Jason Aldean Guarantees Ronnie Milsap Won’t Be Forgotten ‘Anytime Soon’ With New Song: ‘I Knew Immediately That We Were Going to Cut It’

When Jason Aldean performed at the Academy of Country Music Awards in Frisco, Texas, on May 16, 2024, his acoustic version of “Should’ve Been a Cowboy” paid homage to the late Toby Keith.

But while he was there, Aldean got an additional opportunity to celebrate another country legend. He received a fresh demo of a new song written by two band members, bassist Tully Kennedy and guitarist Kurt Allison, and he quickly recognized the sound that Allison had created with a Fender Rhodes electric piano.

“It was a tip of the hat to Ronnie Milsap,” Aldean remembers. “I knew immediately – one listen – that we were going to cut it, and it was going to make the record.”

“Anytime Soon,” released by Broken Bow to country radio on Aug. 2 via PlayMPE, uses a keyboard tone akin to Milsap’s “Stranger in My House,” blended with classic rock sounds that embody Tom Petty and Journey. It was created with Aldean’s musical tastes in mind, as well as his penchant for stories about guys trying to pick themselves up.

“There are two things that never go out of style, man: falling in love and relationships falling apart,” Aldean says. “For whatever reason, I’ve always leaned into the latter.”

Kennedy and Allison were writing with John Edwards (“How Far Does a Goodbye Go,” “Whiskey Drink”) a few weeks before the ACMs at BMG Music on Nashville’s Music Row when they found the musical thread that became “Anytime Soon.” They’d already written another song and thought they were done for the day, but Kennedy and Edwards started a rough-edged chord progression in a minor key. It felt substantial, so Allison, who was already packing up to leave, began unpacking. They didn’t quite know where the song was headed.

“We didn’t have a hook,” Kennedy recalls. “With each line we wrote of the chorus, I was getting more nervous. I’m like, ‘I don’t know what we’re writing to,’ which never happens. You just don’t do that because you don’t know where to land. “

The song developed a drinking theme fairly quickly, with the protagonist downing a couple shots at a time, hoping to erase a woman from his memory. In the last half of the chorus – with the writers still uncertain what lie ahead – the guy’s internal war became clearer, as he tries to “fight off” “a battle that I’m bound to lose.”

“That’s Aldean 101,” Allison says. “He’s never like, ‘Hey, I’m a super-awesome guy.’ It’s always like, ‘Hey, I got some faults, and I’ve got some struggles, but that’s on me.’”

The hook finally showed itself after that, as they recognized the guy’s enemy is well-supplied: “They ain’t runnin’ out of whiskey anytime soon.” It was then that they contemplated a title. “Running Out of Whiskey” sounds decent, but it’s the opposite of the song’s meaning. “That’s not cool,” Kennedy says.

Plus, they’d previously written “Whiskey Drink,” and Aldean had had a hit with “Drowns the Whiskey.” “Anytime Soon” seemed the better option. “That,” Kennedy says, “feels great.”

They wrapped after one verse and chorus, deciding to wait until they could finish it with John Morgan. So roughly a week later, all four writers assembled at BMG and brought up the work tape, wondering if it would still resonate. “You come back, and it’s better than you even remember,” Allison says. “We were excited to finish.”

One of the first things they addressed, at the start of the second verse, was a location. The existing lyrics suggested a bar but could still be interpreted as a guy drinking alone.“We try to be as vague as we can while still giving details about the storyline,” Morgan says. “There’s definitely drinking references in the first verse. [It] doesn’t really put you in a certain place.”

They launched verse two with the guy “hittin’ this hole in the wall” and staying “all the way to last call,” making the dive bar images stronger. But they still weren’t definitive. “We didn’t want to get overly specific with some of those words,” Allison says. “Like ‘hole in the wall.’ Does that mean ‘dive bar’? Does it mean, ‘Hey, I’m going through a struggle and I put my fist through the wall at the house’?”

They finished the song by repurposing a pre-chorus from the first verse as a bridge, then made a demo that approximated an Aldean recording. Given Kennedy and Allison’s musical history, that’s not particularly difficult. “They’ve been playing music with me for 25 years,” Aldean says. “They know what I will and won’t say, what I think is cool and what’s not cool.”

Aldean tends to sing the verses in his songs loosely, a bit like a conversation with a musical soundtrack behind it, and Morgan delivered the demo vocals with that in mind. “One of the references that we pulled from, phrasing-wise, was Don Henley and ‘Boys of Summer,’” Morgan recalls. “Some of those verses, he’s talking more than singing… It was [meeting] in the middle on doing the Henley thing, being in the measure, but kind of being lazy about it.”

The demo provided a terrific roadmap when the band recorded the master version of “Anytime Soon” with producer Michael Knox (Montgomery Gentry, Thomas Rhett) at Nashville’s Treasure Isle. They needed just three takes to record it; in fact, session pianist Tony Harrell and recording engineer Peter Coleman (Blondie, The Knack) may have devoted more time to developing the “Stranger in My House” keyboard tone than the band needed to play it.

“Luckily, Peter Coleman knew how to make that thing sound authentic,” Knox notes. “It wasn’t a plug-in. It was a true Wurlitzer sitting in the back of the studio that they pulled out and had to dust off and warm up [to] get it done right.”

Allison and Adam Shoenfeld traded guitar parts, though Allison took the primary solo. Drummer Rich Redman provided a steady backbeat, and acoustic guitarist Danny Rader’s almost-inaudible rhythms brighten the track just a hair. Steel player Mike Johnson added enough twang to keep the Milsap-meets-Petty sonics in a country lane.

Johnson, says Knox, “can make a rock song sound like a country song, and you don’t know why you think it’s a country song.”

Aldean knew “Anytime Soon” inside out before he cut the final vocal and gave Knox six takes. “This one,” Aldean says, “was pretty much in the wheelhouse.”

Aldean slid it into his live set when his 2026 concert schedule launched Jan. 15 at Simmons Bank Arena in North Little Rock, Ark. The recorded version debuted on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart dated Aug. 22 at No. 55. Given that his last 25 radio-promoted solo releases have hit the top 10, with 18 going to No. 1, it’s a good bet that “Anytime Soon” is beginning a ride that won’t end … anytime soon.

“I remember when I was a young guy,” Aldean says. “Now I’m trying to hang in there with all the young guys. I’m just glad that we’re still putting out stuff that seems to be connecting with people out there. That’s what it’s all about.”