Story Behind the Song: Chris Janson, ‘Power of Positive Drinkin”

Chris Janson co-wrote all 11 songs on his 2015 album Buy Me a Boat, including three with his good friend and publisher, Chris DuBois. One of those three songs is "Power of Positive Drinkin'," the record's second single, which is currently climbing the country charts. DuBois recently sat down with The Boot and a few other reporters to reveal the unique way that he, Janson and Mark Irwin penned "Power of Positive Drinkin'."

It was a song we wrote with a gentleman named Mark Irwin, who’s had a resurgence here of late with some success. He wrote [Blake Shelton's] "Neon Light" ... Mark’s a great guy.

It was Mark’s title, and that title is everything in that song. As soon as he threw it out, it was like, "Okay, we’re definitely going to write that. The question is, how do we write it? How do we make it interesting and keep it interesting?"

Structurally, that song is pretty weird: It’s got a post-chorus. We wrote the first verse, and then we wrote a little pre-chorus section, and then we wrote a chorus section, and then we wrote a post-chorus section. We never wrote another verse; we just repeated the pre-chorus section, the chorus, and then the post-chorus. That’s all mind-numbing to people who are going to hear that or read that, because they don’t even know what that means, but to me, it was pretty cool the way that song came together.

We cut a great demo on it. We actually did replace a lot of the parts, but that was on the same demo session as "Buy Me a Boat," and there was something about those two songs together that really felt like they helped define Chris’ direction as an artist. And it’s something that, when the labels heard it, they got it. It was just a fun process to be a part of.

Chris Janson Discusses Surprising Success