Kenny Chesney wrote this chill ballad with his frequent collaborator Ross Copperman and with the English pop superstar Ed Sheeran. Chesney had the idea for “Tip of the Tongue” for a while, but was unsure where to take it. “It is an authentic story in my life and an idea in my life about connection,” he explained. Chesney’s co-writers helped him figure it out.
The phrase “tip of the tongue” is usually used to mean a word or name that a person can almost, but not quite, bring to mind. Here, Chesney, Copperman and Sheeran use the idiom literally to describe how a lover can “taste” so good.
I love your salt and sugar
On the tip of my tongue
Once the three writers got into the idea of the song and started exploring, it took them only a couple of hours to write it. “It’s funny how a figure of speech can lead you to all kinds of places,” Chesney marveled. “You start talking, and words fall out, and anything can happen. When you go in and write on any given day, the chemistry is what it is. When the idea fell out, we all just laughed and went, ‘Well, what can we do with that?'”
The press release describes the song as a “decidedly grown up” track that plays on a figure of speech over a melody “you can just drift in.”
Copperman has co-written a lot of Chesney’s previous material, including “Setting the World on Fire” and “Get Along.” He brought along Sheeran for the session that produced this song and Chesney only had good things to say about the Brit.
“Ed and I had never written together,” he said. “You know, we have a lot of similarities in our life and what we do for a living, but we never sat down in a room together to write a song, and ‘Tip of My Tongue’ is the end result.”
Courtesy of Song Facts
