Story Behind the Song: Granger Smith, ‘If the Boot Fits’
In the spring of 2016, Granger Smith released "If the Boot Fits" as the second single from Remington, his major-label debut album; the song was written by Jordan Schmidt, Andy Albert and Mitchell Tenpenny.
After its release, "If the Boot Fits" became a Top 10 hit for Smith. Below, Tenpenny recalls the day he and his co-writers penned the tune.
That was the first time we ever wrote together, and they've become my best friends and my two favorite people in town to write with ... They're my best friends, but that was actually our first experience writing together.
Andy, he came in with the "If the Boot Fits" title ... and I really liked that title; I hadn't really heard that. And then I started humming the "small-town Cinderella" thing, and we kind of played on that for a minute. We didn't know if we wanted to go the Cinderella route ... but to me, "If the Boot Fits," it had to be Cinderella; that's what it was playing off of. So we agreed on that, and we went that route, and we wrote it in about an hour and a half. It came out really quick; it felt really good.
Jordan had the demo done that day, and we just loved the song. It felt big; he produced it really big -- loud, and uptempo, and it was awesome. At the time, we were trying to get more artist writes, and so we sent that song ... to Granger's manager, just trying to get a co-write ... and Granger's record was already done, Frank Rogers had already produced it. And the next thing we get is, "Hey, Granger wants to cut this song. Would that be cool?" We didn't really know who Granger was, but at that point, we had no cuts, nothing, so we were like, "Yeah, please."
So, we looked up Granger, started figuring out who he was, saw he had this huge following ... and we didn't hear anything for a while, and a few months later, we got the call that he was going to single it, and that literally changed all our lives ... It gave us a bunch of momentum in this town ... And now, he's a great friend; Granger's a great friend ... I get to go on the road with him, and play and write ... It was kind of cool how it all -- that day, the stars aligned -- because it normally doesn't happen like that.