Songfacts®:

• Rhett Akins, Jesse Frasure and Ashley Gorley's original demo for "Dirt" was much more modern than Pardi's final recording. "'Dirt on My Boots' is a very club, honky tonk kind of song," Pardi told Radio.com. "The demo was way out there, it was super-hip-hop. But I loved the lyrics, the lyrics were so country, they were talking about getting off work, getting on a tractor, he's gonna pick up his girl, he's got dirt on his boots. I just loved that, that really appealed to me. So we took it and we made it more country."
  
  "And I think it kind of really made a cool sound. It's got a killer groove on it, it's got the fiddle and the steel guitar, the big guitars, the big rock section in the middle," Pardi continued. "As an artist, you can't always do the same thing every time; you want to push yourself. So this is like a very modern sound, but with a twist of my traditional sound. It's real fun, and it's gonna be fun to play."
• This featured in the trailer for part two of season one of the Netflix show, The Ranch.
• The song takes Pardi back to his younger self after working outdoors all day." I saw my 22-year-old self getting off a tractor and going to take a shower and putting his work boots back on and going and hanging out with a girl and having a good time dancing or something," he said. "And I really connected to the lyrics of it. It's very country lyrics. It has tractors. It has cutting a rug. My favorite [line] - 'I can get cleaned up, but I can only get so fancy,' and I loved it."
• The song started out with a techno beat, but that all changed when Pardi went into the studio to record it.
  
  "It had robot voices," Pardi recalled. "It had a big 'whooo,' and it was like really cool done. I'm not hating on that, but it wasn't me and I couldn't – myself as an artist that's somewhere kind of making his own line, I couldn't come out with that. So, the way we took it and made it like it's real country but also modern, and it's kind of real swampy and it has a ganjo rolling through it. It really came out like this is my take on that kind of song."