Songfacts®:

• Moore told Mike Ragogna of The Huffington Post about the inspiration for this romantic cut about an ideal forever love. "For me, I've been rambling now for a long time and I've moved a lot of different places by myself," he explained. "I lived in Hawaii for a long time in this little hut, surfed all of the time, backpacked and worked little odd jobs, then I moved to Nashville. With me spending that much time by myself and coming from a big family, it made me that way. I desired to get my own time because there were so many people trying to get a word in, I kind of grew up that way. With the job I have now, I'm always on the go, always on the run, and settling down is not really in the cards right now. I do know myself enough though to know that I'm going to desire. I think that's how we're all made, and it's how we were all created. You want to go through life with somebody at some point and have somebody to lean on. That's what I was thinking the day I wrote 'Hey Pretty Girl.' It's one of those things for me that's more of an idealistic standpoint - that one day, this is how I hope to feel about somebody, and this is the way I like to go through life with somebody."
• Moore (from Country Music Is Love): "You know that song is basically something where when you live the life that we're living, like me these guys in the band, it's traveling like a gypsy. We're always on the road. This is where all my focus is right now. It's always music. It doesn't give me a chance to give a woman what they deserve at this point in my life so I stay away from it. I stay away from kinda letting somebody in right now 'cause I know that I can't give what they need."
• Moore wrote this the day after he had a conversation with his guitar player, Dave Lapsley. He explained in a radio interview: "Me and Dave had been playing together for 10 years, ever since I moved to town, and I love Dave with all my heart. Dave was my guy, man, that'd I'd go hang out with and raise hell with. And when he told me his wife was pregnant, there was a complete change in Dave. He was being like, 'Dude, we gotta make this thing happen now. We're not making enough money, and I've got to support a family now.' And I saw everything kind of change. Even though I don't have a wife and kids, it kind of made me see it through his eyes. Even though I don't want that right now, the next day I went into the [writing] room and I was just talking to Dan Couch about it, and I was like, 'I hope to have that thing that I see in Dave's eyes now one day, and I hope I want to go through life with somebody like that, and this is how I hope it is,' and that's what we tried to capture that day writing about it."
• For the song's video, Moore wanted to show real love, rather than hiring an actress to portray his on-screen sweetheart. "I didn't want to have a love interest, I wanted the performance to just be about me playing and singing the song," the singer-songwriter told The Boot. "And then about real life people, couples, grandparents with their granddaughters... I wanted to capture innocent moments of people holding hands, people painting a house together -- not anything raunchy, rolling around, making out. I wanted to capture the innocent moments between father and daughter, between mother and daughter, between young couples."