Songfacts®:

• This playful track about two friends deciding to start a band is a duet with Keith Urban. Paisley and the New Zealand singer have been friends since before either of them had record deals.
• Paisley said of this song to The Cleveland Plain Dealer: "It's probably not what you think, in the sense that it's not a blazing fast thing. It's more of a rockin' Eagles style tune like back when Joe Walsh and Don Felder would play those harmony parts."
• This is one of four vocal tracks from Paisley's mainly instrumental album Play. In 2007 Paisley won the Best Instrumental Grammy for "Throttleneck."
• Brad Paisley told AOL he'd been intending to record something with Urban for a long time and it was a wonderful thing to finally get to do so with his friend. He explained: "When I called him I said I had a couple ideas for what we could do. One of them was just go write a real fast guitar instrumental and try to blow people's minds. The other was this song about starting a band that was pitched for my last record that I didn't cut. I told him the words to 'Start A Band' and sent it to him. He cracked up when he heard it because we've both been through this so much in our lives, just our attempts to be cool as guitar players you know, and wanting to fit in."
  Paisley added that when it came to record this song he was determined that the end result would be more than just two entertainers playing together. He explained: "I couldn't finally get the chance to play with Keith and do just some obscure artsy thing that no one was going to appreciate. I was like, 'Let's do something really cool that people are going to talk about and want to hear.' So we went in and had fun and he worked his butt off on that song. He spent all day doing harmony parts with his guitar and came up with lines I never would have had on that chorus."
• When this reached #1 on the Hot Country Songs chart, it became the 13th chart-topper for Paisley and the ninth for Urban.
• Paisley and Urban were the first male duo to have a country #1 since Kenny Chesney and Uncle Kracker reigned for five weeks in April and May 2004 with "When the Sun Goes Down."