' It wasn't written as a duet; it was just from the guy's point of view. And she and I had made this pact that we don't do cheesy love duets, it's just not us. So if there was ever a song that was a perfect lyric for us and our personalities, it was 'Dragging the River.' I think it was meant to be for us, there's not been a song that I know of that she and I can sing in the same key, and for whatever reason that melody was perfect, that lyric was perfect, and I'm already hearing from fans that it's one of their favorites."
• Shelton explained the funny banter between the two lovers at the end of that song. "The outtakes that we ended up using were probably the most PG [rated]. Scott Hendricks was really pushing us to throw the insults out there and take jabs at each other. On the original version of that, we were talking back and forth until the end of the song and I said, 'Man this is too much. There's stuff in there about bringing the beer and burning the parents' house down and crap like that.' [laughs] So finally I said, 'Just let her insult me at the end, and I'll apologize about calling her dad a son of a bitch and we'll leave it at that."'