Longneck Way To Go

Album: Mr. Saturday Night (2022)
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Songfacts®:

  • Midland join Jon Pardi on this raucous drinking song. The Texas band's vocalist Mark Wystrach and Pardi are downing the beers to numb the pain of lost love. The two singers have drunk five or six rounds, but they've got "longneck way to go" before they drown the memory of their ex. A longneck is a kind of beer bottle.
  • Rhett Akins and Ashley Gorley wrote the song at Gorley's home, while Midland's Jess Carson, Cameron Duddy and Mark Wystrach joined in the songwriting session via Zoom. Akins and Gorley previously penned Pardi's hit song "Dirt On My Boots."
  • Akins arrived at Gorley's home with the "Longneck Way To Go" title and a storyline about a heartbroken man trying to forget his ex at his local honky tonk. "If the song was called 'I Got a Long Way To Go,' obviously, that can be anything," Akins told Billboard. "But when you say 'longneck,' it just immediately put it in a bar for me: Some guy just sitting there pining over someone and the beer's not helping. It's like, 'The more I keep drinking, the longer it feels like I'm never going to get over this person.'"

    By the time the Midland trio linked up via Zoom, Akins and Gorley had nearly completed the song. Carson, Duddy and Wystrach reworked it a little so it fit the group.
  • Midland wasn't sure at first if he should cut the song, so Akins sent it to Pardi, who liked it. Midland and Pardi eventually agreed to team up for a joint recording that ended up on both Midland's The Last Resort and Pardi's Mr. Saturday Night. Pardi released "Longneck Way to Go" as the second single from the album on July 18, 2022.
  • Pardi, Wystrach, Carson, and Duddy filmed the song's video in a Nashville-area bowling alley. "It was completely chaos. You can tell how much fun we were having," Pardi recollected to Billboard. "It was a full open bar from 9:00 p.m. until 1:00 a.m."

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