Songfacts®:

• Hardy described the title track from his debut album, A Rock, as a "stoner idea" about how rocks are significant throughout our lives - from skipping rocks in a pond at the beginning to being buried beneath a tombstone at the end. In a 2020 Songfacts interview, Hardy explained how he came up with the idea:
  
  "I was just driving down the road and was thinking about all the ways that a rock is important, like how a tombstone is made from a rock, and the roads you drive on a lot of times are made out of tons of rock, and engagement rings are made of rock, and when you think about it, iron comes from a rock, and if there wasn't iron, there wouldn't be pretty much any metal. I know that sounds ridiculous, but then I just wrote down 'A Rock' in my phone because I just was like, 'That's a weird idea.'"
• Hardy also took inspiration from one of his favorite songs, "Sometime Around Midnight" by the LA rock band The Airborne Toxic Event, which doesn't have a chorus. "I loved that song so much and I was like, 'Man, I want to write a song with no chorus that just tells a story, and it's just verses," he recalled.
  
  He brought idea for his chorus-less "rock" tune to his songwriting partners, Jake Mitchell and Smith Ahnquist. "I explained I wanted to tell the story about life and hook it with a rock and make a rock a significant part of your life," he said. "We worked on it really hard and worked on that lyric and it just turned out to be perfect in my opinion - it's exactly how I wanted to write it."
• Prior to signing a record deal, Hardy co-wrote a number of hit songs for other artists, including Florida Georgia Line ("Simple," "Talk You Out of It"), Morgan Wallen ("Up Down"), Dallas Smith ("Drop"), and Blake Shelton ("God's Country", "Hell Right"). In July 2020, two months before releasing A Rock, he was named the AIMP Nashville Songwriter of the Year.