Rory Feek is perhaps best known as one-half of the award-winning duo, Joey + Rory, along with his wife, Joey Feek (who passed away from cancer in 2016). But Feek began as a songwriter and has had several songs recorded, including one by Blake Shelton. In 2004, Shelton released “Some Beach”. The song, written by Feek and Paul Overstreet, is part of Shelton’s third studio album, Blake Shelton’s Barn & Grill.
A four-week No. 1 single, “Some Beach” says in part, “Some beach, somewhere / There’s nowhere to go when you got all day to get there / There’s cold margaritas and hot señioritas smiling with long dark hair / On some beach, somewhere.”
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Interestingly, when Feek and Overstreet wrote “Some Beach”, they were thinking of Kenny Chesney instead.
“That song came from me and Paul Overstreet sitting having coffee one day,” Feek tells Songfacts. “Paul had just come off the road with Kenny Chesney, years ago. And Kenny was about to record a beach album, and Paul was going to try and write something for Kenny. So we were talking about beach song ideas. And one of us said the phrase ‘some beach,’ and we just started giggling like schoolboys. Started singing, ‘Driving down the interstate.’”
“We wrote a bunch of that sitting at Starbucks, actually outside drinking a cup of coffee, singing into my cell phone so we wouldn’t forget it,” he adds. “Then we drove to his house and went out and jumped on the boat, and we wrote the rest of it out there on the boat.”
The Unlikely Inspiration for the End of “Some Beach” by Blake Shelton
The last part of “Some Beach” tells the story of a man who goes to the dentist for a toothache. The song says, “We’ll give you some Novocain / That tooth will be fine in a minute or two / But he stuck that needle down deep in my gum / And he started drilling before I was numb.”
Unfortunately for Overstreet, that verse was actually inspired by his own personal pain.
“Paul had a really bad toothache he was fighting at the time, so that’s how that last bridge went in there,” Feek says. “But same thing, that song sat around for a good while before anybody ever recorded it. You didn’t know if you had a great song or the world’s worst song in the world. You couldn’t tell for a long time. But when it came out, it sure was a blessing.”
The success of “Some Beach” was huge for Feek, Overstreet, and Shelton. But Feek adds that it’s “Some Beach” that became the start of a new chapter for Shelton.
“It’s one of the first songs that I think Blake had where his personality started showing up,” Feek says.
Photo by Frank Mullen/WireImage
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