“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.”

Introduction

As a song that epitomizes the high-energy, carefree spirit of contemporary country music, “This Is How We Roll” resonates with many. Its title alone evokes memories of endless summer nights, driving down dusty roads with friends, windows down, and music blasting. For many fans, it captures the essence of youth and freedom—a soundtrack to adventures that many cherish as a symbol of their best days.

About The Composition

  • Title: This Is How We Roll
  • Composers: Luke Bryan, Tyler Hubbard, Brian Kelley, Cole Swindell
  • Premiere Date: November 26, 2013
  • Album/Opus/Collection: Here’s to the Good Times…This Is How We Roll
  • Genre: Country, specifically Bro-country

Background

“This Is How We Roll” was originally a track from Florida Georgia Line’s album, featuring country music superstar Luke Bryan. The song emerged from a collaboration that highlights the camaraderie and shared musical vision between these artists. It represents a significant phase in the ‘Bro-country’ movement, characterized by its blend of rock, hip-hop, and electronic influences within traditional country music. The track was a commercial success, embraced widely for its catchy melody and quintessentially carefree lyrics, capturing the lifestyle and cultural ethos of a generation.

Musical Style

The song is marked by its robust, anthemic quality, designed to be an upbeat soundtrack perfect for lively social gatherings. Its instrumentation includes electric guitars and a prominent drum beat, creating a robust sound that complements its high-energy vocals. The structure is catchy, with a chorus that invites listeners to sing along, making it a staple in country music playlists at parties and events.

Lyrics/Libretto

The lyrics of “This Is How We Roll” celebrate life on the road and the freedom associated with it, typical of the Bro-country genre. Themes of friendship, adventure, and carefree living are prevalent, resonating with fans who find joy in the simple pleasures of life—like rolling down a backroad with friends or celebrating the weekend in the country.

Performance History

Since its release, “This Is How We Roll” has enjoyed immense popularity in live performances, particularly at country music festivals where Florida Georgia Line and Luke Bryan have featured it prominently. Its reception has consistently been enthusiastic, further cementing its place in contemporary country music.

Cultural Impact

The song’s influence extends beyond music; it has become a cultural icon for a segment of youth that identifies with its themes. Its impact is seen in its frequent use in films, commercials, and television shows that aim to evoke a sense of freedom and fun, aligning with the song’s spirit.

Legacy

“This Is How We Roll” remains a defining piece in the careers of Florida Georgia Line and Luke Bryan, often cited by fans and critics alike as a highlight. Its ongoing popularity at concerts and its regular play on country music stations underscore its lasting appeal and its role in shaping the modern country music landscape.

Conclusion

“This Is How We Roll” is more than just a song; it’s a celebration of life’s joyful, unrestrained moments. For anyone looking to recapture the spirit of youthful exuberance or seeking a musical escape into the world of country fun, this track is a must-listen. Whether at a live concert or through your speakers at home, it’s guaranteed to lift spirits and invite you to roll down those windows and just enjoy the ride.

Video

Lyrics

[Verse 1: Florida Georgia Line]
The mixtape’s got a little Hank, little Drake
A little somethin’ bumpin’, thumb thumpin’ on the wheel right
The mix in our drink’s a little stronger than you think
So get a grip, take a sip of that feel right
Trucks jacked up, flat bills flipped back
Yeah, you can find us where the party’s at

[Chorus: Florida Georgia Line]
This is how we roll
We hangin’ ’round, singin’ out everything on the radio
We light it up with our hands up
This is how we roll, this is how we do
We burnin’ down the night, shootin’ bullets at the moon
Baby, this is how we roll

[Verse 2: Florida Georgia Line]
Yeah, baby, this is how we roll, we rollin’ into town
With nothin’ else to do, we take another lap around
Yeah, holla at your boy if you need a ride
If you roll with me, yeah, you know we rollin’ high
Up on them 37 Nittos, windows tinted, hard to see though
How fresh my baby is in the shotgun seat, oh
Them kisses are for me though, automatic like a free throw
This life I live, it might not be for you, but it’s for me though, let’s roll

[Chorus: Florida Georgia Line]
This is how we roll
We hangin’ ’round, singin’ out everything on the radio
We light it up with our hands up
This is how we roll, this is how we do
When the world turns ugly, I just turn and look at you
Baby, this is how we roll

[Guitar Solo]

