Songfacts®:

• The song's music video was directed by Peter Zavadil (Eric Church, Kip Moore, Lady Antebellum) and filmed in the Brothers Osborne's hometown. "We went back to our hometown of Deale, Maryland, just to kind of give people a little bird's eye view of what it's like where we come from," T.J. Osbourne explained. "We also wanted people to realize what really the perspective of 'Rum' was, which wasn't sitting on the beach. It was about really from the perspective of being in our hometown which is very blue collar, a lot of people who don't have money to go to the beach, so they kind of make their own little moments and their own paradise."
  
  "'Rum' is about being in paradise no matter where you are," John Osborne added. "And to us, Deale was our own little blue collar paradise."
• TJ and John Osbourne wrote this feel-good song about creating your own paradise with fellow Nashville songwriter Barry Dean. Speaking about the process that John and him go through when penning a tune, TJ said. "It all just kind of happens, you know. I mean it's really random. It comes and goes."
  
  "A lot of it starts off with music and that kind of starts to spark up," he continued. "We're really feeling it, if it really gets us inspired musically, typically it's kind of hand-in-hand with the lyric starts to come out then. Sometimes we go in to writes with lyrical ideas, and it just all changes. Sometimes, it's never really one way, and that's kind of a good thing."
  
  "When you're trying to do it a certain way, it seems to maybe work for a little while, but eventually, it just gets stuck and it just doesn't work anymore," TJ concluded. "We don't even like to go in to writes with any rules at all, not even, 'this has to be for us.' So, we like to go in and write a song and figure out the rest later."
• When TJ Osborne came out as gay in a 2021 interview with Time, it surprised many. People might have cottoned on to his sexuality had they been paying more attention, as in every Brothers Osborne song bar one, he uses gender-neutral lyrics. "Rum" is the one exception where he specifically sings about a woman.
  
  Starin' at the prettiest part of this powder keg world
  Sittin' with the finest example of a beautiful girl
  
  Osborne stressed that "Rum" isn't specifically a love song. "In that song, it doesn't really reference necessarily a relationship, but it says, 'Sitting with the finest example of a beautiful girl,'" he told Billboard in a 2022 interview. "And I liked the way that line is. I just liked the way it sounds, but I knew from then I was like, 'I don't ever want to say 'girl' again in a song.'"
  
  Osborne added that his choice to use gender-neutral lyrics isn't only because of his sexuality; he also considers the repeated use of the word "girl" an overused cliché in country music. "People still pitch me songs with 'girl' in it," he said. "I'm like, 'What the hell? Read a book.'"