Songfacts®:

• In this lighthearted country tune, Uncle Kracker drinks his way through the COVID-19 pandemic to cope with the new normal of wearing masks, attending Zoom meetings, and binge-watching bizarre documentaries like Netflix's Tiger King. Kracker almost didn't release the song because he didn't want people to think he was making light of the pandemic.
  
  "I was kind of hesitant about it, but it was just such a fun song," he told American Songwriter in 2020. "Not funny, but just done in such a fun spirit on such a shitty subject."
• Kracker actually started writing this in Nashville with former Trick Pony bassist Ira Dean months before the pandemic hit, but he wasn't satisfied with the lyrics.
  
  "Ira came into the studio with the idea 'No Time To Be Sober,'" he told American Songwriter. "The title was already there from Ira so it worked out perfectly. We wrote it and tracked it music-wise and I definitely loved the arrangement and the track we'd already done, but I wasn't really totally happy with where the song was. So I decided to rewrite it when I got home."
  
  Back home in Michigan, Kracker put a pin in the song until the coronavirus started to spread and forced people into quarantine. A phone conversation with Detroit rapper Paradime inspired the new lyrics.
  
  "We were talking about how crazy everything is right now, and it kind of evolved from there, so we just basically rewrote what Ira and I had already done," he recalled. "It was actually almost too easy. Having it already tracked kind of lit a fire under my ass to finish it the way I wanted it."
• Kracker cut the new vocal track in a Detroit studio, figuring it was "no dirtier than walking into a Wal-Mart," and emailed it to Josh Bright, who produced the song from his personal studio in Alabama.
• Paradime also helped Kracker write the 2023 single "Sweet 16."
• Lockdown made it difficult for artists to shoot professional music videos, so Kracker enlisted two of his daughters, Madison and Troy Shafer, to film him boozing it up around his house while singing the tune and posted the clip on YouTube. The girls are credited as the video's directors and editors.
• In the years since releasing his 2012 album, Midnight Special, Kracker released a string of non-album singles. In a 2023 Songfacts interview, the country rocker said he likes this method because he can release new music whenever he wants without being chained to an album - which is a testament to how the music industry has changed.
  
  "Twenty years ago I used to beg the record labels to put new music out all the time like that," he explained. "They wouldn't let you do any of that."