[Bridge: Luke Bryan & Florida Georgia Line]
And we gon’ sing it to ’em
Yeah, we’re proud to be young, we stick to our guns
We love who we love and we wanna have fun
Yeah, we cuss on them Mondays and pray on them Sundays
Pass it around and we dream about one day

[Chorus: Luke Byran & Florida Georgia Line]
‘Cause this is how we roll (Come on, y’all)
We hangin’ ’round, singin’ out everything on the radio
(Get your hands up, get your hands up, get your hands up)
We light it up with our hands up (Aw, yeah)
This is how we roll, this is how we ride
We slangin’ up the mud, cuttin’ through the country side
Baby, this is how we roll
[Outro: Florida Georgia Line & Luke Bryan]
Yeah, this is how we roll (This is how we roll)
Yeah, baby (How we roll)
Yo, LB, let’s go (Yeah, this is how we roll)
This how we roll, this is how we do
We burnin’ down the night, shootin’ bullets at the moon (Aw, yeah)
Baby, this is how we roll (BK, Tyler)
LB, baby, one more time boys, let’s go
Yeah, this is how we roll (This is how we roll)

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In the small West Nashville house Dottie West and her family could finally afford in 1961, supper often came with a guitar. Songwriters arrived carrying unfinished verses, stayed around the table, and played what they had written. Dottie cooked, listened and learned. She was not yet the woman Nashville remembers from “Country Sunshine” or her duets with Kenny Rogers. She and her husband, steel guitarist Bill West, had moved their young family from Cleveland after years of driving south on weekends, trying to establish enough contacts to make the move possible. Starday Records had given Dottie a chance, then little came of it. Atlantic did not change her fortunes either. The house supplied what the record companies had not: a place inside Nashville’s working conversation. Hank Cochran, Roger Miller, Red Lane, Willie Nelson and Justin Tubb were among the writers moving through the Wests’ circle. Published accounts recall Dottie feeding musicians and absorbing what they knew about constructing a song. The arrangement carried no formal title. People brought guitars; she put food on the table. Everyone was still trying to write the piece that might keep them in town. One of Dottie’s songs eventually opened the door the labels had kept half-closed. Jim Reeves recorded “Is This Me?” in 1963 and spoke to Chet Atkins about the woman who had written it. RCA signed her. The next year, her own “Here Comes My Baby” reached the country Top Ten, helped secure her Grand Ole Opry membership and earned a Grammy—the first awarded to a female country performer. Success did not close the house. West later encouraged Jeannie Seely to move to Nashville, hired a young Steve Wariner and helped Larry Gatlin when each was still trying to find a place in the business. Her daughter Shelly remembered being included rather than kept outside the career: sitting on a bench in the Ryman wings, watching her mother work. Dottie West’s Nashville home never became a museum. Its importance was less formal than that. Long before the awards filled a room, there had been children in the house, food on the stove and another writer at the table, holding a song that was not finished yet.

After the Crash, Bill Anderson Had to Learn the Woman His Wife Had Become On October 13, 1984, a truck carrying irrigation pipe crossed into Becky Anderson’s path. The collision left her with permanent brain damage, memory loss and no sense of taste or smell. Bill Anderson soon discovered that survival did not mean returning home to the life they had left that morning. Bill and Becky had married in 1970 and were raising their son alongside Bill’s two daughters from his previous marriage. By 1984, the family had settled into the rhythms surrounding his Grand Ole Opry career. Then hospital rooms, rehabilitation and medical assessments replaced the familiar calendar. Becky recovered beyond the bleakest early expectations, but the injury altered how she experienced the world. A psychiatrist later testified that she had lost part of her normal emotional range. Becky described feeling “flat,” without the peaks and valleys she had known before. The family could see her, speak to her and bring her home, while also adjusting to changes no photograph could show. Two years after the crash, the Andersons faced the driver in court. He acknowledged drinking twelve or thirteen beers before the collision. Bill’s testimony included a sentence stripped of the language he normally shaped so carefully: Becky was no longer the woman he had married. He was not saying that she had ceased to be his wife. He was trying to explain an injury that had left much of her outward appearance intact while changing memory, sensation and emotion. A jury awarded the couple $1.2 million, but the verdict could only assign money to a life that now had to be organized differently. Bill later built his 1989 autobiography around two versions of himself—the man he had been before the accident and the man formed by its aftermath. Becky’s recovery had changed more than her own future. Their marriage continued until their divorce in 1997. Bill did not reduce those thirteen intervening years to an easy lesson, and the public record does not justify doing it for him. What remains is the family’s more difficult achievement: after the hospital, the testimony and the settlement, they kept living inside a home where the person who returned was familiar, altered and still Becky.

