Songfacts®:

• Derek Hoke has been making music in Nashville for more than 20 years, but once upon a time, he was the new kid on the block - with a big chip on his shoulder. In this tune, he takes aim at brash upstarts just like him.
  
  "'Hush Your Mouth' is a song that's about me when I moved here," he said. "It's about a lot of people that, when they move here it's like 'big fish, small pond.' I've found over the years of being here that a lot of people move here with a really bad attitude and then don't have the goods to back it up. If you're going to act like a total asshole rock star please at least be really really good - as this town is full with some amazingly talented people that are also super nice. It's still a small town at heart and we just don't have time for that."
• Hoke was raised in South Carolina, where he starting playing cover songs in bars and restaurants to audiences that were less than enthusiastic. "Growing up playing sports bars and rooms full of people where no one's listening, you create a lot of bad habits," he recalled. "I had a lot to unlearn."
  
  He also had a lot to learn. Luckily, he found a great teacher in Ricky Skaggs. When Hoke relocated to Nashville in the '90s, he landed a gig selling merchandise for Skaggs on his tour, where he also learned the art of showmanship from watching the veteran bluegrass singer perform.
• Electric Mountain is Hoke's first album of new music since 2017's Bring The Flood. Although it was completed during the COVID-19 pandemic, Hoke told the Songfacts podcast he didn't want to write any "pandemic, depressing songs - I feel like everybody else has got that covered."
• Nashville singer-songwriter Lillie Mae, who also played fiddle on the album's second single, "Let Go Of My Heart," plays on this tune and shares backing vocal duties with Alyssa Graham (of the singer-songwriter duo The Grahams) and jazz singer Laura Mayo.