Songfacts®:

• This song finds Eric Church engaging in some tough talk about his dark side. The singer states that he manages to keep a lid on his evil inner urges when with his family but threatens to put a bullet into anyone who messes with his 2-year-old son.
• During an interview with GQ, actor Chris Pratt cited Eric Church as a major inspiration for the tough guy character Owen Grady that he plays in Jurassic World. Writer Chris Heath reported:
  
  "On Jurassic World, all of Pratt's ideas and approaches were combined into a kind of mantra that he would repeat to himself just before the camera rolled: 'Flow core, no TC, volume up point five, Eric Church.'
  
  'Flow core' to remind him of his posture when he was paddleboarding. 'Volume up point five' to remind him to make his voice slightly louder. 'No TC' to remind him to lead with his forehead, in a formulation only a formerly fat man would think to use: No triple chin. And Eric Church to remind him of 'Dark Side,' a song by Church that Pratt was listening to over and over, and the darkness in this character it encapsulated."
• Eric Church penned "Dark Side" with songwriters Travis Meadows and Jeremy Spillman on his tour bus. Meadows recalled to The Boot: "Jeremy and I talked the night before the write, and we were trying to come up with ideas, because you want to show up with something - preferably not a knife to a gunfight; you want to have something good."
  
  The pair then walked on the bus and after some small talk Church asked if they'd got anything and Spellman replied, "I got this one little thing," The duo sang and played their suggestion to Church after which there was a very long awkward silence. Church then said, "Well, I got this one thing." Meadows recalled that the Nashville star then sung "the entire first verse of 'Dark Side' that he had been working on, and Jeremy and I just kind of laughed and said, 'Yeah, let's do that one,' because it was so great."
  
  "If I remember correctly," Meadows added, "it was a relatively short write because Eric had a pretty good idea of what he was wanting to say, and I helped him round his thoughts together."