Roy Acuff Built a Second Career in the Place Where Songs Became Property In 1942, Roy Acuff was earning more money than most country performers had imagined possible. His records were selling, roads jammed when his touring show came to town, and the Grand Ole Opry had placed him near the center of its growing star system. That same year, Acuff put his name on a business with no audience, applause or visible stage. Acuff-Rose Publications began with Acuff and songwriter Fred Rose. Nashville had singers, radio programs and recording sessions, but it did not yet possess a major country publishing company capable of keeping songs—and their long-term earnings—inside the city. Performers and writers regularly surrendered copyrights to distant firms or sold songs outright without understanding what later recordings might be worth. Acuff supplied money, stature and the needs of a working performer. Rose understood song structure, copyright administration and the larger publishing world. Their company initially gave Acuff control over his own material, then opened its doors to other writers. On April 12, 1948, Hank Williams signed an exclusive agreement with Acuff-Rose. Rose became his editor, publisher and producer, helping bring discipline to songs whose language remained unmistakably Williams’s own. The resulting catalog continued producing income long after the singer’s death. Other writers followed: Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, Don Gibson, Roy Orbison and many more. Their songs traveled through recordings by artists far beyond Nashville, but the paperwork returned royalties to a company based there. Acuff’s recording career eventually cooled. Honky-tonk and smoother country voices moved ahead of his older string-band sound. The publishing company kept growing. By then, Acuff had helped establish a principle that would shape Music Row: Nashville did not have to supply talent while New York, Chicago or Hollywood owned what the talent created. A song written in Tennessee could be registered, promoted, licensed and paid from Tennessee. Audiences remembered Acuff standing beneath the Opry lights with a fiddle nearby. Much of his lasting power, however, rested in an office where someone opened an envelope, read a royalty statement and entered another song into the ledger.

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In the small West Nashville house Dottie West and her family could finally afford in 1961, supper often came with a guitar. Songwriters arrived carrying unfinished verses, stayed around the table, and played what they had written. Dottie cooked, listened and learned. She was not yet the woman Nashville remembers from “Country Sunshine” or her duets with Kenny Rogers. She and her husband, steel guitarist Bill West, had moved their young family from Cleveland after years of driving south on weekends, trying to establish enough contacts to make the move possible. Starday Records had given Dottie a chance, then little came of it. Atlantic did not change her fortunes either. The house supplied what the record companies had not: a place inside Nashville’s working conversation. Hank Cochran, Roger Miller, Red Lane, Willie Nelson and Justin Tubb were among the writers moving through the Wests’ circle. Published accounts recall Dottie feeding musicians and absorbing what they knew about constructing a song. The arrangement carried no formal title. People brought guitars; she put food on the table. Everyone was still trying to write the piece that might keep them in town. One of Dottie’s songs eventually opened the door the labels had kept half-closed. Jim Reeves recorded “Is This Me?” in 1963 and spoke to Chet Atkins about the woman who had written it. RCA signed her. The next year, her own “Here Comes My Baby” reached the country Top Ten, helped secure her Grand Ole Opry membership and earned a Grammy—the first awarded to a female country performer. Success did not close the house. West later encouraged Jeannie Seely to move to Nashville, hired a young Steve Wariner and helped Larry Gatlin when each was still trying to find a place in the business. Her daughter Shelly remembered being included rather than kept outside the career: sitting on a bench in the Ryman wings, watching her mother work. Dottie West’s Nashville home never became a museum. Its importance was less formal than that. Long before the awards filled a room, there had been children in the house, food on the stove and another writer at the table, holding a song that was not finished yet.

