Today (May 5), the wait for new music from Scotty McCreery is finally over. After almost two years, the former American Idol has released a new song, “Five More Minutes,” to digital retailers and streaming services. Scotty co-penned the deeply personal tune with Frank Rogers and Monty Criswell two weeks after the death of his grandfather in 2015.

A few hours before the song dropped, Nash Country Daily caught up with Scotty and he revealed 5 Things You Need to Know About “Five More Minutes.”

1. The Song Is Autobiographical

“I wrote this song in early 2015, and the day that I wrote it, I tweeted that I thought I just wrote my favorite song I’ve ever written, and that still holds true today. I was hoping this thing would be out in 2015, so it’s nice that it’s finally here. I think it’ll be worth the wait. I’m excited about it. I had written with Frank [Rogers] before. This was my first time writing with Monty [Criswell]. I’ve known some of his songs like ‘I Saw God Today’ by [George] Strait and a few others that he’s written, but yeah, this was the first time we’d sat down to write together. It was just a couple weeks after I lost my Granddaddy Bill, so I was just talking to them about that and where I was in my head space. Anytime you lose somebody, everybody thinks about things you wish you could’ve said to them before they passed or something you wish you could do again. For me, it would’ve been golfing with him. Just chatting about that and Monty had the idea for ‘Five More Minutes,’ and we rolled with it.

“The verses were all real experiences. You’ve got to craft them in to how they work in a song, like the verse when he’s 16 years old and on the porch with Katie. I never had a girlfriend named Katie, but her name fit well in a song. I’ve been on the porch before with parents watching, the awkward moment. The sports lyrics, too, that verse about the football field, for me, it was baseball, but it was the same kind of deal. I remember like it was yesterday my last pitch that I threw, and I walked back to the mound and dusted off the mound with my cleat one last time and just looked around, took it in and walked back. It was kind of a tough moment. Everything in there is autobiographical. We just pieced it together to fit the song.”

2. First Performance

“The first time I sang it, we were in Pinehurst, North Carolina, where my Granddaddy Bill and my Grandma Paquita live. The first time I sang it, I had brought a bunch of radio folks down to play Pinehurst No. 2 [golf course] with me and let them hear some new music. This was back in 2015. Grandma Paquita was there in the crowd when I sang it, and I couldn’t even make it through the last verse. I was choked up pretty good. That was my first time singing it, but my first live show to the public was at the Grand Ole Opry.”

3. Emotional Effect

“It gets me every time I sing it live, some nights more than others. Some nights it’s kind of like you feel like he’s watching over you and you get going, you get to where there’s energy that’s out there. Some nights, it’s a little tougher when you actually get down to thinking about not being able to spend time with your granddad anymore. It’s nice when you sing a song looking out in the crowd, it’s like everybody is locked into it and their eyes all focused on one spot. A lot of times when you’re singing, you’ll see them talking to friends, you’ll see them on their phones or something, but almost every night that we sing the song, it’s like everybody is focused in on the lyric, remembering their own moments of their lives that they wish they could have five more minutes of. They tell me that in meet and greets, their story behind it, what the song means to them. That definitely helps me.”

4. Family Favorite

“My family loves it. The first time that everybody heard it in the family, I think everybody got a little teary-eyed. It affects them the same way because we’re all thinking about the same moments. As a family, we all know the man that he was and what he meant to all of us, so I think everybody got a little choked up. Grandma, I think the first time she heard it was when I started breaking down, so she never even heard the last verse until recently, and she called me and said that she loved it. Yeah, everybody kind of had the same reaction.”

5. New Album

“We had a full record pretty much ready to go [when I lost my record deal in February 2016], and ‘Five More Minutes’ has been my favorite song for a while. I would’ve loved to have had it come out back then and release the record off of that, but things happen. We’ve still got all that music back, and we are probably going to use some of that music on the upcoming album. But we’ve been writing, too. I’ve been writing just a ton here recently, and I feel like I’m in a really cool spot creatively. On the album, we’re probably going to use a lot more of what’s happening right now, now that I’m writing, but I’ll probably still use three or four from the record that we had made in 2015 and piece it all together.”