Songfacts®:

• Sugarland said on their website that the message of this gritty little tune is: "Sometimes, you just gotta let go." And: "Let go, laughing." Jennifer Nettles added: "We always say we should take the music seriously, but not ourselves." The singer concluded that the ironies, such as "getting in a fender bender with your ex and his new girl, shows listeners what a grand sense of humor the universe has."
• This was Sugarland's fifth #1 on the Hot Country Songs chart.
• Nettles and Kristian Bush of Sugarland, wrote the song along with Bobby Pinson, with whom the duo also co-wrote the album's first two singles, "All I Want To Do" and "Already Gone."
• Pinson told The Boot the story of the song: "I had a list of ideas. I just wasn't sure where to take that thing because obviously it was built around 'ssshhh ... it happens.' It was just a little play on words. This day of trying to be radio safe, you just don't know where the good place to take that is.
  We had this really cool melody, and we laid it out there and recorded it. They had it down as 'Bobby's Melody Ideas.' I came back the next time, which turned out to be the magical weekend. We wrote all four songs off [Love on the Inside ] -- 'All I Want To Do,' 'It Happens,' 'Already Gone' and 'Keep You' -- that week, and this was the last one [we wrote].
  They were like, 'Let's listen to some of the stuff from our last trip.' That little melody was still there. In the meantime, I had come up with the idea of 'It Happens,' which I hadn't the first time. So we put it on there. It was just a really fun song. We started it before a show, and then finished it the next day. We were just carrying it around, and I was having one of those days where you go, 'Sometimes things just happen!'
  When you write with somebody, it's kind of like your left and right hand. You just know what they're going to like and dislike. Writing four songs in a week, you really learn what their tendencies are. Of course the whole world knows [Jennifer Nettles'] tendencies are just being light, off-the-cuff and country. It fit perfect for this song. It was good for us because we've done light, we've done poppier light, but this is a pretty down the middle country song with a lot of their fun mixed into it."
• In our interview with Kristian Bush, we asked the Sugarlander if there was any concern over the faux-bawdy title and lyrics. He replied, "It's a long line of songs that I can trace back to Roger Miller, you know. Country music allows that. I think you just have to do it with some intelligence, and with some attitude. The song can't take itself too seriously, and that's totally one of those."