Zac Brown Band – Toes

The song came from a 6 a.m. phone call to Zac Brown during his own 30th birthday trip to Key West — and became the band’s second country No. 1.

It started with a phone call no one wants at six in the morning. Zac Brown was in Key West, on vacation for his thirtieth birthday, when his songwriting partner Wyatt Durrette rang him at dawn with an idea. Out of that early-morning call came “Toes” — a beach-escape daydream about trading Georgia for sand, salt water, and a cold drink, which went on to become the Zac Brown Band’s second No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart. For a song about doing absolutely nothing on a beach, it arrived with unusual urgency.

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By the time “Toes” was released as a single in July 2009, the Zac Brown Band were mid-breakthrough. Their major-label debut, The Foundation, had already produced the runaway No. 1 “Chicken Fried,” and it would ultimately send four singles to the top of the country chart. Brown wrote “Toes” with the same crew that built the album’s success — Durrette, with whom he’d written “Chicken Fried,” plus the band’s bassist John Driskell Hopkins and singer-songwriter Shawn Mullins — and it slotted perfectly into a lane country radio loved: the sun-and-escape song, the tradition Jimmy Buffett built and Kenny Chesney kept alive. The narrator leaves the concrete and traffic of home behind, lands somewhere warm with his toes in the sand, runs out of money, and simply relocates the same easy feeling to a lakeside chair back home. The fantasy, the song insists, is portable.

Two versions of the same escape

There are, in fact, two “Toes.” The album cut is looser and saltier than the version most people heard on the radio: a word in the signature chorus line was swapped for a tamer one before country stations would play it, and a later line that nodded at less family-friendly recreation was trimmed out entirely. It’s the kind of quiet double life a lot of hits lead — the record fans sing at full volume off the album, and the cleaned-up cousin that actually rode the airwaves to No. 1. The edits did nothing to slow it down; the song went on to sell into the multi-millions and earn a 3× platinum certification.

Flody Boatwood goes to the beach

The music video, directed by Darren Doane and released in July 2009, leaned all the way into the song’s goofball charm, built around a character named Flody Boatwood and stuffed with cameos, including one from Kid Rock. Fittingly for a band this rooted in place, parts of it were shot close to home — around Forsyth County, Georgia, and on Lake Lanier, the same north-Georgia water Brown grew up near. Brown himself, born in Georgia on July 31, 1978, had spent years grinding through bar gigs before The Foundation broke the band nationally, and “Toes” became one of the songs that defined their early, breezy, beach-country appeal. More than fifteen years on, it remains a reliable summer singalong — the sound of a daydream that started, improbably, with a 6 a.m. wake-up call.