After the Crash, Bill Anderson Had to Learn the Woman His Wife Had Become On October 13, 1984, a truck carrying irrigation pipe crossed into Becky Anderson’s path. The collision left her with permanent brain damage, memory loss and no sense of taste or smell. Bill Anderson soon discovered that survival did not mean returning home to the life they had left that morning. Bill and Becky had married in 1970 and were raising their son alongside Bill’s two daughters from his previous marriage. By 1984, the family had settled into the rhythms surrounding his Grand Ole Opry career. Then hospital rooms, rehabilitation and medical assessments replaced the familiar calendar. Becky recovered beyond the bleakest early expectations, but the injury altered how she experienced the world. A psychiatrist later testified that she had lost part of her normal emotional range. Becky described feeling “flat,” without the peaks and valleys she had known before. The family could see her, speak to her and bring her home, while also adjusting to changes no photograph could show. Two years after the crash, the Andersons faced the driver in court. He acknowledged drinking twelve or thirteen beers before the collision. Bill’s testimony included a sentence stripped of the language he normally shaped so carefully: Becky was no longer the woman he had married. He was not saying that she had ceased to be his wife. He was trying to explain an injury that had left much of her outward appearance intact while changing memory, sensation and emotion. A jury awarded the couple $1.2 million, but the verdict could only assign money to a life that now had to be organized differently. Bill later built his 1989 autobiography around two versions of himself—the man he had been before the accident and the man formed by its aftermath. Becky’s recovery had changed more than her own future. Their marriage continued until their divorce in 1997. Bill did not reduce those thirteen intervening years to an easy lesson, and the public record does not justify doing it for him. What remains is the family’s more difficult achievement: after the hospital, the testimony and the settlement, they kept living inside a home where the person who returned was familiar, altered and still Becky.

Roy Acuff Built a Second Career in the Place Where Songs Became Property In 1942, Roy Acuff was earning more money than most country performers had imagined possible. His records were selling, roads jammed when his touring show came to town, and the Grand Ole Opry had placed him near the center of its growing star system. That same year, Acuff put his name on a business with no audience, applause or visible stage. Acuff-Rose Publications began with Acuff and songwriter Fred Rose. Nashville had singers, radio programs and recording sessions, but it did not yet possess a major country publishing company capable of keeping songs—and their long-term earnings—inside the city. Performers and writers regularly surrendered copyrights to distant firms or sold songs outright without understanding what later recordings might be worth. Acuff supplied money, stature and the needs of a working performer. Rose understood song structure, copyright administration and the larger publishing world. Their company initially gave Acuff control over his own material, then opened its doors to other writers. On April 12, 1948, Hank Williams signed an exclusive agreement with Acuff-Rose. Rose became his editor, publisher and producer, helping bring discipline to songs whose language remained unmistakably Williams’s own. The resulting catalog continued producing income long after the singer’s death. Other writers followed: Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, Don Gibson, Roy Orbison and many more. Their songs traveled through recordings by artists far beyond Nashville, but the paperwork returned royalties to a company based there. Acuff’s recording career eventually cooled. Honky-tonk and smoother country voices moved ahead of his older string-band sound. The publishing company kept growing. By then, Acuff had helped establish a principle that would shape Music Row: Nashville did not have to supply talent while New York, Chicago or Hollywood owned what the talent created. A song written in Tennessee could be registered, promoted, licensed and paid from Tennessee. Audiences remembered Acuff standing beneath the Opry lights with a fiddle nearby. Much of his lasting power, however, rested in an office where someone opened an envelope, read a royalty statement and entered another song into the ledger.

Jeannie C. Riley Sang About a Woman Being Judged—Then Nashville Turned Her Into That Woman Jeannie C. Riley had a husband and a young daughter when “Harper Valley P.T.A.” made her famous in 1968. Her record company preferred that audiences not hear much about them. The song described a widowed mother accused of wearing her dresses too high and behaving improperly around town. She answers by walking into the PTA meeting and naming the private hypocrisy of the people judging her. Riley did not write the song. She was a twenty-two-year-old Texas singer working as a Nashville secretary when producer Shelby Singleton placed Tom T. Hall’s composition in front of her. She did not initially consider it the best song available. Once recorded, it moved with astonishing speed. “Harper Valley P.T.A.” reached No. 1 on both the country and pop charts, making Riley the first woman to take the same single to the top of both. A Grammy and the CMA Single of the Year award followed. Then the woman singing the story began to disappear behind its central character. The label put Riley in miniskirts and boots resembling the clothes described in the lyric. She later said interviewers were discouraged from mentioning her husband. Promotional decisions presented her as a free, provocative “Harper Valley” woman rather than a married young mother trying to establish herself as a singer. Riley continued making records, including additional country hits, but producers repeatedly searched for another song filled with small-town confrontation. When she began writing material of her own, she found little room for it. She later described herself as a robot whose songs and public appearance had been chosen by other people. In the 1970s, she moved toward gospel music and eventually published an autobiography titled From Harper Valley to the Mountain Top. She never fully escaped the request for the song, nor did she permanently remove it from her performances. “Harper Valley P.T.A.” had given a fictional woman the freedom to confront everyone who had reduced her to an image. The singer who gave her a voice spent years asking for the same freedom.