Songfacts®:

• Paisley wrote this good-time summer jam with his frequent songwriting partner Kelley Lovelace and first performed it during Nashville's annual Country Radio Seminar convention in early 2014.
  
  "We got an inner tube
  We got a trailer hitch
  We're near the river and far from rich
  But we have got each other and gas in the tank
  We're laughing all the way to the river bank."
  
  Paisley's first performance of the song on national TV was during the ACM Awards in Las Vegas on April 6, 2014.
• The song was inspired by growing up 500 yards from the Ohio River. "I was trying to figure out where to go from here, what to write and what felt like what I wanted to do," Paisley explained to The Tennessean. "There's a groove that feels like that and I think we grabbed that groove when we made this track and, more than that, there's a mindset that I am completely ready for after this winter."
  
  "I've called myself, for years, a river rat," he added. "My best memories with my grandfather are on that body of water, and my dad and learning to ski. It's kind of like a back-to-basics song, which is really an inner tube and a boat and you've got a theme park."
• The song's music video is a party on the river with Paisley and Twiggy the Water Skiing Squirrel. It was directed by Scott Scovill and filmed on a 150-acre body of water in Alabama.
  
  Twiggy first came to fame in an act by Chuck and Lou Ann Best, on a 1979 episode of Real People, where he was featured skiing around in a heated pool. Since then there have been several squirrels who've used the name (the rodent equivalent of "Shamu"), popping up on numerous television shows as well as such movies as Anchorman.
• Country rapper Colt Ford appears on a remix dubbed the 'River Bank Rip Rap.' The idea came after Paisley and Ford decided to meet and work together for the very first time. "I wrote with Colt a little bit for this album and when we were getting to know each other, I said, ''River Bank' feels like something you should have done. You should do a version of this,'" Paisley revealed, "and he said, 'Man, I'd love to' and so I sent him the track and that's what he came up with."
  
  "It really does work," he added. "Don't you think it sounds like he was on there all along?"
• Asked by Billboard magazine why he chose to lead Moonshine In The Trunk with this song, Paisley replied: "It ticked all the boxes in a great way in that it sounded like me, old me, but it sounded like a new me at the very same time."
  
  "This is interesting because I've never done a groove with this composition of elements," he continued. "I've done things this tempo, but I've never done this kind of groove, plus the new technique of the way I've done the vocal, which is sort of a punch and hammer it."
  
  "At the same time, it's a subject that's not far from things I've sung about in the past, which is what you do to have a good time in the summertime if you don't have a lot of money and you live in the country," Paisley added. "But at the same time, it's a new hook. I've never heard this hook before: 'Laughing all the way to the riverbank.' I can't believe that hasn't been done. It seems like it's been sitting there waiting since the dawn of country music to be written and nobody did it yet."
  
  "I just felt like it was the right thing to add to my show," he concluded, "the right thing to get my fans fired up and ready to hear more."