Songfacts®:

• Telluride is a town in the southwestern portion of Colorado. Originally a silver mining camp, it's now known for its ski resort. The town is the subject of this Tim McGraw song penned by Troy Verges and Brett James. "Brett and I wrote that at his parents' house the day after we wrote 'Who I Am,'" Verges recalled to Rolling Stone Country.
  
  "I had actually never been to Telluride," he continued. "Colorado always seemed like the place where the cool kids went when I was little. Growing up in Louisiana, if you were cool and maybe a little bit rich then you would go to Telluride to ski. It seemed like the romantic thing to do to go to Colorado and work at one of the bars, so we tracked that story and then Tim McGraw took it to another level."
• The song was later recorded by Josh Gracin for his 2008 album We Weren't Crazy. Released as a single, his version peaked at #34 on the Country chart.
• Telluride has been the subject of several other songs, including eponymous ones by Kate Wolf in 1976, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band in 1985 and Chapel Club in 2010. The Colorado ski resort is also mentioned in Glenn Frey's tune "Smuggler's Blues" ("They hide it up in Telluride, I mean it's here to stay. It's propping up the governments in Columbia and Peru, You ask any D.E.A. man, He'll say "There's nothin' we can do.")
• When Brett James died in a small plane crash in 2025 at 57, Tim McGraw posted: "Brett was one of the most talented and most respected songwriters in Nashville and wrote some of my personal favorite songs I ever recorded, 'Telluride' and 'Drugs Or Jesus.'"