The Story Behind “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere”

Sam Gazdziak at The 9513 has a good writeup on how “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere” came to be a song, and how it fell into the hands of Alan Jackson and Jimmy Buffett:

The timing on the song was so perfect, that the time from when it was written to when it was released to radio was about three months, a rarity in the industry. Brown recorded the demo, which was initially pitched to Kenny Chesney, but his team passed.

“I think they wanted to not do so much beachy stuff anymore,” he says. “If we had gotten it to him three years earlier, he probably would have jumped on it, but the timing wasn’t right.”

Fortunately, Alan Jackson was looking for a song that he could cut with his friend Jimmy Buffett, and Gary Overton, then the head of EMI Publishing Nashville, turned him on to “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere.”

The song was released in June, 2003, and was an immediate hit, debuting at #31 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart. It eventually spent a total of eight weeks at #1 and made it to #17 on the pop charts. It also won the Country Music Association Vocal Event of the Year award in 2003. Not bad for Brown’s first ever single.

Read the full article here.

Watch Alan and Jimmy perform the song at the 2003 CMA Awards, and also watch their acceptance speech for Vocal Event of the Year.