Brad Paisley, ‘A Man Don’t Have to Die’

Before Josh Thompson was delivering hit after hit with songs like 'Beer on the Table,' 'Way Out Here' and 'Won't Be Lonely Long,' the singer-songwriter was working hard at his songwriting craft in Nashville. In just the last few years, Thompson has scored himself cuts with Jason Michael Carroll's 'Growing Up Is Getting Old' and Jason Aldean's 'Church Pew or Bar Stool.' More recently, Thompson landed a cut on the new Brad Paisley 'This Is Country Music' album with a tune called 'A Man Don't Have to Die.'

"My problem is I write everything down," Thompson tells Taste of Country with a laugh. "Anytime I get an idea that I think might even be something, I write it down. My computer's full of weird ideas [laughs]. 'A man don't have to die to go to hell' seemed really cool to me, and I just wrote it down."

"I wrote it with Rivers Ruthersford and George Teren," Thompson continues. "It was our first writing appointment. We were just writing like crazy for my first record. This was back in March or April of 2009, I think. I had this idea, and I had never written with either of them. I really respected them as writers. That idea just happened to scream at me that day, so I said it, not really knowing what to expect, and they loved it. It was just one of those things."

"Well he yelled out from the back row look here preacher man / We all know you're new here but you need to understand / It don't really scare us when you yell and shake your fist / You see we already know that hell exists," Paisley sings in the opening verse.

"We wrote a little bit of it," says Thompson. "We had to split ways, and I think about three weeks later, we finally got back on it and finished it. We knew we had something really special."

"It's six months short of thirty years when the boss man lays you off / No thankin' you, no pair of shoes, no shiny new gold watch / It's payments you can't make on a house that you can't sell / See a man don't have to die to go to hell / No you don't have to die to go to hell," the trio penned wrote in one of the choruses.

"We took it to the studio and recorded it," Thompson recalls. "We just absolutely loved it. I got a call one day that Brad had it on hold, and then Brad came up to me at the end of the H2O tour and said, 'I don't know if you know this, but I just found out that I had a song of yours on hold for about three or four weeks.' I said, 'Yeah, I knew about it.' He said, 'Well if you're not going to cut it, I want to cut it this Wednesday.' Of course I said I thought that would be great if he cut it. I think he's the perfect guy to do it. He did it, and it's absolutely amazing."

Listen to Brad Paisley, 'A Man Don't Have to Die'