Songfacts®:

• "23" is a nostalgic country-pop jam where Sam Hunt looks back fondly on a past relationship. He reminisces about their trips to New Orleans and Folly Beach, and a conversation in the July rain. She's moved on with new cities, jobs, friends and love interests, but Hunt hopes his former sweetheart is happy now and is really glad he knew her when he was 23.
• Hunt co-wrote this end-of-summer song with:
  
  Chris La Corte, who also produced the emotional track.
  
  Frequent collaborators Shane McAnally and Josh Osborne, whose other Sam Hunt compositions include "Body Like a Back Road," "Downtown's Dead," and "Hard to Forget."
  
  "Sam's whole thing on it was how precious that time actually is because you really only get it once, and you shared it with somebody," said Osborne to Billboard. "It feels like kind of a heavy concept in a light-sounding song, and that's always appealed to me."
• Released on September 9, 2021, Hunt first offered fans a taste of "23" back on July 14, 2020, when he shared an acoustic performance during the virtual 2020 Highway Finds Fest. The SiriusXM channel The Highway aired the festival three days later.
• Hunt used an early photo of his wife Hannah's aunt and uncle when they were a young couple for his single art.
• Sam Hunt, Shane McAnally and Josh Osborne had previously tried to write a song called "22." When the three met up in Florida for a writing retreat, Hunt played a track that Chris LaCorte gave him in June 2020. His cowriters loved the sound, so Hunt suggested revisiting the "22" idea on the hook.
  
  I'll never be 22 with anyone but you
  
  McAnally pointed out that Taylor Swift already has a song called "22" and suggested changing the age. They also flipped the focus to the girl, making her a past love who's frozen in time, matching the vibe of LaCorte's music.
  
  You'll never be 23 with anyone but me
  
  Hunt recalled to Billboard: "Even having that track playing as sort of the background music to the conversation when we started talking about those times and being that age, all that imagery just really felt right."
• McAnally contributed the song's opening line:
  
  You can marry an architect
  Build you a house out on the water
  
  The lyric pays homage to McNally's favorite song, Dan Fogelberg's "Same Old Lang Syne" ("She said she's married her an architect") and to a former girlfriend who wed a builder.
• Sam Hunt had the idea for "23" for some time, but it wasn't until he, Shane McAnally and Josh Osborne went down to the Florida beach that the song finally came together. "That's one that I've had and tried to work up for several years. A lot of times you're just one word or one little change away from an idea turning into a song," he said. "We were down at the beach, we happened to be at the beach; that may have had something to do with it. We were down there and it's easier to tap into that nostalgia when you're at the beach, thinking back to trips you know from your youth. But who knows? But I'm glad that it worked out that day because we wrote it in probably two hours, which is pretty rare for me."