Songfacts®:

• Born in Valdosta, Georgia, Rhett went to Nashville's Lipscomb University to study communications but dropped out to become a musician. As his music career took off, he found himself spending a lot of his time on the road rather than back home in Nashville or Georgia. This fiddle-soaked ballad finds him returning to his first love.
  
  Yeah, I love me some California, but it sure ain't Tennessee
  And my roots down there in Georgia, yeah, they started missin' me
  And I wouldn't change the things I've done or the places that I've been
  Man, it feels good to be country again
  
  During the last verse, Rhett expresses his joy at being united in body with his wife, Lauren.
  
  I traded sunsets with my wife, for hours on my phone
  And even when I was right beside her, I still wasn't really home
  But last night, we built a fire, watched the moonlight kiss her skin
  I thought, "Man, it feels good to be country again"
• This is the title track of Country Again: Side A. Thomas Rhett had the idea for the album after seeing an old pair of cowboy boots he regularly wore in high school sitting in the back of his tour bus. When he slipped on the footwear, they brought back memories of his youth growing up in Georgia.
• Rhett wrote most of the album while locked down at his Nashville home during the COVID-19 pandemic, taking inspiration from traditional country music. He said the record shows how after a decade on the road he returned back to his roots.
  
  "Country Again: Side A is everything that I wanted to say when I was 19 years old, but hadn't lived enough to know how to say any of those things yet," he explained. "It's about the crazy journey that took me out into the world over the last ten years and ultimately brought me back home, more centered and content than ever, with a deep understanding for what's important in life."
• Rhett co-wrote every track on the album; on this one his co-writers were Ashley Gorley and Zach Crowell. The same three also penned another Country Again: Side A track, "Blame It on a Backroad."
• Rhett's go-to producers Dan Huff and Jesse Frasure helmed the song. The musicians are:
  
  Acoustic guitar: Ilya Toshinskiy
  Electric guitar: Derek Wells
  Steel guitar: Paul Franklin
  Bass: Jimmy Lee Sloas
  Fiddle: Stuart Duncan
  Drums: Chris Kimmerer
  Keyboards: Charlie Judge
  Backing Vocals: Josh Reedy
• Thomas Rhett had the idea for the song when the COVID pandemic forced him to slow down after years of hard work. Instead of spending much of his time on the road, he could be with his family again and go fishing, hunting and hiking. These were things he used to love to do until life got in the way.
  
  "I think a lot of us have just been grinding without realizing how hard we're actually working, and hard work is great, but I do think, every now and then, you can slow down and just smell the roses for a second," Rhett told The Boot in 2021. "And that's what last year was for me, which is kind of where the inspiration for "Country Again" kind of came from."
• Rhett came up with the idea for the song and put it in his phone in May 2019. For several months, he didn't know how to write it until a summer 2020 Zoom session with Ashley Gorley and Zach Crowell. When he brought his idea up Gorley came up with the opening two lines:
  
  I quit huntin' with my daddy
  Guess I didn't make the time
  
  Gorley's suggestion got their songwriting juices going; after that the rest of the song flowed using the idea of "country" as a synonym for "simple life."