Songfacts®:

• Morgan Wade's debut single, "The Night" is about her struggle with alcoholism. She started drinking heavily when she was a 19-year-old freshman at, ironically, Jefferson College of Health Sciences. This was also around the time she started getting serious about music by writing songs and forming a band. The alcohol gave her some liquid courage, but the pre-show shot soon turned into two or three or four, and the drinking started to affect her, sending her into a depression.
  
  The turning point came a few years later on June 17, 2017, during her first trip to New York City. She got really drunk and suffered a life-changing hangover. That day, she quit drinking and hasn't looked back. She has that date - June 17, 2017 - tattooed on her arm as a reminder.
• In the song, we hear Morgan Wade fighting the temptation to got back to the bottle. These lines are a reference to Johnnie Walker, a brand of whisky.
  
  Well, Johnnie called me late last night
  And I told Mr. Walker just go home
• Wade first released "The Night" independently in 2019 when she was starting to make waves in her home state of Virgina, performing as Morgan Wade & the Stepbrothers (they released an album in 2018 called Puppets With My Heart). She was still an indie artist when she put out her 2021 album Reckless, which got the attention of Arista Nashville, which signed Wade and re-released it. The album made waves and got great reviews; the song "Wilder Days" landed on the Country chart. In 2022, a deluxe version of the Reckless album was released, this time with "The Night" on the tracklist.
• Morgan Wade wrote and produced "The Night" with Sadler Vaden, a guitarist in Jason Isbell's 400 Unit. They met at a music festival and started working together on this song. Vaden stayed on board for Reckless, writing more songs with Wade and doing production work on the album. He returned to produce her 2023 album Psychopath.
• Wade picked up a lot of fans by performing livestream concerts during the 2020 pandemic, where she included this song in her sets.
• Wade may have kicked her alcohol habit, but her battle to maintain her mental health is ongoing and often source material for her songs. Her songs "Reckless" and "27 Club" are good examples.
• In 2022, Wade released a sequel called "The Night (Part 2)," where she takes a very sanguine approach to her sobriety, knowing she's just one drink away from a relapse. Both songs were made into music videos and compiled as a single called "The Night Part 1 & 2."