Songfacts®:

• This mid-tempo ballad is the title track of American Country music artist Jason Aldean 's fifth studio album. He explained the meaning of the song to The Boot: "A lot of times when I'm standing backstage, and I'm looking around, I see all this chaos going on backstage now," said Aldean. "It wasn't that long ago that it was me and my boys - 12 of us on a bus, pulling a trailer. Now you go back there and there's eight or nine buses, there's nine semis. We start filing out of the venue, and that's what it looks like, it looks like a train - a freight train - going down the interstate."
• Aldean told Billboard magazine how the album title reflects where he is in his life and career. "To me, Night Train was a perfect example of just how far things have come the last few years," he said, "going from a bus pulling a trailer to now like a freight train with bus and tractor trailers. The title, more than the song, sums up where we're at right now."
• The first week sales of 409,000 for Night Train was the best first-week showing for a country album since Taylor Swift's Speak Now debuted with approximately 1,047,000 units in October 2010.
• The song was released as the fourth single from Night Train on July 16, 2013. Aldean took the opportunity to debut the song at the 2013 CMT Music Awards, which he co-hosted with actress Kristen Bell on June 5, 2013.
• The song was written by Neil Thrasher and Michael Dulaney and was originally pitched by Aldean for a different singer. "Me and a couple of guys in my band were working producing another artist, Kristy Lee Cook, and so I was trying to find songs for her record," he explained to Radio.com. "I called up Neil Thrasher, who's a good friend of mine, writes a lot of songs for me ["Fly Over States," "Tattoos On This Town"]. I told him I have an artist I'm working with, wanted to know if he had any songs he could pitch me. So he sent over a few songs, and one of them was 'Night Train.'"
  
  Aldean played the song for Cook and it didn't fit her, but the more he listened to it the more he liked the track. "I start listening to it and I get really into the song and I'm thinking, 'If she's not going to cut it maybe I should cut it,'" he said. "That's how we ended up with the song and then ultimately the title of a record."
• The music video features footage from Aldean's Night Train tour. It was the singer's ninth video to be directed by Wes Edwards, starting with his debut, "Hicktown." He would go on to direct Aldean's "Burnin' It Down."