Never meet your heroes.

That warning is a familiar adage, a reminder that people with a public persona are often different than the image they’ve created. But country artists often provide a welcome counterpoint to that position — and for Nate Smith, he not only found one of his heroes likable, he’s now collaborating with the guy in his latest single.

Florida Georgia Line came to prominence in 2012, around the time that Smith left Nashville when his first record deal fell apart. FGL employed producer Joey Moi (Morgan Wallen, Jake Owen), whose work with Nickelback had always impressed Smith. He was naturally attracted to what he heard in the duo.

“They were a massive, massive influence on me, because what they did so well is sing-along, banger anthems,” he says. “That’s what I like.”

As it turned out, one of Smith’s former co-workers at a Nashville Starbucks – bass player Tom Beaupre – went on to spend 10 years with FGL, and he occasionally mentioned Smith to the duo. When Smith returned to Nashville, Beaupre gave them a heads up, so a quasi-familiarity had already been established when he finally met FGL founders Tyler Hubbard and Brian Kelley.

Beaupre, “in a weird way, kind of started this thing,” Smith reflects. “Me and Tyler talk about Tom all the time.”

Hubbard didn’t initially have Smith in mind when he wrote “After Midnight” on July 15, 2023. He wasn’t even writing for himself when he hunkered down on his tour bus with fellow writers Corey Crowder (“Famous Friends,” “Minimum Wage”) and Casey Brown (“Blue Tacoma,” “I Am Not Okay”).

“I’ve written enough with him to know he’s a songwriter at heart,” Crowder says. “Pretty much everything he writes, he’s like, ‘Who can I send this to?’ So I’ve learned when I write with him, we just write songs that are great, and I don’t overthink where they’re going.”

Crowder had the “After Midnight” title, flipping an admonition that he, like many Americans, had heard repeatedly from his mother: “Nothing good ever happens after midnight.” Just like the “never meet your heroes” advice, he decided it wasn’t ironclad.

“In my experience,” he says, “most of the epic nights of my life were after midnight.”

Thus the hook: “Something good always happens after midnight.” It was so obvious that Hubbard was shocked he’d never heard anyone say it before. And the title practically dictated how the story should go.

They knocked out the chorus first – the hook suggested the phrasing, a catchy melody attached itself right away, and they crafted four anthemic lines, bookending with the hook. For good measure, they threw in an extra, repetitive “happens after, happens after midnight.”

The verses came with their own built-in ease. The “after midnight” theme fit the field-party or parking-lot scenario that’s become a staple of the genre. The opening stanza roughly addressed prepping the property, while the second verse dove more heavily into the activities once they got started.

“It’s a little bit of a timeline of the night, if you will,” Hubbard says. “Just kind of setting up the scene, setting up the pictures, trying to make it as colorful as possible.”

That’s not exactly easy. The tailgates, Mason jars, shining stars and “map-dot town references” are natural pieces of the puzzle, but they’re overly familiar, too. “A lot of it’s cliché,” Hubbard allows. “It’s that same thing you’ve heard from me at times, and sometimes [it’s] just a don’t-fix-it-if-it-ain’t-broke kind of thing. We just decided to kind of lean into it.”

And yet they still found ways to paint the picture that were atypical – “Solos get flipped” is a different way to describe taking a swig; “She’ll lay one on me/At 2:22” is just different.

Crowder and his wife, it turns out, had a game in the early part of their relationship called “kiss the clock.” “Anytime you have, like, 1:11, 2:22 – any of those kinds of things – you’re supposed to kiss the clock, you know, or kiss who you’re with,” Crowder explains. “It’s kind of a small-town, Southern thing, but that’s definitely a thing.”

The guys had gone fishing early in the day, so when they wanted to reference a good-time song for their late-night-party storyline, they picked The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s “Fishin’ in the Dark.” And in the final chorus, they slipped in a “’round here rowdy kind” phrase, an obvious tip of the cap to FGL’s 2013 single “Round Here.” Meanwhile, the song’s “After Midnight” title has a built-in similarity to Eric Clapton’s first charted solo single. They never considered renaming their song “(Something Good Always Happens) After Midnight.”

“We didn’t overthink it,” Hubbard notes. “I don’t even think I thought about the Clapton song at the time.”

Brown took charge of the demo, giving it a rock edge with block chords underneath Hubbard’s performance. Within a couple months, Hubbard decided Smith needed to know about it. “I just kept hearing Nate’s voice on it and just thought, ‘Man, I’m going to see if he likes this, because it feels like a song that he would do really well,’” Hubbard says. “He liked it, but he didn’t jump on it right away.”

“I was really excited about it,” Smith adds. “But, I don’t know, you get so many songs, and you’re constantly writing, so your attention – especially with ADHD – I’m just all over the place. Like, I might go to another song, and then forget about an awesome song.”

Hubbard pitched another one at a later date, and when they discussed that title, “After Midnight” got mentioned again. Smith was reinvigorated, but Hubbard sounded really good on the demo. Would he do a feature? Both artists’ teams thought it was a good idea, and by the time that Brown produced the instrumental tracking session at Soundstage, they already had determined it would be a single. Just for kicks, Smith asked Brown to tap into artificial intelligence and see how the two singers would sound on it.

“It was good hearing our voices together for the first time,” says Smith, who felt even more confident it was “going to turn out pretty good.”

Both singers were out of town when the tracking session took place, but Smith made it clear that he thought “After Midnight” should fit sonically with his previous hits “World on Fire” and “Bulletproof.” He also asked Brown to get rid of a guitar riff that was on the demo and just use big, grimy chords, à la Foo Fighters. Brown sent video periodically that day to keep Smith in the loop.

When Smith and Hubbard cut the final vocals at Brown’s home studio, hearing Hubbard’s voice in the headphones brought all of the “heroes” stuff back into play for Smith. “He’s got one of the most recognizable voices of country,” Smith says. “As soon as you hear it, you know that’s Tyler Hubbard.”

Smith made sure that the “’round here rowdy kind” was part of Hubbard’s part. “He has to say that line,” Smith notes.

RCA Nashville released “After Midnight” to country radio via PlayMPE on Nov. 13. It owns the No. 30 position in its eighth week on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart dated Jan. 17.

“Where I think we have a little advantage on the radio is the fact that it is an uptempo rocker in the middle of winter,” Smith says. “Radio told me that they get hit up with a lot of slow songs, a lot of ballads, around this time because of the cold and dreary [weather]. But we get to have a rocker on the radio right now.”