Songfacts®:

• In May 2020, Nashville cops arrested Morgan Wallen outside Kid Rock's bar in downtown Music City for public intoxication and disorderly conduct. He wrote this song with Ernest K. Smith a couple of weeks later as a letter to himself.
  
  I don't wanna go downtown doin' what we used to
  Twist the top off another round, hell I got enough loose screws
  
  Wallen has now learned to stay clear of overdoing the drinking. He realizes such overindulging causes things to get "dangerous" for him.
• Wallen explained in a iHeartCountry video that he sees "Dangerous" as a beacon pointing in a better direction. "'Dangerous' is a song that me and Ernest wrote a little bit after I got arrested in Nashville," he said. "Obviously, it wasn't anything super serious, but it was kind of a song that I wrote to myself in a way, if you read the lyrics and think of it that way I think it would make sense."
• I could see me sittin' in the back of a cop car bangin' my head on a window
  I could see me slammin' that last call shot glass, losin' everything in my billfold
  Ooh, ooh
  That's what I do when I'm drinkin' 'bout you
  
  Though Wallen and Smith based most of the song on the unfortunate incident, the pair added a bit of fictitious romantic heartbreak. "We threw in a little bit of a love interest in there as well just to make it more universal," the singer explained. "To where people could throw their own story into it."
• The song is the title track of Morgan Wallen's second studio album. "It just seemed like, 'What a better way to describe the album, too, as lessons I've learned and things that I wanted myself to know?'" the country star reflected to ABC News. "So it felt just appropriate to entitle the whole project that."
• Dangerous is a double album containing 30 tracks (32 on the Target Edition). The idea of such a huge record started off as just a joke between Wallen and his manager because he'd accumulated so many songs. Then the COVID lockdown put the kibosh on all touring, giving the singer enough time to make it happen. Wallen wrote several more songs for the project during the quarantine, including this track.
• Dangerous become country music's top-streaming album in its debut week. With over 240 million streams in its first seven days, the longplayer obliterated the previous record held by Luke Combs' What You See Is What You Get, which notched 102.26 million streams in a week.
• The song started with Morgan Wallen strumming some chords on a guitar while he thought about some lessons he's learned from his mistakes. He found a beat and penned some lyrics before recruiting Ernest K Smith to help him complete the track.
  
  "I brought Ernest in for that song - it was just me and him," he told American Songwriter. "The music was there, the body was there, we just kinda finished it over the course of 30 or 40 minutes, just me, him and a guitar. We added a love interest thing to that song, but if you really listen to it, it's actually me talking to myself about things I had learned. It's for myself, so it's pretty special to me for those reasons… that's actually why we ended up choosing it for the album title."
• Dangerous spent its first 10 weeks at #1 on the Billboard 200 before being deposed by Justin Bieber's Justice record. It was the first longplayer to occupy the top spot in its first 10 weeks since Whitney Houston's 1987 Whitney collection. Houston's set went on to spend an additional week at the summit.
  
  Dangerous enjoyed strong sales despite an incident a few weeks after its release when a neighbor recorded Wallen shouting a racial slur.
• When Dangerous topped Billboard's Country Albums chart for a 51st week, it broke the record for the most time at #1 since the tally launched in January 1964. Shania Twain's Come On Over and Luke Combs' This One's for You, which both spent 50 weeks on the summit, previously held the record.