Songfacts®:

• This playful song about girls hitting on guys was written by Ballerini with Josh Kerr, Ryan Griffin, and Jason Duke. "It's a fun and flirty song," she told Billboard magazine, "but I hope when people hear it, they hear that message of empowerment and confidence. It's important for girls to have that voice. I hope people listening to that song think, 'That is so me right now.'"
• "Dibs" is an American English term for an informal convention where one declares a first claim to something to which no one else has a clearly recognized right. The equivalent terms in the UK, Australia and New Zealand are "bags" or "bagsy."
• Ballerini had logged the title "Dibs" in her phone, and she brought it up during a songwriting session with Josh Kerr, Ryan Griffin, and Jason Duke that hadn't been going anywhere. "I thought it was like a cute, little flirty thing," she told Billboard. "All of a sudden, it was off to the races. We started with the chorus, and as soon as we did the 'hey' we were obsessed with it."
• Originally, the songwriting session was just Kelsea Ballerini, Jason Duke and Ryan Griffin, but as they were leaving their meeting they bumped into their pal Josh Kerr. The foursome decided to hung out for a while, during which time Kerr started scatting out the song's signature lyrics. "Josh had to walk out of the room for a second and run back over to the studio to finish a mix or something," Griffin recalled to Taste of Country, "so we started vamping on that song. I started kind of singing the outro part of it. Just kind of coming up and Kels was just throwing in the words as I was singing it, and then Josh comes in and he grabs it and puts his little Josh Kerr melody on it, which is kind of like the spoken part."
  
  "I had the title in my phone for a long time and it was always just a fun, flirty title," Ballerini added. "I think country music is in this cool place right now where they're kind of letting other genres bleed in a little more, so we wanted to do that."
• The video was directed by Black River's Robert Chavers and features a selection of Kelsea Ballerini's road memories. Clips were shot during her shows in York, Pennsylvania, Greenville, South Carolina and St. Leonard, Maryland. It also shines a light on the singer's adorable puppy (whose name is, naturally, Dibs).
• Ryan Griffin was a struggling singer-songwriter when he co-wrote this song in a serendipitous writing session. "The day that we wrote that song, we weren't even supposed to have written," he recalled to Billboard. "We wrote it in 45 minutes, and it popped out. I'll never forget the day she called me and told me it would be her second single."
  
  As he was broke at the time, the news that it would be Ballerini's second single was an enormous relief for Griffin and it allowed him to continue pursuing his career in Nashville.