Live like you Were Dying movie

Tim McGraw

You know the words, but do you know the story behind them? In a new book, Nashville Songwriter, music biographer Jake Brown interviews elite country songwriters to get "the true stories behind country music's biggest and most enduring hits," he says. "What followed has been one of the most thrilling writing adventures of my life, and a bible of sorts for hopefully multiple generations of country music fans wanting to know more about where the soundtrack of their lives came from."

We're excerpting a series of passages from the book, starting with the story behind Tim McGraw's hit, "Live Like You Were Dying," the winner of the 2004 Grammy Award for Best Country Song. Writers Craig Wiseman and Tim Nichols both explain how the beloved song came together, below.

Live Like You Were Dying Lyrics

Craig Wiseman:

"My buddy Tim Nichols and I were writing, and we had a friend of ours who’d just had a huge misdiagnosis, if you can imagine. This guy [who] was a young father and all this stuff, went to the doctor, who told him 'Oh, you have this weird thing on your x-ray.' And this guy was sort of a hypochondriac anyway, so he freaked out!

They sent him to an oncologist who took some more x-rays a week or ten days later, and told him 'No, dude, this is a little birth mass that everybody’s born with; in most people it goes away, but it didn’t with you. This is not going to kill you, you’re fine.' So we were talking about him: 'What would that be like?' And then that led us to talk about other people, like my uncle, who got leukemia and had to go to Mayo Clinic. Luckily, it was treatable, but he retired and went shark diving.

So we just started talking about people who responded in that type of way: 'Wow, it’s time to get busy,' as opposed to, 'I’m going to go lay down in my bed and freak out.' And our talks just turned in that direction of people that just sort of respond to that news in a really cool way. And at some point, we knew there was a song there, like 'dying to live.' I think I mumbled, 'live like you were dying,' and Tim said, 'Yeah, that!'

And as soon as he stopped me, I grabbed the guitar and just kind of started scatting some stuff out, and next thing you know, we finished the second verse at midnight on the phone. I was laying in my living room in the pitch dark on the phone, and the song was demoed within a few days of that, and the rest is really history. The demo got to Tim, he immediately cut it as his first single, and boom, boom, boom."

Co-writer Tim Nichols:

"At that point, Craig and I had not written together in a while. That day, I was just telling him a story that I’d heard the day before about a friend of ours who’d had this health scare, and for a few days, he really thought he was dying. It was just some kind of a screw-up in a lab, but as I was telling Craig this story, it reminded him of a story he’d heard on NPR about a woman who’d been diagnosed with cancer, and she said before she died, she wanted to go mountain climbing in the Rockies.

So from there, we started talking about people, when they’re faced with some sort of crisis in their life, they respond in this really unique, cool way. And so we were throwing out stuff like, ‘Dying to live,’ phrases like that, and Craig spit out, ‘Live like you were dying.’ I said, ‘I love that,’ and we got a verse and a chorus. My son had a football practice I wanted to get to that day, so I knocked off early and Craig called me back that evening at 10:30 or11:00 and said, ‘I think this is really good,’ and I agreed.

I had this little home office down in my basement, and had been down there kind of thinking about it, and basically, we finished it over the phone that night. I always joke around when I’m playing shows, saying, 'Songwriters tend to think our latest song is our greatest song,’ and that one was no exception.

So then Craig did a demo of it. And we both had been writing songs for a long time at that point, and just within our publishing companies, when people started hearing the demo, I’d just never gotten any response like that to just people hearing the demo.

I don’t think either of us knew, when we heard the record, that it would win every award in country music that you can win. We wound up writing a little inspirational gift book for Thomas Nelson and it wound up on the New York Times best seller list. And Craig and I both play a fair amount of writers' shows and corporate events, and I tell you, it seems like without fail, somebody will come up and have some story they want to share about the song and what it meant to them, or a friend or family member in their life. Or they lost someone and played the song at their funeral, and said, ‘My friend lived like this was their life.’

It’s just the coolest thing to be a part of, and it’s that thing where you must be present to win. You just show up, and you just never know. I’d been writing songs 18 years when that came down. To me, that’s the beauty of it."

Nashville Songwriter by Jake Brown is due out tomorrow.

Listen to "Live Like You Were Dying":

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