Something Like That

Album: A Place in the Sun (1999)
Charted: 28
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Songfacts®:

  • Written by the Nashville songwriters Rick Ferrell and Keith Follese, "Something Like That" is a teenage love story, with the singer reminiscing about the day he met his first love at the county fair. Years later, when they run into each other again, she asks if he remembers her. "A heart don't forget something like that," he tells her.
  • This was the second single from Tim McGraw's fifth album, A Place in the Sun. The song spent five weeks at the top of Billboard's Country singles chart.
  • According to Nielsen BDS, a company that tracks radio and cable music channel airplay, the song was the top-played radio single in any musical genre in the 2000s, racking up 487,343 spins from Jan 1, 2000 through to Dec. 17, 2009.
  • McGraw sang this from the diving board at his pool as part of the March 29, 2020 "Living Room Concert For America," a benefit featuring a range of stars performing from their homes to raise money for charity and encourage viewers to stay home. McGraw was the lone country singer on the slate, which was hosted by Elton John and featured performances by Mariah Carey, Billie Eilish, Backstreet Boys and several others, all from their homes. McGraw was joined by three members of his band, who accompanied him from their homes while he sang.
  • When Keith Follese showed up to a co-writing session with Rick Ferrell, he carried a spark of an idea: "If we fell in love, it would go something like that." Ferrell, meanwhile, had been saving two vivid lines he hadn't found a home for yet: "She was killing me in that miniskirt" and "I had a barbecue stain on my white T-shirt."

    Those three fragments became the backbone of what would turn into "Something Like That." Sitting at the piano, Follese started riffing on a honky-tonk lick Ferrell had tossed out. "Rick played me this lick and I don't know who it sounded like," Follese recalled to NSAI's Bart Herbison, "but I just played it kind of like a honky tonk thing... and he said, 'Boy, I really like that.'" From there, the song began to unfold as a story.

    They settled on a Labor Day setting, painting the picture of two small-town kids falling into a summer romance. Ferrell contributed his long-held lines, and Follese added his own childhood detail: "skipping stones on the river by the railroad tracks." Piece by piece, the images stitched together into the narrative of youthful attraction and nostalgia that the chorus sums up with: "A heart don't forget something like that."

    When the finished song made its way to Tim McGraw, he instantly connected with it. He recorded it, and the single went on to become one of his most enduring hits.

Comments: 1

  • Addy from Fort Smith Tim McGraw is great love this song best tho
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