I actually started writing "Seventeen at Three in the Morning" when I was seventeen years old. That being said, it took a considerable amount of time to complete and become our single as that was nearly four years ago.

I remember it was around Christmas time when I came up with the first verse. The only reason I remember that is because my family and I went to my grandparent's house the morning after I wrote it. My family always wants me to perform when we have any kind of gathering… I'm like a juke box. I don't mind though. I am an entertainer after all.

So I decided I'd try out the first verse on everyone. If you've heard the song, you know the lyrics are somewhat racy. Especially for a seventeen year old I suppose. But I've always been very interested in pushing the envelope with things like that. And I've never filtered my writing even in the company of my grandmother. So after I stumbled through my rough version of the first verse, I waited eagerly to hear what they had to say. And then I waited a bit more. It was pretty quiet. I guess I caught them off guard talking about sleeping in a car with a girl and foggy windows and such. After they collected themselves they all assured me they loved it!

We tried "Seventeen" a hundred different ways. We tried it with a full band; bass, drums, the works. But it never sounded right. It always came out sounding like a pop country song. We tried different tempos. I tried keying it differently. Nothing sounded right though. Then one day I was listening to one of my Johnny Cash records. The song "God's Gonna Cut you Down" came on my car speakers. And that's when it hit me. Stomps and Claps! It sounded so brilliant on J.R.'s song I thought, "hey maybe it'll work for us too."

The crowd of stomps and claps you hear on the record was actually just my buddy John and I doubled like ten times. We set up some mics on the drum riser in our studio and stomped until our legs were numb. When I played it back, I was like "That's the way it's supposed to sound!"

There are two versions of the song. The original version won't be available much longer. When we press new records it will be replaced with the new version and it has already been replaced online. When I was tracking vocals for the original version I was really sick, so I didn't like the vocal takes I had. Not to mention we were out of time and money because this was the last song we did on the album. So when we decided to release "Seventeen" as our single I decided I wanted to finally get the song right.

I re-cut the vocals down at Southern Tracks Studios and we started mixing. We brought in our old friend Rodney Mills (Lynyrd Skynyrd, Atlanta Rhythm Section, Butch Walker) to mix the new version. Rodney mixed our first album "all the gory details," so we were excited to have him help us out. We ended up doing four mixes before we got the mix right! Four mixes for a song with no bass and drums. Just acoustic guitars, stomps and claps, vocals, and some strings. That's ridiculous but it was worth it in the end. The song was finally complete.